I think Stacey Mason's PhD thesis, Responsiveness in Narrative Systems, provides a terrific way to think about player agency and game responsiveness as the two sides of a dialogue between player and game, and to start thinking about the different kinds of responsiveness and where we might look for low-hanging fruit in our own designs.

But it's also nearly 300 pages: it's hard to say, "hey everybody, go read this!" So I finally wrote down my attempt at a "good bits" summary[1] hoping to inspire more people to dig into this.

https://joshgrams.com/2024/07/responsiveness-notes.html

[1]: haha, yeah right, *most* of it is good bits

#InteractiveFiction #InteractiveNarrative