That’s not How It Should End: The Effect of Reader/Player Response on the Development of Narrative

TL;DR

This creative-critical PhD thesis argues that seriality offers a useful framework for comparing Victorian serial fiction and episodic videogames, treating *Great Expectations* and the Sherlock Holmes stories as interactive and *Mass Effect* and *Life is Strange* as serials. Its contribution is a set of approaches for writers of interactive fiction regardless of technical expertise, demonstrated through the ChoiceScript novella *Writers Are Not Strangers*.

Key findings

• The thesis' central claim is that "serials such as *Great Expectations* and the Sherlock Holmes stories are interactive, and that videogames such as *Mass Effect* and *Life is Strange* are serials," with seriality as the comparative framework.
• Of the 36 sections of *Great Expectations*, the author determined "around twenty-one tentatively fit Allen's definition of cliffhanger," but "only six clearly meet the stylistic criteria" of introducing suspense a few lines before the episode's end; the highest concentrations of consecutive cliffhangers occur near the beginning and end.
• *Mass Effect 3* has eight endings (four with significant differences), most resulting in Commander Shepard's death; only the "perfect" Renegade ending shows Shepard taking a breath, a scene adjusted after outcry. *Life is Strange* has two of five episodes with cliffhanger endings and two endings, both downbeat.
• Post-episode statistics for *Life is Strange* show players "overwhelmingly choose helping behaviours," yet at the point the minor-choice image was taken, most players did not rescue the bird — theorised as a discoverability rather than deliberate abandonment issue.

Methods

• A creative-critical thesis combining comparative critical analysis with the creation of an interactive novella, *Writers Are Not Strangers*, authored in ChoiceScript (the same environment as Lynnea Glasser's *Creatures Such As We*).
• Comparative analysis focuses primarily on *Great Expectations*, selected Sherlock Holmes stories, and the *Mass Effect* and *Life is Strange* series, framed through the ludology vs narratology debate, reader-response theory (Iser, Ryan, Carlisle, Nell), and the analogies of the detective, the magician and the telepath.
• The thesis is deliberately non-linear and multimodal, with hypertext-like directions, "invisotext" sections, and appendices including a cliffhanger analysis of *Great Expectations*, design documents, design maps, an offline version of the novella, and full code documentation.

Limitations

• Stated: the offline version cannot replicate the online "invisotext," so pale grey text is substituted; the offline creative work "contains some shortened and simplified sequences for clarity" and is "for reference only"; a key difficulty in comparing Victorian serials and videogames is that the Victorian serial writer could expect regular audience contact during production, while videogames are theoretically available in their entirety; the author notes her positioning of videogames alongside Victorian serial fiction implicitly asserts their "respectability," which was "initially unintentional"; she also acknowledges performing "a similar act of omission" with a truncated Nell quotation.
• Evident in the text: the argument rests on a small set of case studies (*Great Expectations*, Sherlock Holmes, *Mass Effect*, *Life is Strange*); the tale of mourning Londoners in black armbands is described as apparently fictional, with Peter Calamai's 2013 challenge for contemporary evidence still unmet; and the thesis concedes, via Ryan, that "we can never be sure that sender and receiver have the same story in mind."