From the get-go, Sarah Stang takes on a strong stance on how she believes that “interactivity is a debatable concept which has been so over-applied as to be rendered meaningless, and the sense of agency that videogame players experience is illusory” (Stang). She begins by interrogating the concept of interactivity itself, noting that scholars have long debated whether video games are truly “interactive” at all. She describes how some argue that games are better described as “reactive”: this is when the player inputs something and the game responds in a pre-coded way, and so on in a loop. Others use the term “interreactivity” to capture the fact that both the player and the game are responding to each other. Stang’s position is that regardless of which term is used, the sense of control players feel is actually just an illusion. Since all choices and outcomes are pre-scripted by developers, player choice is always somewhat predetermined and constrained. The game’s “possibility space,” to use Ian Bogost’s term, is fixed in advance.
Thus, Stang clearly believes that most games, as she notes, try to hide the fact that choice is an illusion by using branching decision trees and emotional investment to make players feel their choices genuinely matter. Slay the Princess takes the opposite approach: it makes the illusory nature of agency the entire point. No matter what the player (or the Hero, in this case) does with the Princess, such as killing her, sparing her, befriending her, or fearing whatever form she takes on, the game continues and transforms. The loop resets (in a lot of cases) and she comes back. The player’s “choices” do not liberate the player from the narrative. One time in particular, I chose to tighten my grip on the knife, but the narrative of the story was crafted in such a way that the Hero dropped the knife anyway, which was noted by the Narrator.
The game is essentially telling the player that their desire to control the outcome is itself the mechanism trapping them. The feeling of helplessness from the constant loops and making choices thus adds to the overall ambiance of the game. This connects to Stang’s observation that in BioShock, Ken Levine wanted players to feel the humiliation of having no real will. However, where BioShock delivers that message in a single climactic cutscene, Slay the Princess sustains it across the entire experience. I argue that Slay the Princess does not merely illustrate Stang’s illusion of agency, but transforms it into a deliberate artistic device that challenges the moral framework Parkin applies to video game interactivity.
What makes this especially interesting is that Slay the Princess makes the art of surrendering to its inevitability feel meaningful, even moving. This supports Stang’s point, where she draws from Giddings and Kennedy, that there is genuine pleasure in lacking control, where players have the relief in being acted upon rather than acting. The game reframes Stang’s “illusion of agency” not as a flaw or a lie, but as the very thing worth exploring artistically. When I played the game, I felt a sense of restlessness, but there was also a sense of surrender because of the constant loops that made it clear my struggle against the narrative was itself what the game wanted me to feel.
Now consider the New Yorker article by Simon Parkin, where he argues that what makes video games morally distinctive from film or literature is precisely their interactivity. Thus, the story only moves when the player acts. In Parkin’s framing, this active participation is what implicates the player morally. The article assumes that this sense of personal authorship over the game’s events is what makes the medium uniquely troubling. However, Slay the Princess complicates this assumption significantly. If the New Yorker is right that interactivity creates moral complicity, Slay the Princess asks a harder question: are the players actually complicit when the game was always going to unfold this way regardless? When looking at this game from this standpoint, the illusion of control Parkin treats as morally dangerous is somewhat reduced down to artistic choice that simply drives the game forward. Slay the Princess ensures every act of violence genuinely transforms the world and the Princess herself, thus satisfying the New Yorker’s demand that game violence carry artistic weight and consequence. Each illusory act of violence in turn transforms the story for the player, where the killing of the Princess reflects how the story is played out for the player. The driving act of violence instead becomes this beautiful balance between controlled illusion and being somewhat complicit in violence, as it is a driving factor in the overall narrative.
