Introduction
In the dance “Café Müller” by the acclaimed choreographer Pina Bausch, the stage is darkened completely, besides the realistic structure of a cafe. Except, scattered around, are an array of completely randomly placed chairs. The observer is initially confused, as knowledge of any dance shows would indicate that stages should be sparsely decorated to allow for unobstructed dances. Yet, obstruction here is the point – Bausch and her fellow dancers spend 50 minutes dancing in mostly silence, running into chairs, a tripping and falling, eyes completely closed and grasping and searching for one another, entrances and exits highly choreographed, each character imbued with a deep emptiness in how they grasp around in the dark and bruise their shins. Over, and over, and over again, repeatedly through visceral Sisyphean pain. 
“Café Müller” by Pina Bausch. Photographed by Ulli Weiss, 1978. Copyright: Pina Bausch Foundation Archives.
This is not how dance normally looks, not how stages are normally used, not how bodies naturally move. It is an unnatural and hollow presentation of reality that leads to a plot of absolutely nothing. The costumed bodies on stage were presented with great rehearsal and intention, but with what world? For what world?
As I played through Slay the Princess, similar questions ran through my mind. Why was I putting myself through death over and over again, making choices with unpredictable outcomes, in a world where it felt like logical rules kept changing each time I made a selection? Each time the chord of the path ran through my head after a death, a new – although beautifully presented – hand-drawn forest presented to me, I could not help but wonder – why?
Eventually a loose narrative was presented to me – a gestural hand-wave towards the large concepts of death and rebirth and shifting energy, creating new worlds and accepting death and love and change in some larger human condition or metaphor, these ideas ultimately too large and abstract to truly sharpen to an internal point. And so, the game relied on the player’s – my – innate sense of creating purpose in the face of such uncertain large forces. Curiosity to explore, in the face of empty death and endings, listening to only one other character and voices that fade away, with little continuity or care.
Slay the Princess is not the only video game to play with agency through its sense of scope and selection-based nonlinearity, or with a larger-than-life narrative set in an empty world, unrecognizable from ours. Games such as Papers Please and A Short Hike play with similar questions of agentic choice. And on a larger scale, video games themselves are hailed as the medium of interactivity and player choice.
Barring procedurally generated AI games, I feel that there is a paradox here – that video games are expected to elicit a player’s individual agency even through pre-constructed, pre-determined narratives. Can purpose be found in works that are fictional and often empty in their reflection of true reality? The values of the players drive their choices, and impact game design to lean towards searching for purpose in a world that feels too large to understand and too complex to control. Contemporary video games force their players to interrogate the concept of individual purpose through branching narratives or nonlinear storytelling. This essay first analyzes the structure of nonlinear and branching games – their medium. Then, I evaluate how different games’ content trends towards absurdism.
Thesis
Game design choices of non-linearity and pre-constructed worlds create the illusion of purposeful choice, while players still continue to seek purpose and meaning through continuing through these games’ worlds and plotlines. This reflects Albert Camus’ absurdist philosophy: that no meaning exists, yet players continue to construct their own purposes.
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The Medium is the Message: Video Game Interactivity
In the Medium is the Message, the seminal paper defining how mediums themselves shape culture, McLuhan is dismissive of the media-consuming masses, almost considering humans to be a nameless and faceless public:
“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” (McLuhan 8)
With a vaguely arrogant air, McLuhan still implicates himself – alongside all of us, the other “technological idiots” in this cultural criticism. He notes that the content itself of the medium is not what necessarily should matter, or even how the medium may function as a tool or weapon or device. Rather, culture is shaped through the affordances and signifiers that are (in the case of video games, literally) encoded into the medium.
I don’t necessarily give full credence to the idea that a medium’s content is simply “a juicy piece of meat” to distract from the fact that the game design in totality – I will expand on this through later analyzing the prevalence of particular non-realistic narrative content in games. But I do believe that the “watchdog” public, many of whom are acutely and often critically aware of the impact of certain mediums on their habits, could benefit from further analysis of video games as their own unique medium divorced from storytelling strength.
To further illustrate how mediums may impact culture: the above theatrical description of Pina Bausch’s dance work exemplifies another medium. Live performance, distanced from the audience, may invite a visceral reaction to seeing the dancers bruise themselves live in space, honing attention to a single point – or, it may invite passivity, the gap between the seating bank and the stage too far to surmount.
The mediums of live performance and video games play with two sides of the same coin. Live performance, in its Western-esque modern form, invites passivity – the audience observing something they themselves do not inhabit. In stark contrast, games necessarily invite active participation. A similar idea was highlighted by Simon Parkin in “How Evil Should a Video Game Allow You to Be?” noting that “The ability to assume a role, rather than simply witness actions, is part of the medium’s great […] potential, enabling us to inhabit the lives of people who don’t necessarily share our beliefs, values, or systems of behavior” (Parkin). The player is directly moving their avatar, or making a strategic choice, or achieving an arbitrary goal. No longer limited by the conditions of real life social structure, the player is free to explore their own curiosities in a new role. It is because of the digital era and advancements in technology that create the affordance of self-projection and personalization.
Video games range from far-reaching narrative psychological studies to loosely aligned, storyless Match-3 mobile games. But in each of these, whether playing as themselves or as a character, players literally inhabit a digital avatar. Thus, games necessarily invite conversation about the player’s sense of purpose through their agency.
In this essay I conflate the aspects of player control with their choice, and at this level of abstraction to the game medium itself, they function to the same end. Video games across the range of choice-based spectrum are evaluated on the same plane on the basis of genre through McLuhan’s argument – rarely is a new game described without the genre (and therefore affordances) it is designed under, such as roguelikes, gacha sims, or walking simulators. Thus there are particularly subgenres and submediums within video games themselves that bring player choice to the forefront – particularly nonlinear branching narrative games, that are structured around particular choice-based breaks in time and are purported to reflect individual player actions.
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[Name] Will Remember That: Branching Narratives
If, as McLuhan argues, players are shaped by the mediums that they interact with, they must also, on some level, select these mediums based on their willingness or desire to be shaped. In other words, if the branching narrative game medium affords a player a certain sense of individual control, perhaps the player already sought a space where they could execute such control. Games in this genre often fall under categories of walking simulators or interactive films, but are recognizable due to their emphasis on moral and ethical selection with narrative consequence.
Heavy Rain, a 2010 video game, was one of the first mainstream Western titles to employ innovative mechanics in choice-based gaming. In parallel to the exercises a theatrical/film director may employ to warm up their actors, the game designer David Cage used thoughtful design to immerse the player agent:
“Whenever your character does anything physical you are really in charge of the motion. This idea of physical immersion is everywhere in the design. […] Whenever you have an action where strength or speed is involved, you must move the sticks very quickly to simulate a strong pull or action. The idea is to put you in the same physical space as your character. […] You are always in the same position as your character.” (Fondaumiere, via MacDonald)
And this is a design choice continuing through the game medium itself. The connection between the player and their narrative character is abundantly clear at this point. Your character reflects you. Your character choices reflect your actions, curiosities, and desires. Players seeking immersion may seek choice based games, and in turn, the medium itself impacts their expectations for personalized storytelling and immersion. Players are encouraged to replay games until their curiosity is satiated, whether or not they (are even able to) see all possibilities.
Nonlinearity – and therefore interactions with player choice/control – in game narratives is not a new concept, and can present across a wide range of games. Slay the Princess, as described earlier, is a highly constructed plotline, each moment and choice pre-determined by the game designer, leading to complex changes in narrative and gameplay differences in a world lacking logical rules. As an example of a moderately nonlinear game, Papers Please, the popular border control ethics simulator, the world reflects realistic logic – the core gameplay and expectations stay the same from day to day, with slightly different inter-and-post game scenes depending on the player’s unique choices and performance. Lastly, nonlinearity can present in open world games as well, in that the player retains full agency. A Short Hike comes to mind – from one angle it has a fixed, unchangeable ending and just one storyline. But, in that the vast majority of its quests are optional, and that there are physically, multiple ways of jumping and flying one’s way to the top of the mountain.
In each of these examples, players inhabit the characters and exercise agency reflecting their moral curiosities (what happens if you allow the stripper entry? Stab the loving princess? Donate tuition money to the bully?) within narrative structures themselves that are ultimately preset and predetermined. The watchdog player knows intellectually that the game is pre-coded and preconstructed by a development team, but the brain follows the juicy meat of the narrative – allowing the fallacy of choice and exploration to occur in a wholly constructed and pre-mediated environment. This pattern is repeated along the above examples, across the wide spectrum of narrative consistency.
The audience seeks and craves and loves narrative games that offer them choice, even in a world where – visibly, necessarily – no free will ultimately exists, and all actions are constrained in the limiting digital realm. The video game medium itself is what allows for this cognitive dissonance to occur, as it forces the player into a preconstructed world of predetermined choices. The player directly engages with Camus’s absurdist philosophy.
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The Medium is Not The Only Message: Video Game Content
In his absurd philosophy, Camus defines absurdism as the notion that humans seek deeply and consistently to live life according to purpose, though there is, paradoxically, inherently no purpose. Or, at the very least, any perceived purposes are artificial and inadequate in the face of larger human questions. (Aronson)
At risk of inviting McLuhan to roll around his grave, I would like to argue that — while evaluating games on the basis of their form is wholly valid — content is equally important to this particular cultural discussion around purpose, individual agency, and meaning, tied together with the theory of the absurd. I believe that it is in the combination of analyzing games through both medium and content that ultimate cultural strength is found.
I’ve already described how video games may feel inherently absurd in their structure through Slay the Princess, but the topical relevance of absurdity is also reflected in the content of many of these video games’. In other words, the large cultural interest and vested creation in the medium of nonlinear video games reflects a desire for personal purpose and agency, and the content—topics and themes—popular in these games do as well.
Slay the Princess
Take Slay the Princess – already discussed. Common features of absurdist storytelling, as defined by academic Martin Esslin in the context of absurd theater and dance shows, include a “deep sense of human isolation”, the “world as an incomprehensible place”. He asks:
“If the characters change their personality halfway through the action, how consistent and truly integrated are the people we meet in our real life? And if people in these plays appear as mere marionettes, helpless puppets without any will of their own, passively at the mercy of blind fate and meaningless circumstance, do we, in fact, in our overorganized world, still possess any genuine initiative or power to decide our own destiny?” (Esslin, 5-6)
The Princess does not have any character of her own; she does not exist in a world with logical rules, where physics and memory do not work in reflection of our own. The player and the princess are trapped in a deeply isolating situation, completely at the mercy of some larger oppressive force, what initially feels like “meaningless circumstance”, and later is revealed to be the literal cosmic tension between change (symbolized by the Princess) and stagnation (us; bird player character) itself. The player’s expectations and choices do not change her actions in any logical way. This is an absurd situation. The player’s desire for a game purpose is potentially marginally satiated through the cosmic narrative, but this same narrative only highlights the inevitability of both stagnation and change and the player’s overall lack of control in face of these two paradoxically consistent concepts.
Do we have any “genuine initiative or power to decide our own destiny”? Slay the Princess would pretend to say yes, but truly mean no. The game may offer us a fine selection of pre-determined endings, but all function within both the (internal) game narrative of inevitably pre-determined yin-yang conflict and (externally) the game designers’ Ren’Py pre-determined narrative.
In taking this reading of Slay the Princess in combination with the necessary mechanics of nonlinear branching choice-based work to play the game, the game is a reflection of a cultural desire for agency and control over what is inherently uncontrollable. It is futile to try to resist the princess; that much is clear immediately. It is functionally inevitable that she will kill you or you will kill her. Yet, there is still a thrill we feel in the chase, in the discovery, in the choice itself. In this way, choice-based narrative video games are a cultural representation of absurdism – allow the player to find joyful purpose in exercising agentic choice, though the narrative is necessarily and futilely pre-determined and choice is ultimately illusory.
Additionally, I feel that the world-sized concepts in Slay the Princess are too metaphorically large and (are intentionally) presented too vaguely to truly be grasped by most casual players. Thus, in this example, the story is presented not as an objective truthful narrative with a thesis, but more so as sensorial experiences to be captured and felt. The strength of the game is in the player themselves developing their own sense of purpose in completion and understanding within the given experience and large concepts of change and death.
Camus believed that “life should be lived in the present and in the sensuous world” (Aronson). In abstracting games’ meaning away from realistic narrative strength and towards sensorially immersive content that may not reflect reality, games like Slay the Princess further demonstrate absurdism.
Utopian and Dystopian Games: A Short Hike and Papers, Please
Slay the Princess, while an illustrative example of absurdist content and form, features an especially unique world. Less rare are broadly dystopian or utopian nonlinear choice-based games, which are additional examples of absurdist theory. These games still encourage players to find their own paths and personal meaning. And like Slay the Princess, they rely on their distance from realism to develop the player’s sense of purpose.
A Short Hike is utopia; free from capitalist struggle; the player is free to explore what they want, endlessly, fulfilling easy tasks, to the point where the game is commonly described as a summer vacation. In many ways, it seems to function as the opposite of Slay the Princess – in that the world is largely simple, quickly understandable, and predictable. There are few surprises, the world is cheery and pixelated, dialogue simple and clear. However, the game still includes elements of Sisipheyan struggle; climbing up the mountain for what end? What drives the player towards the summit and the optional questlines besides their own developed sense of purpose?
Especially in the time after the short summit cutscene is realized, the player must find their own drive and meaning in the utopian construct, without any forced push towards the summit, or any particular forced quests to engage in. A Short Hike is popular due to its escapist structure, which still relies on choice-based frameworks to create meaning for their players. In a world functionally free from the social system of capitalism, the player enjoys creating their own purposes, their own goals. The audience themselves is able to project choices onto Claire, though the world remains singularly finite and pre-constructed. Still, the player themselves clearly does not become Claire; she is not a hollow vessel; she has her own character.
In clear contrast to that summery bliss, Papers Please is dystopia; the player is wholly subject to capitalist forces with very little control of their day to day tasks. The game is spent in a single holding cell. Repetitive tasks of guess-and-check challenge the player to grow in personal skill, while ethical choices are largely illusion, in that they change little about the player’s actions in a given day, and are clearly understood to be. The vast majority of the games’ 20 endings are incredibly similar, ending with the player in jail.
Any attempts to escape the player character from the situation they are in are thwarted, or the game ends. While the player may be driven by curiosity or a sense of forced survival, their day-to-day life and actions do not change based on the choices they make. Perhaps their gameplay performance allows the game to continue, or not. Again, the player must find purpose in the Sisyphean mundanity. The strength of Papers Please is largely not in its gameplay mechanic, but rather the ethical considerations it invites. Which family members do you prioritize? Who do you listen to? Whose life do you save – yours, theirs, Arstotska’s?
Futility would seem to permeate the game, except that it remains wildly popular and well-played, with a 5.0 on Steam from 39,000+ reviews. Clearly, there is interest and purpose that players continually find for themselves in picking up this game. Why may this be? Even with little gameplay shifts or illusions of one’s choices having a deeply game-changing impact, unlike the narrative structure of Slay the Princess, or the unlockable will-I-or-won’t-I quest structure of A Short Hike, players find their own purpose – whether it is getting better at quick-reading documents or allowing in the right number of rebels to arbitrarily overthrow the government and discover many more options for endings.
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Conclusion
In these examples, the player’s actions are ultimately futile. Despite appearing as if they wholly reflect the player’s choice, there exists a finite amount of story to encounter and limited options for discovery. Still, the games’ overall reliance on nonlinear choice-based mechanics reflect Camus’ theory of the absurd. Players strive and seek and continue to discover even within a medium where necessarily design is pre-encoded. The human condition itself is absurd within the constructs of the universe (the game mechanics), and yet, purpose is still sought out (choice-based narrative popularity). Even through mutually understood, ultimate futility in completing a game, players are driven to begin, explore, and understand. And in this way, the medium of games, in both its structure and content, acts as a greater reflection of its player’s larger purposes.
So the question is then: why does this matter? Why do players crave choice in structures that inherently lack it? As players seek purpose and agency in the very medium created to engage their interactivity, it follows that choice-based games may be a reflection of larger cultural structures: the consequence-free struggle and choice players crave from larger social systems, whether capitalism or not, that may similarly ensnare them. The internal world of video games offer the player a safe, pre-encoded platform to attempt, explore, hit one’s shins over and over, in the endless pursuit of what may matters to them – without the steep and lasting consequences found in life.
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Works Cited
Aronson, Ronald. “Albert Camus.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2022, ed by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, 21 Dec. 2022, plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/camus/.
Ellison, Gemma. “The Illusion of Free Will in Video Games: Are Your Choices Real?” Wayline, 14 June 2025, www.wayline.io/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will-in-video-games-are-your-choices-real. Accessed 8 June 2026.
Esslin, Martin. “The Theatre of the Absurd.” The Tulane Drama Review, vol. 4, no. 4, May 1960, pp. 3–15. JStor, https://doi.org/10.2307/1124873.
Parkin, Simon. “How Evil Should a Video Game Allow You to Be?” The New Yorker, 17 Sept. 2013, www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-evil-should-a-video-game-allow-you-to-be. Accessed 8 June 2026.
MacDonald, Laura. “Quantic Dream – David Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumiere.” Adventure Gamers, 4 Aug. 2005, adventuregamers.com/articles/quantic-dream-david-cage-and-guillaume-de-fondaumiere. Accessed 8 June 2026.
McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium is the Message.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, 1964, https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf. Accessed 8 June 2026.
Weiss, Ulli. “Café Müller” by Pina Bausch. 1977/78. Pina Bausch Foundation Archives, https://www.agendalx.pt/events/event/cafe-muller-1985/?lang=en. Accessed 8 June 2026.
