I played five short, browser-based interactive fiction games: talking to my dad, Coming Out Simulator 2014, You’re Gone, Adventures with Anxiety!, and The Acquisition. I replayed many of them to see other branches. I read each one through Henry Jenkins’ four narrative strategies (evocative spaces, enacted stories, embedded narratives and emergent narratives). All of them are minimal on purpose, and it helps let me fill the gaps with my own life.
talking to my dad
The entire game takes place in the rearview seat of a car while your dad drives. When someone drives you somewhere, you’re stuck there together; you either talk, sit in awkward silence or music.
This is an evocative space because the car carries memories the player already has. It took me back to being driven to school by my uncle, where he would ask how my day was going, and I still didn’t feel comfortable sharing everything. The dad here is friendly too; he seems open and wants to hear more, but then the paternalism and defensiveness show up, like when he defends the mom for signing the character up for activities he didn’t want. Talking to a parent is a different situation than talking to a friend because they’ve been taking care of you for a lot of your life. A peer feels much more approachable and on the same level as you.
Most of the story is embedded narrative: the game hints at the character’s sexual orientation and depression, so you piece them together yourself. It’s a visual novel played as a choose-your-own-adventure; you pick how to respond, and your choices steer the conversation. Because the visuals barely change, the game never hands you a fully drawn character.
The game draws empathy toward the near-universal awkwardness of talking with your parents, and it does so by making the conversation stilted, with a dad who keeps trying but never quite understands. I think it succeeded because it used so few visuals that I could map it onto my own life. It left me nostalgic of the old times when my uncle drove me to school and more thoughtful on how I talk to my parents. Should I tell more information than I already do? How do I frame the relationship to be more comfortable like talking to a friend?
Coming Out Simulator 2014
Nicky Case calls this a half-true retelling of coming out to her parents, and most of it happens at a static dinner table. Dinner is a smart evocative space: it’s where families are expected to talk. Like talking to my dad, it’s minimalist and choice-based. The simple drawings and small animations kept me from fully becoming the character and pushed me to reflect on my own experience instead: times I felt uncomfortable telling my parents things I wanted to keep personal, even though they’ve helped me so much.
The game draws empathy toward Case’s own experience, and toward anyone who doesn’t know how their family will react, by showing that night from Case’s side as the parents find out. It worked on me because coming out feels more socially accepted where I grew up in California; the game made me understand how much harder it is when your family might not be receptive to a kid who is different.
You’re Gone
By Madison Rye Progress, You’re Gone is told entirely through instant messages a husband keeps sending to his wife’s phone after she dies. The message thread is the evocative space: texts are very common, so then it is easy to step in the shoes of the husband. Embedded narrative carries the plot, with key details arriving one message at a time, like her parents externalizing their pain by blaming him and saying it would have been better if she had married someone of the same ethnicity. It’s a kinetic novel; you only have one linear path, and your only action is pressing send. The design illustrates the sadness because the husband knows nobody will answer.
My slight criticism is about onboarding. At first I thought the game was broken, since the top of the screen was blank and gray and nothing happened, until I noticed the send button at the bottom. When I reloaded, I saw that it blinks red, but I missed that the first time. The lesson for my P2 is to make the first action easy to see.
The game draws empathy toward people who have lost someone, through a one-sided conversation that ends in letting go: the narrator lets the phone number deactivate and stops writing these diaries, accepting that she’s gone and that dwelling on it isn’t helping. It made me sad, and it worked.
Adventures with Anxiety!
Also by Nicky Case, this one has you play as the anxiety itself: a red wolf trying to protect its human. The situations are evocative ones, like being alone or feeling pressured by peers at a party, and they reminded me of moments when I felt the same way. It’s a visual novel where you choose which fear to throw at your human.
I find interesting playing as anxiety because it reframes anxiety as not an enemy to get rid of, but a watchdog that sometimes goes overboard trying to protect you. That empathy succeeded while I was playing. My critique is that the effect feels somewhat short-term. When I’m actually anxious, it’s hard to remember the reframe; I just feel bad.
The Acquisition
In The Acquisition by Jess Watsky, an IFComp 2026 entry, you play someone who has always wanted an original drawing by the surrealist cartoonist Glen Baxter. The game tries to help the general public understand why artists and collectors value art so much, and why people spend what looks like a crazy amount of money on it. It’s choice-based and entirely text: you act by picking how to proceed, and you can replay it by choosing different options. Being text-only meant I imagined each scene my own way. The game was trying to convey that art is a physical thing you have to experience firsthand, not something you can find on a computer for free. Still, it was only partly successful for me. It ended abruptly, the short timeline felt forced, it didn’t clearly explain why my character cared so much about art, and it never showed me the art, so I had to treat everything as theoretical.
What I’m taking into P2
The biggest shift is about visuals. I came in wanting lots of art to immerse the player, and now I’m reconsidering, because these games kept showing me that less detail leaves more room for the reader’s own story. In MDA terms, the mechanics here are tiny (pick a line, press send, change the station), but the dynamics they produce (hesitating, pausing, reflecting on your own personal life) create the feeling of a real, awkward conversation. Here are some interesting things I would like to note:
- One trapped space vs. many locations. A car, a dinner table and a message thread each force the conversation to happen, while many locations allow a diversity of different dialogue.
- Hints can carry the heavy material. Embedded details let players reach the hard truth themselves, which may make it land harder.
- The Acquisition showed me that rushing the end weakens everything before it.
Overall, the games that moved me most built a familiar but generalizable box and let me bring my own memories into it.
AI Use Disclosure
I played every game and recorded my reactions myself as voice-dictated notes. I then used Claude Opus 5.5 to turn those notes into a first draft. Claude removed repetition, reorganized my points into one section per game, and reworded my sentences into complete ones. It also added the Jenkins and MDA framing, a few phrases of its own, and the takeaway list, and it used web search to check each game’s title, creator and link. It caught two factual errors in my notes: the anxiety in Adventures with Anxiety! is a wolf, not a dog, and the art game I played was The Acquisition, not The Breakup Game.
After that, I revised the draft by hand: I rewrote many of the sentences, cut and added content, and took and placed all the screenshots. The experiences, opinions and judgments about each game are my own.
References
Case, N. (2014). Coming Out Simulator 2014 [Browser game]. https://ncase.itch.io/coming-out-simulator-2014
Case, N. (2019). Adventures with Anxiety! [Browser game]. https://ncase.me/anxiety/
hatimb00. (n.d.). talking to my dad [Browser game]. itch.io. https://hatimb00.itch.io/talking-to-my-dad
Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004). MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research. Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI.
Jenkins, H. (2004). Game design as narrative architecture. In N. Wardrip-Fruin & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person: New media as story, performance, and game (pp. 118–130). MIT Press.
Progress, M. R. (2018). You’re Gone [Browser game]. itch.io. https://makyo.itch.io/youre-gone
Watsky, J. (2026). The Acquisition: You, me, the world, and an untitled drawing by Glen Baxter [Browser game]. Interactive Fiction Competition 2026. https://ifcomp.org/
