Beacon Pines is honest about not being a game

This is not a game (and you are not a player)

A horrible flaw permeats nearly every instance of [fiction, of the branching narrative genre, presented in the medium of computer software], the flaw of pretending to be something they're not. The sorry state of mainstream vocabulary is such that all kinds of interactive entertainment, so long as they're delivered using computers, are called "games", even when they're decidedly un-game-like. And so, with precious few exceptions, _visual novels_ bill themselves as "videogames", address their reader as "player", and use second person pronouns for the story's protagonist, whom they pretend is a "player avatar".

It's hard to clearly perceive a flaw when it's this ubiquitous. Sometimes, you need an example of something done right, before you can crystallize a general sense of wrongness into a concept the can be pointed at. Named. Banished. For me, that first[^1] example was Beacon Pines.

[^1]: The second being Dr. Ludwig and the Devil, which uses a different framing device from Beacon Pines, but is equally honest about the level of agency afforded to the reader. It's also quite short and doesn't cost anything, so give it a try.

Beacon Pines

Beacon Pines tells the story of one Luka VanHorn, a 12 year old boy. The first thing I noticed about said boy is that the narrator always describes his on-screen actions as "He did this and that" (3rd person, past tense), never "You do this and that" (2nd person, present tense). Good. Honest. In using the past tense, the narrator admits that just like every other story that isn't a tabletop RPG, this one has an absent author, not a present GM.

Then, you reach a point in the story in which you are presented with a choice, which forks the narrative. Every choice point you're presented with is a branching point in the narrative, or, looking at it from the other side, because we're not pretending that this is a game and that the reader is a player, we also don't need to adultrate the few choices which correspond to actual branching points with a ton of "choices" that don't have any consequences and are only added to VNs to give "players" the illusion of having more agency than they actually do.

Because all choice points are wheat, rather than the usual mixture of 10% wheat / 90% chaff, a reader that wants to experience all of the different story branches doesn't need to consult a walkthrough in order to know whether this particular choice point warrants making a save. You just save every single time you're presented with a choice. Well, actually, you don't. The software does it for you, automatically. And when you do the Beacon Pines equivalent of "loading a save", the various choice points are laid out in the shape of a tree, corresponding the actual shape of the narrative, rather than the more common list or grid.

Immersion and Flow

Every time a character that is supposed to be my avatar in the fictional world acts in a way that isn't true to how I'd act in similar cirumstances, that's an immersion break. Worse if the "game" forces me to dwell on the dissonance by pausing to offer me a choice between multiple options, none of which are appropriate for a "me". Beacon Pines does not break immersion in this way, because it does not pretend that Luka is in some sense "me".

Every time I bring up the menu to make a save, that's an interruption in the flow of reading. Even worse if I have to tab out to another application entirely in order to consult a walkthrough. Beacon Pines avoids the problem by not pretending that choices are "real" and "locked-in" and "irreversible". Because of that, the UI for recording and restoring "saves" can be streamlined, and seamlessly integrated with the experience.

It's honest fun. It's fun because it's honest.