Spectre: Exploring the relationship between players and narratives in digital games

In most interactive narratives players physically inhabit the main character, guiding their avatar through a preset story with a marginal amount of flexibility. In Spectre, players use their avatar less literally: their actions direct the flow of a character's memory as he searches for the nine most important moments in his life. This places the player in the role of director instead of puppeteer: he/she determines the content and tone of a story whose events have long since been locked into place. By taking the causality of events out of players' hands, and giving them, instead, indirect control over a much larger recombinant story space, games can tell nuanced narratives while still giving participants meaningful agency over their experience.;Keywords: interactive narrative, art game, storytelling, interactive fiction, database narrative, platformer, side scroller, game vignette, fabula, sujet.