What "safety" means to a PL designer
I just finished reading Justus Robertson & R. Michael Young's INT 2013 paper about their work using the fact that players have incomplete knowledge of a simulation to accommodate incongruous player choices -- those that don't meet the story's goals -- by selectively rewriting the past. I made some sketchnotes summarizing the paper. Of course, if all one wanted to do were to ensure an authorial goal (e.g. that Batman goes to Harvey's location), one could just simply make all seemingly-significant "choices" lead to the same scene. What I find interesting about this work is that it ensures that any railroading of this form is done in a perceptually consistent way, one that won't leave the player wondering how it was possible for the outcome to occur, because what they saw was consistent with their knowledge. There's a world model that led to Harvey being in one place and Rachel being in another, and that world model can change as long as it goes