Idle News Podblast: Her Story Spoilercast

[Urthman]

I think one of my favorite things about this game is the way some players say, "I thought it had to be a multiple-personality thing because the twin story was just too ridiculous," while others say, "I was sure it had to be twins because this sort of MPD isn't a real thing that exists."

 

I was in the latter camp.  The multiple-personality thing never even occurred to me, and I was kind of dumbstruck when Chris said he stuck with the multiple-personality theory because it seemed to fit better with the game's flat, realistic tone.  What?  Twins at least are a real thing that exists, even if the story about them is far-fetched.

 

Given what we know about confirmation bias, I would guess that the difference for most people is attributable to the order you discovered things in the game.  I would guess most of the people in the MPD camp ran into a detail early on that either made the twins story seem preposterous or multiple personalities seem plausible.  Likewise, I'd guess most people who favor the twins explanation found some of the more plausible evidence that they are twins earlier, making them later more willing to accept some of the less believable details.

Another way of looking at this would be that in genre fiction we typically suspend our belief about the premises but want the conclusions to follow plausibly from those premises.  So depending on the order you discover things, you might (consciously or unconsciously) be thinking, "Oh, this is a world where MPD exists" or "Oh, this is the sort of story where you just except the idea that a little kid could grow up hiding in the attic."  Neither is actually credible, but whether that breaks the story depends on whether, for you, they were premises or conclusions.

And that dichotomy seems like a really fascinating feature of this kind of non-linear storytelling.  It seems players might, depending on the order they discover things, form different ideas about the very genre of the story, and that perception might have inertia that causes them to have very different reactions to identical plot points.