Metanarrative Horror: The Existential Dread of Choice

This paper, by Claire Stricklin and Samuel Muscente of Rutgers University-Camden, argues that the opposing design paradigms of "sandbox" and "railroad" games each carry a distinct existential horror, and that these horrors can be deliberately exploited as a resource for self-reflexive horror design. The sandbox, in its extreme form, becomes an aimless wandering through infinite choice, while the railroad becomes a form of restrictive control that strips players of meaningful agency. The authors frame these twin anxieties through existential philosophy, drawing on Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre, and situate them within Henry Jenkins's account of play as a space of free exploration constrained by adult authority.

The analysis proceeds through close readings of two interactive works. Netflix's Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is presented as an exemplar of the railroad, where its branching binary choices and metanarrative framing make the player feel as pressured as the protagonist, and where the apparent meaninglessness of choice is revealed when a single decision is overridden regardless of input. The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe serves as the counterpart, showing how a sandbox freed from its controlling narrator collapses into a "narrative agoraphobia" in which the absence of rules dissolves the game itself.

The paper's central claim is that both extremes produce unnerving experiences that can power horror design through alternating cycles of freedom and restriction. The work is primarily conceptual and interpretive rather than empirical, relying on textual analysis of selected games and secondary literature rather than player studies or survey data, and its conclusions are therefore offered as theoretical framing for future design practice in interactive metanarrative.