A while back I co-wrote a paper on Umineko no Naku Koro ni.
The ultimate origin was that I had a lot of time during the pandemic to play an eighty-hour visual novel while simultaneously trying to solve the murder mystery with my housemates, but the point of the paper was that we saw a connection between the concepts of the game and the discussion of story volumes that had been happening around the same time.
You might already be familiar with a story volume even if you didn’t have a name for it. A story volume is “a family of emergent stories, all of which are begotten by a set of carefully curated system parameters” or, in other words you’re playing a game and there are many possible storylines that could happen, but there are also storylines that could not happen. The rules that create the emergent stories exclude as much as they include.
More importantly, we want it to be the case. The shape of the story volume is as much a part of the experience as any of the individual storylines. Some things are impossible and never happen in any storyline, some things always occur in every storyline. Discussion of interactivity often centers on what changes in response to the player, but often the most impactful moments are precisely the ones that don’t change. And some of that impact is because other things do change.
Umineko has a lot to say about this, but one useful bit of terminology inspired the paper: the idea of the catbox. Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead, and all of the storylines in the story volume are both alive and dead.
Related to this, one aspect of Umineko that I particularly like is that the catbox nature of the narrative means that we can see the characters from many points of view–I feel like I knew the characters more intimately because I’ve seen what it takes for them to change. And, moreover, what part of their character is immutable, unchanging in every circumstance.