The word linear, when applied to video games, is death. We denigrate shooters on rails as trivial diversions best played with a beer in one hand and a light gun in the other. We treasure games like Grand Theft Auto, Deus Ex, The Sims, even Crayon Physics because they are profoundly nonlinear. They let us solve problems in unique ways and they let us design our own experience in large part. Then, surely, if our games are nonlinear, the stories that are bound to them must be too.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that video game storytelling is an entirely new medium. The history of nonlinear narrative runs further back than you’d think, but most of it is hidden like the mass of an iceberg. Academics tend to cite two things most often as the creative roots of nonlinear storytelling: a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941 called “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and a French literary movement in the 1960s called Oulipo — a contraction that when translated reads workshop of potential literature. But in truth, only academics really talk about these things.

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