The vote for the ending

An original opinion article about audience choices in stories.

The audience has voted, the heroine has chosen the safer road and the screen announces that we have made the story our own. I enjoy the moment. I am less certain that pressing a button makes me a storyteller.

A choice can create attention. Knowing that I must decide encourages me to consider the character's situation instead of waiting for the next scene to deliver an answer. Discussion afterwards can be lively because viewers remember where their paths separated. Participation gives us a particular way into the work.

Yet the available roads were made before we arrived. Someone decided which choices would appear, what each would lead to and which alternatives would remain impossible. The audience's freedom is real within that arrangement. Forgetting the arrangement gives us a misleading picture of who made the experience.

I also value stories whose endings refuse my preference. A difficult conclusion can keep working on me because I cannot exchange it for one which feels more comfortable. If every disagreement becomes a request to choose again, I may lose the chance to understand why a writer wanted the discomfort to remain.

This does not make a fixed ending automatically superior. A clumsy conclusion does not become profound merely because nobody can change it. Equally, an interactive story can use its choices to expose habits of judgement rather than flatter the audience. Being offered an easy-looking decision and then encountering its consequences can be a serious experience.

We should ask what the form makes possible. Does choosing reveal something about the character or about the chooser? Does it change the experience in a meaningful way? The interesting question comes after the excitement of the button. We have taken part; now we can consider what our participation actually did.

Explain the writer’s mixed response to giving audiences choices within a story.