Making the Player the Detective

Detective stories in games have long been a heavily used inspiration source and setting for games, and it is indeed a fitting genre at first glance with its clearly defined set of expectations, rules, and type of storytelling relying on uncovering the past. It is curious then, that until recently, most detective games have followed a more traditional adventure game structure, with little emphasis on actual investigation in the player’s actions, but where the player more acts as a proxy for the plot to follow its course. However, in recent years, a number of games have shown a tendency to shift this balance, and push the bulk of the detective work onto the players themselves, to leave them with an inscrutable mystery to slowly uncover over the course of the game, to decipher the story of the crime in their mind. This paper will investigate a few of these games as well as compare with literature on traditional detective stories to understand how detective games have typically been a different type of detective story all together, which is crucial to understanding how we can make the player the detective instead of an observer of a detective.