An increasing number of recent narrative games have incorporated the metagaming elements of rewinding and remaking choices as their core mechanics. Traditionally, narrative game designers were concerned that rewinding would break immersion and negatively affect players’ narrative experience. Although there has been research on metagaming as a whole, relatively little has been focused on the design of the rewinding mechanics and even less on empirical data regarding their impact on players. In this article, we present a theoretical framework on the structure of rewinding in narrative games, consisting of Restricted Rewind, Unrestricted Rewind, and External Rewind. To evaluate the impact of some of the main types of rewind structure, we developed three versions of an interactive narrative game called Rough Draft: a restricted rewind version, a parallel unrestricted rewind version, and a traditional no-rewind version. In a user study (n = 60), we evaluated the player experience of these three versions of Rough Draft in terms of gameplay engagement, narrative engagement, narrative transportation, and overall perceptions. Our results indicate that rewind mechanics do not negatively affect player engagement as previously believed. We also present our reflections and suggest design considerations for narrative games around rewind mechanics.

最近越来越多的叙事游戏将倒带和重新选择的元游戏元素纳入其核心机制。传统上，叙事游戏设计师担心倒带会破坏沉浸感并负面影响玩家的叙事体验。尽管已经对整体游戏进行了整体研究，但相对较少的注意力集中在倒带机制的设计上，甚至很少涉及其对玩家影响的经验数据。在本文中，我们介绍了叙事游戏中的倒带结构的理论框架，包括限制倒带，无限制倒带和外部倒带。为了评估某些主要类型的倒带结构的影响，我们开发了交互式叙事游戏的三个版本，称为“粗糙草稿”：限制倒带版本，并行的非限制倒带版本和传统的不倒带版本。在一项用户研究（n = 60）中，我们从游戏参与度，叙事参与度，叙事方式和整体感悟方面评估了这三个版本的Rough Draft。我们的结果表明，倒带机制不会像以前那样对玩家的参与度产生负面影响。我们还提出了自己的见解，并针对围绕倒带机制的叙事游戏提出了设计注意事项。