Yeah, I agree with Amanda on this. “Addressing the human condition” can mean a lot of things to different people – like, I found No One Else Is Doing This from last year’s comp had a lot to say about the experience of doing grassroots political work, which is something that I’m pretty familiar with through my work and think is really important for social change, but I suspect for most people it felt like an interesting look at a specific job and wouldn’t rise to the level of addressing the human condition.
So I think we’re really talking about the big, universal experiences – growing up and finding one’s place in the world, starting a family, dying, and seeing all that stuff happen to friends and family. And the thing is, it’s very easy to write a story that incorporates those elements but does so in a banal way that doesn’t feel especially insightful, precisely because these are such common events in all kind of fiction, and can easily feel cliche. So starting out from a place of “I want to address the human condition!” is likely to fail; even starting out in a place of “I have a take on one of these issues that I am bursting at the seams to share” can be risky! But I do think that paradoxically, the more subjective and specific your story, the more universal it can feel – this is connected to the empathy and recognition part that Drew alludes to above, which requires something human we can relate to rather than a bland archetype.
I do agree too that fitting gameplay to theme is important for making these kinds of stories work in an interactive context – though in my view that’s as important for the benefits of doing this right (the elegant interplay of interactive elements and narrative reinforcing the impact of both) as avoiding the negatives of messing it up (players who are stymied by brain-teasers or puzzled by low-context choices are unlikely to have bandwidth left over to consider the human condition). Choice and consequences may be one way of doing this, but I wouldn’t think necessarily so – certainly when I’ve experienced these kinds of big events, I often haven’t felt like I have a lot of choices beyond how to respond.
Lastly, the genre conversation feels like it should be irrelevant – since why should genre matter for this kind of stuff – but I think actually is on point. Possibly this is just reflecting my own biases, but I’ve found the IF (and other fiction, for that matter) that successfully does this sort of thing tends to be more grounded in the real world. A fantastical element or two can definitely work – others have mentioned Repeat the Ending and Computerfriend, for example – but I think both of those games start out from a very grounded set of experiences, which is the right approach. Too much variation from the real world means the player can wind up spending a lot of their attention on what’s different from their experiences, rather than what’s the same (would this be a place to gently suggest that in this context, the F/SF focus on worldbuilding combines unfruitfully with the systematic lack of an editing process for amateur IF?)
Beyond these general considerations, I wrote up some more specific thoughts in my post-game notes for Sting that maybe bear on this question too – big spoilers though and if you’re interested in this topic, it might be better to play the game first (it’s relatively short and relatively easy!)