As an author my current attitude is leaning quite a bit towards acknowledging the primary importance of reader interpretation. Obviously I have opinions on everything (even if I didn’t write it, I rarely don’t have opinions about anything), but I’ll try to keep some of them to myself as I’m not sure they’re inherently more valuable than anyone else’s, but might be taken as such. But yes, that’s just an annoying way to say that I’m going to be vague.
2-Player
And I’m going to start right away. I don’t want to talk to the experiential aspects of playing 2-player (I’m in that unique position of never being able to genuinely have that experience), but I will quickly mention the mechanics.
On the Leon side, what happens to each of the ‘subjects’ is entirely dependent on the number that Caroline chooses. Of course, which number the player playing Caroline chooses is likely to be strongly dependent on what the Leon player chooses. I don’t know if either you or your friend played Caroline ‘disobediently’, but that can lead to the Leon player making choices and those choices not being carried out. Which in turn effects the Leon ending, as which ending Leon gets is (mostly but not exclusively) based on what happened to each of the subjects.
Caroline’s ending, meanwhile, is much more dependent on Leon. There are 4 endings for Caroline (given in text differences it’s not so clear cut how many there are for Leon), with each run giving the player the choice of up to 2 of them, but which 2 depends entirely on what ending Leon got. It sounds like you got the same (more likely) choice both times. (sidebar: it seems that the players who are playing single player are getting the other choice (where Caroline is never accused of war crimes) disproportionately more often. I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing but it was an unintentional outcome of my use of RNG in the single player version). Other major plot points in the Caroline story (such as Daniel getting arrested) are also dependent on choices the Leon player makes.
I won’t say any more than that this (im)balance of power was intentional.
The Throne
I’m not going to touch that. I might talk about it later (post comp).
Thesis
This I also don’t really want to talk about, but there’s something I want to raise as a discussion point. I’ve called A Chinese Room a horror game because horror (sometimes) does something that I don’t find as much in other genres. If there’s a word for it I don’t know it, but I’ll call it experiential horror. Those kind of stories that don’t have a clear thesis, but instead try to elicit empathy from the audience, to bring the audience in to a situation or a character and then, once they hold them, bring in the horror and just let the audience sit in it. The kind of story that wants the audience to feel like they’ve been somewhere, like they’ve had an experience, rather than that they’ve necessarily learnt or been told something propositional. That doesn’t mean that these stories can’t ‘say’ things as well, and I personally believe that A Chinese Room does say things, but my intent was from an experiential first point of view. Whether I succeeded there is a whole other matter.
Alternate reality?
Yes. It’s speculative fiction. I perhaps should have been more clear about that somewhere, apologies!