Constructing a Catbox: Story Volume Poetics in Umineko no Naku Koro ni

Abstract

Many interactive digital narrative (IDN) systems are capable of producing numerous distinct storylines, which share some common properties but differ from one another in ways that appear contradictory when attempting to treat them as co-canonical. One theory of IDN poetics therefore positions an IDN system as defining a story volume: a generating function that produces storylines, and whose meaning lies not just in the storylines themselves but also in the relationships between these storylines. However, the discussion of story volumes has until now been entangled with the discussion of choice and emergence, making the scope of this theory’s applicability unclear. To advance understanding of the poetics of story volumes, we examine Umineko no Naku Koro ni—a heavily metafictional visual novel series with no emergent narrative component and almost no player choice, but in which the characters explicitly understand themselves as existing within a story volume—as a case study of how story volumes can be used to create narrative meaning.