New Direction: Risk and Narrative Choice

Last week I presented my thesis progress to the class and raised considerable concern as to the viability of it; namely, a general thesis on using narrative choice to re-enforce themes is too broad and doesn't discuss enough--or perhaps just not explicit enough--new ways of developing narrative choice. Thus, I'm altering the thesis to focus on risk in narrative choice, as I feel risk is the most under-represented part of the decision-making architecture in narrative choice-based games. I'm basically proposing that risk is what makes decisions interesting and that if we inject an element of unpredictability to the outcome of a narrative choice system that it will be more engaging. All I need in addition to my current body of research is something substantiating that claim in the psychological field--game design is full of nothing if not arguments that risk is interesting.