I see you often mention “player complicity” in your articles, and whenever I think I know what you mean, there is always some other nuance I must continue to wrap my brain around the next time I see you use it.
So, to put it simply, what do you mean when you talk about player complicity in a game?
The game doesn’t go forward unless the player makes it go forward; this means that the player is partly responsible for, or complicit in, the unfolding of the story. The player may have no effective control over what happens in the story, but there is still an element of participation that is absent from non-interactive fiction.
In most cases, this is not problematic, but it has interesting effects sometimes, as when the player is encouraged to command the behavior of evil or unsympathetic characters, advance morally dubious plots, or explore disturbing topics. In Varicella or Make It Good, that means that the player helps to bring about events that in all likelihood he would not approve of in real life. In Judith, it means moving the story along with the full awareness that you may be endangering sympathetic characters. Photopia pulls off something a bit trickier, namely to get the player to the point where he thinks retrospectively that he might have had the chance to avert the outcome of the game, but failed to do so (which is why for many people the immediate step is to replay to try to make things come out better).
But in all cases these games are drawing part of their emotional effect from the dissonance between what the player might want to have happen and what he has actually caused to happen in the course of the game.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
I see you often mention “player complicity” in your articles, and whenever I think I know what you mean, there is always some other nuance I must continue to wrap my brain around the next time I see you use it.
So, to put it simply, what do you mean when you talk about player complicity in a game?
The game doesn’t go forward unless the player makes it go forward; this means that the player is partly responsible for, or complicit in, the unfolding of the story. The player may have no effective control over what happens in the story, but there is still an element of participation that is absent from non-interactive fiction.
In most cases, this is not problematic, but it has interesting effects sometimes, as when the player is encouraged to command the behavior of evil or unsympathetic characters, advance morally dubious plots, or explore disturbing topics. In Varicella or Make It Good, that means that the player helps to bring about events that in all likelihood he would not approve of in real life. In Judith, it means moving the story along with the full awareness that you may be endangering sympathetic characters. Photopia pulls off something a bit trickier, namely to get the player to the point where he thinks retrospectively that he might have had the chance to avert the outcome of the game, but failed to do so (which is why for many people the immediate step is to replay to try to make things come out better).
But in all cases these games are drawing part of their emotional effect from the dissonance between what the player might want to have happen and what he has actually caused to happen in the course of the game.