This article examines how linear mobile role-playing games (RPGs) generate a sense of agency without branching story outcomes. Focusing on Ashes of the Kingdom , a serialized, female-oriented mobile RPG operating under a games-as-a-service (GaaS) model, the study introduces the concept of operative signifiers: small, system-generated feedback cues such as dynamic forms of address, tonal shifts in dialogue delivery and unlockable memory scenes that acknowledge player input without altering the canonical plot. Methodologically, the study combines interactional textual analysis with an online survey ( N = 110) and fifteen semi-structured interviews. Survey results show that players report high perceived narrative agency and emotional resonance despite strong awareness of narrative fixity. Qualitative findings further reveal how players interpret micro-feedback as meaningful recognition, while also articulating moments of affective fatigue and deliberate resistance through what participants described as ‘testing’ or ‘playing against’ the system. Rather than framing constrained narratives as failures of agency, the analysis demonstrates how agency in this context operates as expressive and performative, grounded in how consistently the system responds to player actions at the level of tone, intimacy and interface feedback. The article contributes a transferable typology of operative signifiers that can be applied to other linear or micro-customized narrative games, offering design-oriented insight into how meaningful player experience can be produced without branching plot structures. More broadly, the findings situate these techniques within the economic logic of GaaS, where sustaining emotional engagement becomes a central design objective.
He et al. (Sun,) studied this question.