Complexity and near-aha moments in digital narrative

Faced with a puzzling narrative in film, literature, or video games, audience members may approach a sense of almost understanding of what is going on, how the events are related, and so on. This feeling – which I call a “near-aha moment” in this article – is particularly common when engaging with narratives that deploy various formal devices to create cognitive-level complexity. Exploring a concrete instance of this experience via Sam Barlow’s 2022 video game Immortality , this article argues that these near-aha moments shed light on the embodied nature of storytelling – how narrative builds on more basic, bodily and affective patterns of interaction with the world. Through playful complexity, the failure or disruption of narrative sense-making reveals the cognitive structures underlying narrative experience itself.