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• 1 2023-12-08T20:34:08+00:00 It Paints Me (2) 20 "It Paints Me" Page 2 plain 2023-12-09T01:40:05+00:00 There is, however, a third choice that the player has to make. For the third and final choice, both decisions that the player could make lead to Sam creating a jarring work of art, but each painting in each of the two endings have different motivations. Furthermore, aside from making these three choices, the player also navigates the story through each slide by either pressing the space button or clicking on the screen. 
  
  In the same chapter, "Agency," Murray argues that "in a narrative experience not structured as a win-lose contest the movement forward has the feeling of enacting a meaningful experience both consciously chosen and surprising." (131) Even though the players might not be deciding every move that Sam makes, they still feel as if they are the ones moving through the story as they click through the painted slides, and they discover the twists and turns at the same time as Sam does. When in the first ending, Marie is trampled by the carriage, and when, in the second ending, Sam's loved ones from his past come back to haunt him, the player is surprised by these turns of events as much as Sam is.
  
  They even have the power to decide between these two endings, so one could argue that the player of the game has more agency than Sam. Both of the possible decisions for the player to make present a celebration of art as the result of inspiration from real life, each in their own way; the first one is a shot of Marie, broken, bloody, and, well, dead, which Sam paints vengefully in the depths of his grief, while the second one is a reflection of himself, prompting him to fall in love with art enough that he chooses not to follow his dead relatives to the grave. Both outcomes allow the player to walk away with the message that the creator of the game wanted them too: that it is impossible to separate art from life, that it will always inevitably be influenced by our personal experiences. Given that these outcomes are similar in terms of the messages they send, it is possible to make the argument that the player does not have enough agency in this game--given that there are only three choices to make--as much as it is possible to make the argument that the player feels as if they are in charge of the story the whole time, because they decided how Sam feels at the end, whether he is vindictively painting Marie or if he is working through the pain and celebrating himself as an artist.