Worlds the player can't break

I work at an indie studio in Cluj making games. We have six people and we have shipped two projects and we are building a third and the entire process involves building systems and then watching players find all the ways those systems fail. It is humbling and mostly instructive. Interactive fiction is the form I come back to for my own writing because it sits exactly where game design and narrative meet. The difference, in my experience, is that a game player wants to win or break the system. A reader wants to inhabit it. I'm trying to write IF that rewards the reader's interpretation rather than their ability to find the optimal path. I've been studying the Twine corpus and some of the more ambitious Inkle work and trying to figure out what the form is actually good at that prose isn't. My current project has seventeen major branch points and I've completed about half of them. It's set in a near-future Transylvania, which is a setting that sounds like a joke and isn't, and concerns a cartographer mapping boundaries that keep moving. My writing group, three other people from Cluj's small literary SF community, meets at a café near Piaţa Unirii on Thursday evenings and keeps me accountable.