I’m in total agreement with you. The 5 clip limit and the ordering are important design constraints. The whole thing falls apart without them. I wrote a very similar piece about these constraints and why they’re exciting (linked in my username), even contrasting it with BioShock as you have. However, I didn’t realize the ordering was strictly chronological until later. It works out well given the 7 interviews.

haik’, as I said, those constraints are crucial for pacing. And to turn the game into a sort of puzzle; that is to say it actually feels challengin. Without it, the game would be a 2 hour youtube clip and not nearly as fascinating. Besides, it’s not at all unbelievable that a poorly written piece of software (today or in the 90s) would have such an arbitrary limit. This is actually one of the *least* far fetched aspects of the game.

You say
“The interface, the thing that limits what you can and can’t do, is natural: it matches the limitations your character in this world also faces. And so the challenge of overcoming it feels like a game, rather than a frustration.”

To me – that is what threw me off of the game right from the start, and why I just couldn’t enjoy it.
In context, you are using a computer that is powerful enough to go trough every clips, transcript every audio in it, and automatically assign key-words to them. Yet.. that same computer can’t return more than 5 clips at once. Or, maybe just simply presents the clips in chronological orders – something that all computers could do since…well there was computers.
That seems so arbitrary a limit for the sake of gameplay to me (again, stress on “to me”) that the game couldn’t trigger my “willing suspension of disbelief”

In the end – you do not investigate a mystery. That was taken care of long ago. You are fighting against a (purposely) poorly written interface.

And I know that is a bit idiotic on my part, I’m probably missing much. Say the premises were something like “Hey, here’s a bunch of cardboard boxes filled with VHS, each VHS labelled with keyword”, something that wouldn’t change any of the game mechanisms or gameplay, only how they are presented to the player…I would have jumped on it.