The Nature of Railroading

[Max_Killjoy]

There's a sliding scale of freedom between "singular tracks," "multiple-choice tracks," "canyons that are very hard to climb out of," "roads through difficult terrain," "roads through flat and even terrain," and "an open sandbox." And there's even a step beyond that, which Darth Ultron likes to use as a strawman, of essentially Limbo, where the loudest and most strong-willed player dictates reality.

Video games tend to be somewhere in the first two or the fourth. Tabletop RPGs hit their sweet spot in the "canyons that are hard to climb out of" to the "open sandbox."

And then there's the kind of railroad mixed with (poorly-done) illusionism that pretends to be canyons or just roads through difficult terrain, but has deliberately set up insurmountable obstacles in every direction save the chosen path, rendering what looks like particularly steep canyon walls into essentially rails, because nothing but following the rails will "work."

I'd not argue against any of that, really.

But my question remains, when the players' choices and the PCs' actions actually matter and shape the present reality and future possibilities they have in front of them, in a way similar to how the choices and actions of real people affect their future choices in the real world -- where are the "rails" / "tracks"?