Games & Virtual Worlds Series

Agency

Understanding Games: How Video Games & Board Games Work

Michael Filimowicz, PhD

Published in

Understanding Games

8 min readJan 3, 2023

When one party has the authority to take action on behalf of another, the relationship is called an agency relationship in a business setting. As an example, a real estate agent represents either the buyer or the seller in a transaction. The ability to act in a general sense is the foundation of agency.

In interactive media, agency refers to the ability of a user to make choices and take actions that affect the outcome of the experience. In the context of video games, this can refer to the choices that a player makes during gameplay and the actions that they take using the game controller or other input device.

Game designers can use a variety of techniques to give players a greater sense of agency during gameplay. One way is to provide players with a range of choices and options for how to progress through the game. For example, a game might allow players to choose between different paths or make decisions that affect the outcome of the game.

Another way that game designers can increase player agency is by allowing players to customize their characters or modify their in-game environments. This can give players a greater sense of ownership over their experience and make them feel more invested in the game.

Game designers can also use mechanics such as branching storylines or multiple endings to give players a greater sense of agency. By allowing players to make choices that affect the outcome of the game, designers can create a more dynamic and personalized experience for each player.

Some aspects of game design that can potentially deprive players of a feeling of agency. One is linear gameplay, where players are required to progress through the game in a specific, predetermined order and do not have the freedom to make their own choices. This can make the player feel as though their actions do not have a significant impact on the outcome of the game.

Another aspect that can diminish player agency is the lack of meaningful choices. If the choices presented to the player do not have a significant impact on the game, or if there is only one “correct” choice, the player may feel as though their agency is limited.

Heavily scripted events or cutscenes can also reduce player agency, as they can take control away from the player and make it feel as though their actions do not matter.

Also, heavy reliance on chance can deprive players of a sense of agency because randomness has nothing to do with skill or decision-making.

It is important for game designers to balance the need to guide players through the game with the need to give them a sense of agency.

Designing Freedoms vs. Constraints

There are, broadly speaking, two opposing conceptions of human agency:

We adopt ‘positions’ within the sociocultural matrix and negotiate our activities within a severely confined field due to the stifling effects of our social and cultural environments. This is the ‘World-to-Subject’ direction.

The opposite view is that humans, with their unique combination of self-awareness and agency, actively participate in the processes of creating both their external environment and their internal experience. This is the ‘Subject-to-World’ direction.

There are also many arguments that fall somewhere between these, recognizing the merits of both sides while striving for a more nuanced understanding that is neither of the two extremes.

Agency in Life vs. Games

In games, agency has at its disposal vastly different QUALITATIVE resources for interactions. For example, my avatar might have super powers, advanced technologies to use, might be capable of performing magic, etc.

In the Real World, the QUANTITY of choices will always be greater than in any game, though the qualities are more constrained, because we can’t do the kinds of things that are possible in a game in everyday life. There’s an infinity of actions we can do in real life that you cannot program into a game.

Games have to manage a relatively small number of possible choices/interactions to create agency, so the sheer QUANTITY of choices available is constrained even though the QUALITIES can be rather fantastical, which is the exact reverse of ‘real life.’

Any Game Will Highly Limit Choices:

Because computational resources are FINITE: there’s only so many choices you can anticipate and code.

Because World-to-Subject agency is usually implemented in some ways, due to these resource constraints, the player/user is highly constrained by the virtual/digital environment.

Janet Murray’s Symbolic Dramas

Janet Murray has examined interactive narratives by looking for “symbolic dramas” even in the most abstract games.

In the original version of Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray famously read Tetris as a narrative experience: a “symbolic drama” that immersed its player in an abstracted version of the frantic busywork of post-industrial modernity. To work tirelessly to slot blocks into the right spaces, never finishing, always failing, is to feel something like the Sisyphean struggle to complete a mountain of tasks in an ever-shrinking day. Her interpretation attracted jeers from self-identified ludologists; the games scholar Markku Eskelinen called it “interpretive violence” chastising an apparent “determination” on her part “to find or forge a story at any cost.”

In the new edition, Murray responds by forging a story about her critics. They want Tetris — or Candy Crush, or perhaps the screen itself — to be a refuge from narrative, she argues, because they’re embroiled in too much narrative already. “It’s a seductive fantasy, very fragile,” Murray told me — the idea that games or other software “can protect us from any reference to the life world,” and just be “an immersion in manipulating symbols.” The fantasy is pervasive: she suggests that GamerGaters, old-school cultural gatekeepers, ludologist hard-liners, and people on the subway are all alike in their implicit desire to imagine games as an otherworld, a playground separate from wider cultural forces. — Matt Margini, “Hamlet on the Holodeck, Twenty Years Later,” New Yorker

Murray created a typology of symbolic dramas in interactive narrative:

I encounter a confusing world and figure it out

I encounter a world in pieces and assemble it into a coherent whole.

I take a risk and am rewarded for my courage.

I encounter a difficult antagonist and triumph over him.

I start off with very little of a valuable commodity and end up with a lot of it.

I am challenged by a world of constant unpredictable emergencies, and survive it.

These are all Metanarratives or Macrostructures, providing a high level logic for narrative progression. They can also be understood as Masterplots.

Representing Agency

Critics of games often analyze the power imbalances that distribute agency unequally amongst characters. From a postcolonial perspective, white characters often have more agency in narratives compared to non-white characters. Feminist criticism has argued that in narrative, men are often the privileged agents of story, and that female characters tend to lack comparable degrees of agency. Similarly, adults typically have more agency than children in stories, and so on.

The power imbalances and representations of social biases, cultural attitudes, racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and all kinds of culturally pervasive assumptions around legitimacy and power relationships permeate every aspect of many if not most narratives. Agency isn’t just about a player or user manipulating the affordances of your artifact — there are agency relationships structured by power dynamics within the interactive plot itself, as depicted in the representations of the characters and settings.

Censor’s Warning

Here’s a question to consider: if your company designed a massive multiplayer virtual game world based on a popular film franchise, upon discovering that players are using the games affordances for somewhat juvenile behavior (i.e. performing pseudo-pornographic actions), would you design these affordances and behaviors out of the interaction possibilities?

There can be some dangers in allowing an audience to relive their favorite films through interactions in the storyworlds of those films. Some players of games are notorious for lewd behavior, as in the various instances of abusing (e.g. “teabagging”) Luke Skywalker in the Battlefront games.

Bibliography & Further Reading

A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design by Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark
A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach by Michael Sellers
An Introduction to Game Studies by Frans Mayra
Basics of Game Design by Michael Moore
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier
Board Game Design Advice: From the Best in the World vol 1 by Gabe Barrett
Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: an Encyclopedia Of Mechanisms by Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev
Character Development and Storytelling for Games by Lee Sheldon
Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford
Clockwork Game Design by Keith Burgun
Elements of Game Design by Robert Zubek
Fundamentals of Game Design by Ernest Adams
Fundamentals of Puzzle and Casual Game Design by Ernest Adams
Game Design Foundations by Brenda Romero
Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton
Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans
Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames edited by Chris Bateman
Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design by Colleen Macklin and John Sharp
Introduction to Game Systems Design by Dax Gazaway
Kobold Guide to Board Game Design by Mike Selinker, David Howell, et al
Kobold’s Guide to Worldbuilding edited by Janna Silverstein
Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design, 2nd Edition by Scott Rogers
Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, et al.
Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction by Kent Puckett
Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates by David Herman, James Phelan, et al.
Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Fourth Edition by Mieke Bal
Practical Game Design by Adam Kramarzewski and Ennio De Nucci
Procedural Storytelling in Game Design by Tanya X. Short and Tarn Adams
Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing by Wendy Despain
Rules of Play by Salen and Zimmerman
Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Frontiers of Narrative) by Marie-Laure Ryan, Jan-Noël Thon, et al
Tabletop Game Design for Video Game Designers by Ethan Ham
The Art of Game Design, 3rd Edition by Jesse Schell
The Board Game Designer’s Guide: The Easy 4 Step Process to Create Amazing Games That People Can’t Stop Playing by Joe Slack
The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative by H. Porter Abbott
The Grasshopper, by Bernard Suits
The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies by Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory by David Herman
The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design by Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten
Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design by Gordon Calleja
Video Game Storytelling: What Every Developer Needs to Know about Narrative Techniques by Evan Skolnick
Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG edited by Wendy Despain
Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince
100 Principles of Game Design by DESPAIN