Celia Wagar's CritPoints

A commonly invoked concept for video games is the concept of Agency. In real life, Agency refers to the ability of individuals to act upon the world and shape their life outcomes, especially in relationship to other people. I don’t think this concept or framing makes sense for games, and the game The Stanley Parable, kind of lampoons this concept, especially in this trailer.

I don’t think the concept of Agency makes sense for video games, because I view games more abstractly than stories or simulations. If games are self-contained systems of rules and interactions, basically a big bundle of math, then how could you have more or less ability to affect the world or society when there is no world or society to affect? How would you compare the agency of action puzzle games, such as Tetris, Panel De Pon, Puyo Puyo, or Puzzle Fighter II Turbo? How would you compare the agency of sports, such as Soccer, Basketball, American Football, or Tennis?

Is The Stanley Parable a game in which you have a tremendous amount of agency, considering your choices can result in wildly different bespoke storylines? The narrative of the game itself suggests that you have rather limited agency, being completely incapable of leaving the rail tracks provided for you, regardless of how many sets of tracks branch off.

I think that the word Agency presumes an lens of Narrativism or Simulationism. Many people use the word purely to frame the amount of choice and control that a game offers (which you might do for the sport examples above), but I think the overlapping real-world meaning of the term muddies the waters when we try to practically apply it, or criticize games relative to the presence or absence of agency. Agency is frequently used to describe games with a lot of mechanical depth and nuance, but it’s also used to describe a narratively powerful ability to affect the setting and the characters that live in that setting.

Is it Agency or Choice?

Deus Ex is described by many as a game that has strong player agency, but I believe that a lot of the actual choices you make throughout the game are fairly thin and constrained. The mainstream view of the game is shaped by the fact that many of the game’s questlines can be completed in a variety of different ways. The game fosters a simulation of the real-world concept of agency. However, we could contrast this with a game that doesn’t do that, but offers a larger overall possibility space, such as any fighting game, or a technical Metroidvania like Super Metroid, Symphony of the Night, Ori, or Silksong. Within the FPS genre, I have compared Deus Ex to Crysis Warhead, but you could also pick Half Life or Halo.

Valuing Agency can also be misleading. Many action games feature Hitstun, a state that interrupts your action and temporarily locks you out of acting. Games that feature this mechanic are usually better off for having it, and it expands both the possibility space of the game, and the relevant depth. However, from a framing of Agency, this is a moment in which control is taken away. If it is good to continuously be in control of your character, if games are better as you have more control and more choice, then it would seem obvious that states of stun or disadvantage which lock you out or limit you to particular options are a bad thing. I have had people legitimately argue with me and tell me that I am not an “advocate for the player” because I think these types of systems are good and useful for action games.

I think that these different conceptions of agency are confused and not looking at the game more directly as a state tree and learning experience. Rather than interfacing with a more direct understanding of games (possibility space, skill tests, tactical decision-making), they form a proxy value: Agency, and attempt to apply this inconsistently, because it doesn’t actually map to the structure of games.

This doesn’t mean that agency doesn’t exist in any game. Agency is a sociological relationship. Many games have player societies and governments, such as MMOs, and agency can be a very real thing in those social structures. Tabletop RPGs have a live game master to participate in collaborative storytelling ad hoc to the actual game rules or content, affording players the ability to act outside of the game rules in a simulation of real-world agency. In this TTRPG context, we can perhaps more clearly see that agency is more of a feeling that players have with respect to games than an actual formal property of games. Different games provide different feelings of agency based on the way they present their stories and world, and the range of interactions they afford players to shape those stories and worlds.

Agency is a Feeling?

From the lens of Agency as a feeling more than a formal property, we can take a step back and compare it to other feelings that games give us, like the feeling of exploration, growing stronger, or surprise. It’s a taste more than something inherently good or bad. Wanting to connect to the feelings of players is an entirely valid goal for a game. Trouble arises when we mistake these feelings for more fundamental properties of a work, or impose them as universal values for artwork. A lot of art might inspire a feeling of joy or awe, but those aren’t universally valuable properties of all artwork.

Therefore, rather than Deus Ex having strong player agency inherently as a static property of the rules and world it has defined, the game provokes the feeling that the player has agency. When we look at it like this, we can more clearly see the disconnect between the raw game systems and the experience that the game provides to players. This also highlights the inconsistency with which agency is used to describe different games, because it’s not describing the games themselves, but rather the subjective judgements of players. Different players might come to different conclusions about the sense of exploration or growth that a game provides, but that isn’t inherent to the game’s systems, it’s a reaction to the game’s systems.

To put it another way: My frustration with the use of Agency to describe games is that it isn’t descriptive, it’s a conclusion, but it’s positioned in discourse as if it is talking about the properties of the work itself. This leads people to inconsistent ideas about what constitutes good or bad game design, because they’re trying to judge artistic direction as objective fact.