Second Playthrough
Design Concepts

Player agency

In short The player's sense that their own choices are what change the game.

Player agency is the player's sense that their choices are their own and that those choices visibly change what happens. It is not the same as the number of options on offer: a game can present many choices that lead nowhere, or a few that carry real weight. Agency depends on the player being able to form an intention, act on it, and see the world respond in a way that matches what they meant to do. It is therefore partly a property of the system and partly an experience in the player. Designers create it by making consequences legible; they undermine it when outcomes ignore what the player did, or contradict it without explanation.

Not to be confused with

  • Interactivity

    Interactivity means the work responds to input at all; agency means the player recognizes the response as the consequence of a choice they meant to make.

  • Sandbox

    A sandbox removes fixed goals and opens up a space; it often produces strong agency, but agency can be just as strong on a narrow, linear path.

  • Immersive sim

    An immersive sim is a genre built to maximize agency through overlapping systems; agency itself is an experience that any genre can offer or withhold.

Where the game lives

  • rules
  • goals
  • feedback
  • uncertainty
  • choice
  • play

Agency rests on choice and on feedback that answers it, inside rules consistent enough to be read. Goals are optional; a player can feel entirely in control in a world that asks nothing of them.

used dropped · What the six structures are

Examples

  • Deus ExIon Storm, 2000

    Most objectives can be reached through combat, stealth, hacking or conversation, and the world registers which route the player took.

  • The Stanley ParableGalactic Cafe, 2013

    A narrator who anticipates the player's every move makes the limits of agency the game's subject.

  • FaçadeMichael Mateas and Andrew Stern, 2005

    An interactive drama in which typed conversation steers a couple's argument, an early attempt at narrative agency of the kind Murray described.

In the essays

The Game in All of These

Where the game lives

Six structures—rules, goals, feedback, uncertainty, choice, play—map any game-like thing; the missing ones explain why it does or doesn’t feel like a game.

8 min read

Sources

  1. BookJanet H. Murray. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Free Press, 1997. Introduces agency as "the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices." Reading list
  2. PaperNoah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas, Steven Dow and Serdar Sali. Agency Reconsidered. Proceedings of DiGRA 2009: Breaking New Ground, 2009.
  3. BookKatie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, 2003. Discusses meaningful play as the relationship between player action and discernible, integrated outcome. Reading list