Agency Theory
If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been obsessed with Agency lately. On a 2 hour drive back from Charlottesville one day, I took all of these posts to their inevitable conclusion, and concluded a discussion that I’d had with Darius during VGXPO. During this conversation, I’d told Darius that a game is just rules. That’s its fundamental building block. I, however, used a misplaced quote from Pirates of the Caribbean, where Jack Sparrow talks about what a ship “really is.” I said that rules are what a game is. I was wrong. Just like a ship is made of wood, a game is make of rules. But what a ship is, what it really is, is freedom. What a game is, what it really is, and what makes it enjoyable, and the reason that we seek it out, is agency.
Let me reiterate that, in block quote because it is going to be the cornerstone of a lot of writing from me in the future.
Games are Agency.
This is how I see it. Game developers always try to talk about what makes games unique. When we do, we talk center discussions on the concept of interactivity. Interactivity, we say, makes game unique from other media, and that should be where games make their mark. However, I think that by focusing on interactivity, we’ve lost the key part of the puzzle. What’s more important than interactivity is how relates to agency.
Let’s take play as an example. Unstructured play tends to be highly interactive. Running around the playground is interactive and fun, but how much more fun is it when a mechanic and semiotics is imparted? When a person, say, becomes “it”, and is now “the terror of the playground,” the instated mechanics instantly creates what many game theorists refer to as “a magic circle.” These mechanics magically created a game, and, in many cases, the “fun factor” instantly jumped. So, what happened? Why is Tag, more fun than random running around? My opinion (and the center of this theory) is that the addition of that magic circle, the mechanics, and the semiotics made each interaction more meaningful. Players are now able to meaningfully change the things within the magic circle. Salen and Zimmerman called this “meaningful play,” and even said in their definition of games that games create a space where “meaning emerges,” but, to me, it sounds like the definition of agency: the ”satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices”
Agency, the ability to meaningfully manipulate the magic circle of a game, is what makes games enjoyable and unique. And it is not isolated to digital and non-digital games, story based games, or puzzle games. So far as I can tell, a feeling of agency is key to all games.
Interestingly, I argue in my thesis very heavily for something Janet Murray proposes in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck: agency for it’s “own sake.” Although Murray believes that there are very few examples of people enjoying agency on its own terms (and I believed it as well), I now believe that it has existed for a very long time in the space of games. That this is why games exist: to impart our own ability to manipulate things meaningfully.
There is one thing to add here. Note I say “games are agency” and not “fun is agency,” because the latter is simply not true. Fun can exist where agency doesn’t and, in my opinion, and it looks like others are starting to believe it as well, agency can exist where fun does not.
I think the most interesting thing about this theory is that it opens up a lot of discussion on why certain features work in games and others don’t, and why we frequently see the same patterns in games. In my belief, there is probably a way to relate a lot of this back to agency, and I’ll be expanding on this over the next few months. If you have any comments for me, I’d love to hear them.
