Player Agency

Die neuen Medien haben den Rezipienten von Erzählungen endgültig aus einer spezifischen Beschränkung früherer Medien befreit: Statt eine Reihe von Ereignissen als das Ergebnis eines in der Vergangenheit stattgefundenen Auswahlprozesses präsentiert zu bekommen, kann man als Rezipient interaktiver Medien, wie z.B. dem Computerspiel, grundsätzlich selbst an der Auswahl von Ereignissen teilnehmen. Dies muss als eine fundamental neue Art des Erzählens angesehen werden, eine Art, die faszinierende Möglichkeiten, aber auch strukturelle Probleme mit sich bringt. Von zentralem Interesse ist dabei bisher die Frage gewesen, ob die interaktive Komponente dazu führt, dass Computerspiele allgemein als eine (in sich geschlossene) neue Erzählgattung zu verstehen sind, die sich in wesentlichen Punkten von anderen Erzählgattungen unterscheidet, oder ob sich Erzählung nur als Fremdkörper in einem neuen, grundsätzlich nicht-narrativen Medium wiederfindet. Im Gegensatz zu solchen strikt dichotomischen Ansätzen versucht dieser Essay, ein stärker differenziertes Bild zu zeichnen, indem er fundamentale Unterschiede in der Konzeptionierung von Erzählung innerhalb einer Reihe von möglichen Untergattungen des Computerspiels verortet, anstatt die Gattungsgrenzen mit den technisch-medialen Grenzen gleichzusetzen.

Videogames are evolving as a medium, so in order to reach all kinds of audiences, games with very different types of gameplay and metaphors are being made. One of this new type of titles are disempowering fantasies, in which the player experiences a metaphor that has as an objective to make him/her feel weak or vulnerable. In order to understand this new phenomenon, we will analyze Darkest Dungeon (Red Hook, 2016), a game that uses the empathy that the player has for his characters to create a powerful experience that resonates with the players.

In this long critical reflection, I review the videogame Bioshock and engage with the academic discourse surrounding it.  As a literary artefact, Bioshock uses its ludic medium to engage with and eventually deconstruct notions of freedom, agency, coercion and control in a presently unmatched way.  The game has already received a great deal of critical attention, though some of it seems to miss the 'point.'  Must gamers only ever interpret the mechanical rules of the game, or can designers allow for purely narrative/aesthetic choices?  Bioshock is an important milestone in the history of videogames as an artistic medium and deserves the attention it is paid.

Agency has long been considered one of the core pleasures of interacting with digital games. Recent treatments of agency in games culture and game design have grown increasingly concerned with providing the player with limitless freedom to act. While this describes one form of pleasure, in narratively focused games it has the unfortunate consequence of pitting the agency of the player against the will of the designer. We contend that for narrative games it is valuable to refocus our definitions of agency on the notion of meaning, and propose a treatment of agency that emphasises communicative commitments. This form of agency draws on ideas from speech act theory, and relies on a degree of ‘communicative competence’ on the part of both the game designer and player in order to function. We discuss mechanisms for training players in the necessary literacies needed to commit to meanings in games, and provide an example analysis of a game that successfully accomplishes this task.

The paper explores several areas of game design which either stem or are closely connected to player agency. After a brief explanation of how player agency is different from the philosophical concept of agency, chapter one delves into problems directly resulting from player agency such as Heads-Up-Display immersion and flow from the perspective of the consumer. Chapter two analyses several cases in which game design was changed in order to accomodate for player agency and, in turn, how it can be used to encourage certain behaviours from the perspective of game designers. In the final chapter contained is a number of cases in which game systems bleed over to reality, e.g. in marketing campaigns. Some of them are positive, and others exploitative.

The purpose of the article is to show how video games can make their players feel, think, and reflect on their own actions and choices. Due to its participatory nature, a video game narrative evokes a personalised emotional response in the player, of a kind unprecedented in fiction. In the instant of Telltale’s fictional post-apocalypse The Walking Dead this personal emotional response primarily manifests itself in the feelings of discomfort and personal responsibility.

Player  representation within the  videogame is  one of the  main topics  in Game  Studies. Although the term  “avatar” is  commonly  used,  its meaning  is not  clearly  defined  and therefore  can be  misleading. In this  paper,  a new  and more  detailed  concept  is proposed: the  “avatarness”,  or the  different formal  factors  of this  representation, whether they are linked to a virtual subject or not. At the same time,  a theoretical model for its analysis that breaks down all of these factors and a way of describing them in a functional, measurable and comparable manner is presented.  In addition, the notion of “avatarization” is discussed as the process of converting an existing  fictional character into  a functional and  fictional representation of the player. 
To illustrate said model of avatarness, the case of Batman is studied through three games featuring the character: Batman (Ocean, 1986), the first work based on it, Batman (Sunsoft, 1990), published for the Nintendo Entertainment System and  base don the film by Tim Burton and Batman: Arkham City (Rocksteady, 2011), a work that has been defined as the best playable adaptation of the Dark Knight. Each  one  represents a different design approach and help  establish a first step towards the study of functional avatarization in transmedia products.

This paper examines the concept of agency within games and proposes a shift from the notion of agency as representing choice or freedom to one of agency as representing commitment to meaning. This conception of agency is aimed at understanding the pleasures of engaging with narratively rich games, and helps to address the tension between player choice and authorial intent. We draw on what speech act theory says about how trust, meaning and communication are achieved in human conversation, applying these notions to interactive storytelling. This new perspective on agency provides us with a better analytical tool for understanding the relationship between interaction and narrative pleasure, and provides a useful metric for designers of story-rich games.