Games and The Significance of Agency

In a book, a film, a play, a painting, a poem— events and actions are represented, described, depicted. Hunters tread through thick snow with their dogs, a woman pours milk into a cup, kingdoms rise and fall, old grizzled men wrestle with a giant fish or seek vengeance on a whale, a ragtag crew of samurai defend a village. And in all this I am a spectator. I can experience these artworks by simply taking them in: looking, listening, reading, watching.

By contrast, in a game I must do something to really experience the game at all. A game cannot be fully experienced without doing something—without taking part in it, playing in accordance with its rules and acting in its world. And if you can fully experience a work of art while doing nothing, then that is not a game. Agency and interactivity are fundamental components of any game. It is hard to overstate the importance of this fact. C. Thi Nguyen has recently argued that game designers work in the medium of agency and investigated the ways they can do so.

The project I’m taking up here is similar in spirit. These essays are going to be meditations on games, on what they can do best, on their limitations, and on their relationship to other media. If the idea of medium specificity and its value wasn’t now so controversial, I would join right In and say that I hope to shed a little light on what is specific to the medium. And maybe I will even defend that idea at some point—but for now I’ll just say I want to talk about what seems distinctive about games as an art form. We can do that whether or not it’s best to think about agency as the medium games are made of and without assuming that we can read off aesthetic properties or rules of an art form from the medium it works in. I think it is undeniable that agency is wildly important, and yes essential, in the experience of games. It is somehow at the core of that experience.

Intuitively, an art form that essentially involves choosing, doing, trying, and striving is better able to explore those aspects of experience than artworks that do not. And, upon reflection, we can see that there are many things we can feel only through doing something. And there are many things we can only know or know best through making choices and acting. I’ll call these mental states that seem to be rooted in agency, ‘agentive feelings’ and ‘agentive knowledge’ respectively. The landscape of agency is vast. If it’s true that games are unique among the artforms in their ability to explore this landscape, then we have a large territory to map out.

Just to give you an idea of what I mean by all this, we’ll glance at a few key aspects of agency that are familiar from everyday life. These aspects of agency are just the sort of things that games are so well positioned to take up and experiment with and harness as an art form.

Let’s start at the beginning: making choices. Choices can be big or small, deeply significant or relatively inconsequential. And life, for better or worse, is full of choices that must be made. What will I eat for lunch on my break, or what to watch on the couch with my spouse when we come home from work (I feel that’s one of the more significant ones), or where will I live, or what kind of job will I have. There are feelings and emotions that go along with the experience of choosing: the feeling of simply making a choice, deliberating between a set of options, even being torn between them, and then forming and holding an intention to do something.

Once a decision is made, then we have to carry the action out. We have to actually do something. We have to really run the whole mile or get to the next page of the book we picked out until we reach the end (or a pretty good place to stop.) And we have to sustain our efforts along the way and we feel a certain way as we do so. We might feel an unwavering resolve and commitment, or might feel fatigue set in and have to fight off the temptation to quit. We might love each moment of the activity itself or we might loathe it. Some actions are enjoyable for their own sake, others not so much.

And that brings us to the purely instrumental feelings that show up when we consider goal oriented actions and projects. We can experience a sense of achievement that comes with reaching a goal, we can have a feeling of failure or frustration when we do not do so. We become confident after repeated success and sometimes hopeless after we fail many times. Then there are the more morally-laden feelings and attitudes that emerge as we reflect on our choices and what those might say about our character: pride and guilt and shame.

There are special kinds of knowledge and abilities that we can acquire only through doing something ourself— through trying, failing, succeeding— maybe through long hours or even years of practice . Philosophers have talked for many years and in many different vocabularies about certain types of agentive knowledge— craft, know-how, phronesis, and competence or mastery of a skill. Each of these are rooted in action, practice, and performance— and are salient and easy enough to spot.

There are types of agentive knowledge so basic they are hard to notice. we come to know our way around our part of the world in large part by making our way around it. We live and act and work in a place. And once we know a place very well, like our hometown, emotions based in our knowledge of that place start to show up. There’s a certain comfort and familiarity and ease as we navigate around the place. There’s a feeling of unfamiliarity and a sense that we are entering unknown territory once we reach the limits of our knowledge— these can come along with a feeling of dread or a spirit of adventure depending on how threatening the new world seems. If you’ve ever left the house to go on a trip to a new place, as exciting as that is, you probably remember how it feels to come home. As you pull up the driveway or walk in the door, everything feels familiar again— a kind of relief washes over you.

Some of the things that surround us come to take on a special kind of practical significance: we understand and relate to them as things we want or need or can use to get what we want. We see them as having a certain purpose relative to our goals and desires. And we almost unthinkingly and effortlessly make use of a number of tools to do a lot of different things each day.

And then there is the social aspect of action: when we act, we either act alone or with others. So we might feel a profound sense of solitude as we take on a daunting project all on our own or a quiet contentment as we work away in our own little corner. Or we act alongside others. We might be co-operating or we might be in conflict. Co-operation brings with it many feelings and attitudes— gratitude, trust, and reliance. Competition does the same: conflict, resentment, and wariness.

That was a snapshot of agency in everyday life. These and other phenomena can be transposed into a game. Different games focus on different aspects of agency in order to offer us radically different experiences. This is the space that games can explore in ways that other media cannot. This is where designers are continually exploring. And this is the space that I aim to map out as well as I can in the essays here.

[I’m going to post quite a few brief essays on games— on their unique aesthetic possibilities and limitations. This first post is an introduction to the ongoing project. I hope someone finds something here helpful. I’ll go ahead and say that a few writers in particular have inspired my thinking on this subject: Bernard Suits, Jesper Juul, and C. Thi Nguyen. I cannot recommend their work enough. ]