A Meta-Synthesis of Agency in Game Studies: Trends, Troubles, Trajectories

This meta-synthesis examines 59 qualitative and humanistic studies of agency in game studies, arguing that agency in games is plural, contingent, and continually in flux rather than a single, totalizing concept. Its central thesis is that the field has long treated agency as an essential aesthetic experience, following Murray's (1997) framing, while leaving the term itself largely undefined and blurring it with interactivity, freedom, and control. The synthesis contends that much scholarship has treated players as a uniform group and has idealized the degree of choice games actually offer.

The review finds that narrative and design discourses have historically tied agency to white, male, able-bodied, and heterosexual players, while marginalizing characters and nonhuman forms of agency. Case studies such as The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, and Gone Home illustrate how cutscenes and character-driven agency complicate player control. Heavily grounded in BioShock scholarship, which accounts for fifteen of the fifty-nine studies, the synthesis highlights a recurring claim that player agency is often illusory and that such illusions may be disempowering rather than liberating.

The analysis identifies the active-versus-passive binary as a central source of conceptual trouble. Critics of BioShock argue its choices are "forced," while proposals locating "true agency" in fan creativity and collective intervention risk romanticizing active players and reproducing Western assumptions that equate activity with strength and passivity with weakness. The synthesis argues that this binary reinforces hierarchies of race, gender, and ability, a critique increasingly advanced by marginalized scholars.

Drawing on disability studies, Indigenous relationality, and cybernetic and assemblage frameworks, the synthesis concludes that play is simultaneously active and passive. It cautions that celebrations of individual agency can discipline players toward unreflexive obedience, and it proposes understanding agency through plural modalities such as caretaking, subversive performativity, and queer failure. These conclusions are conceptual and theoretical rather than quantitative.