Agency Reconsidered

"Agency Reconsidered" argues that agency in games is not a fixed structural property of a work but an emergent phenomenon arising from the interaction between player and game. Agency occurs when the actions a player desires align with those the underlying computational model permits. Drawing on Janet Murray's notion of meaningful action, Doug Church's concepts of intention and perceivable consequence, and Mateas's framework of formal and material affordances, the authors reframe agency as a balance between what a work evokes in players and what its systems can genuinely support.

A central finding is that the apparent intelligence of a system can mislead as much as it empowers. The authors contend that the Eliza effect, in which players overestimate a system's capabilities, yields only a fleeting illusion of agency. Genuine agency depends on a playable software model of the fictional domain. Steven Dow's research suggests that more realistic, presence-heavy interfaces, such as augmented reality, can diminish agency by raising expectations the system cannot meet. Agency instead emerges through improvisational, experimental engagement, as seen in Sudnow's account of Breakout and in Hocking's analysis of Far Cry 2, rather than through the execution of fixed plans.

The analysis draws its concrete examples chiefly from Façade, SimCity, Far Cry 2, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. The authors show that Far Cry 2 lost richer planning features during development, narrowing the gap between composition and execution, and they caution that player expectations must align with what the model actually supports. Hand-coded illusions of choice, as in Bloodlines, are judged to undermine genuine agency. The scope centers on digital games and interactive narrative systems, with the authors concluding that until computational models for broader play vocabularies mature, agency will remain strongest within well-modeled domains such as movement and combat.