Procedural Content Generation, Player Agency, and Playfulness in Survival-Crafting Game Astroneer

This paper examines how the design of survival-crafting games shapes player agency, using the procedurally generated voxel-based game Astroneer as a case study. Its central aim is to identify the dimensions in which such games enable agency to manifest, a question the author argues has received little attention compared with survival-horror games. The work is situated within a larger project on agency across avatar-based genres and draws on scholarship that treats player action as an affordance of game design and agency as a multidimensional possibility space for avatar action.

The author proposes a framework that conceptualises agency along four analytical lenses: agency as afforded in space, in time, in the degree to which the avatar and virtual world can be tailored to player preference, and in the development of a story. Procedural content generation is positioned as a long-established design method, valued for being less resource-intensive than handcrafting, but one whose aesthetic and agency implications have been only briefly addressed in computer science and game studies research. The study pairs this framework with textual analysis of the game, combining autoethnographic play with the examination of YouTube playthroughs and online wikis to map the game's possibility space as exhaustively as possible.

The principal finding is that Astroneer, which draws on both the procedurally generated dungeon tradition and the sandbox model of Minecraft, affords greater player freedom in some of the four dimensions but not all of them. This design encourages free, experimental and creative play, which the author characterises as paidic in Caillois's terms and links to the broader notion of playfulness. The analysis is qualitative and interpretive, based on a single title and the author's own play rather than on player surveys or larger samples, so its conclusions are offered as an analytical account of the game's design affordances rather than as generalisable empirical claims about player behaviour.