Last night, on the way to the Post Mortem, I got into a discussion with my co-workers about my last post, which led to a discussion about the types of games we like. I, of course, related this all to agency theory, and started looking at things through the perspectives of what types of control (or illusions of control) people enjoy in games. What was great was that, talking in these terms, it was actually pretty easy to classify what we liked in games through this lens, far better than if we were to talk about them in terms of genre, or even other methods that are being researched now. Being able to do that is very exciting. For me anyway.
So, I thought I’d share for you some of the types of agency we hit on, and a few very interesting points about not just classifying games though types of agency, but understanding them. Let’s use Darius as an example. It turns out Darius really likes strategy games and tactical RPGs. When we dug deeper, we started seeing that what he likes in these games is the agency over the improvement of his characters, what I call “improvement agency”, over the long term and in a complex fashion, as well as the short term agency of being given free reign over single battles, and the agency over the difficulty (basically improving his own understanding of the system, and making smarter decisions over time).
This gives us a whole bunch of classifications of agency I hadn’t considered before: simple vs. complex, short vs. long term, and internal vs. external. Any game can have any combination of these in many different types of agency.
Adventure games, for example, tend to have simple short term agency over the narrative, through solving puzzles. A few also have simple long term agency over the narrative, where certain decisions affect later narrative in a small way. Very few will have complex long term narrative agency, where a single decision affects the entire game, but this is rare. More common is the illusion of long term agency, with Deus Ex being the perfect example. Here, it always feels like decisions are affecting long term goals the plot, but, in reality, all of the agency is short term and contained, with a long term illusion over top of it.
Strategy games (especially turn based strategy games) usually focus on giving the player long term agency over the improvement of their units, and short term agency over single battles. In games of strategy like chess, the complex, long term agency of the position of the pieces over time is what’s most engrossing, whereas the short term agency of taking pieces is minimized. In the RTS, however, the long term planning tends to be minimized through races for certain units, and it’s the short term battle to battle agency that’s rewarded.
I could go on, but you get the idea. What’s really cool is that none of these agencies really conflict. You can have short and long term improvement in units in strategy games, just like you can have short and long term affects on a narrative in the same game. You can have improvement agency in a game that focuses on short or long term narrative agency, or in a game that uses only difficulty as its primary system of enjoyment. Additionally, you can have single parts of the game be very short term focused, with the longer, over arching game being more complex. This is how I think game stages work and make certain games more interesting.
That said, not all people like all types of agency, and not all people like having lots of it available. We’re all familiar with the term “freedom paralysis,” something that occurs when there’s just too much available for you to do. Different people have different levels where freedom paralysis occurs, and, even more interestingly, different types of agency that will cause freedom paralysis. For example, some people will look at the giant, open world of Oblivion and basically give up right after the character generation quest. That same person may take a look at all of the options for expansion in a Japanese RPG and eat it up, even though there’s probably more to see and do in those games. For me, side quests in games like Rouge Galaxy gave me freedom paralysis. There was just too much to keep track of and I felt like I had to do it all. But sit me in front of Jak and Daxter or Ratchet and Clank and I’ll get 100% completion.
So, there is no right or wrong type of agency to use, but you should always analyze the audience you’re going to be marketing to, and figure out what types of agency they tend to enjoy, and what types of agency they tend to not enjoy. Additionally, you need to make sure that, for your audience, you’re adding the correct level of agency so that they won’t get overwhelmed (suffer freedom paralysis) or feel the game is too simple. It’s not easy, but it can be done.