Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8141837" data-attributes="member: 82106">My feeling is that the scale of decisions doesn't really bear on the question of agency, much. So I align with [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER], and I think [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] in terms of putting the axis of agency primarily on which areas of game process the players are able to participate. If their input is strictly limited to whatever their characters could do, then that is not agency over the content or direction of play. At best in such a situation the player can indirectly influence the game by way of urging the GM to present certain types of material, and the GM could potentially oblige with a process similar to the old game show where you pick different curtains to see what is behind, and the GM obliges the players by having choices they want be in the mix. Frankly, I think players NORMALLY, in a practical sense, except in dysfunctional games, have a significant influence on granularity. However if the GM keeps refocusing on a specific level, either by only hitting certain specific 'interesting' points, or by constantly focusing down on or promoting a focus on minute details, that will tend to undermine that as well. So it requires the whole table to be in cahoots on what is interesting. Not a surprising observation of course! The point being, one or a different level of detail is entirely orthogonal to amount of agency. Now, if you want to keep a segregation between 'in character' and other forms of player participation, I could see designing a game where the two processes happen in distinct phases. I don't know of a game which works this way, but they may, and certainly could, exist. I think that goes beyond what we're doing in this thread. Maybe we can have a think about that sometime. I like game design discussions, though most of them usually seem stuck in 1980's notions of game structure!</blockquote>

Verification