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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8141993" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Here is why I haven't engaged in your "real life agency vs gaming agency" compare/contrast (and why I think its fraught and not apt at all):1)  In real life, I have an autonomous nervous system (putting to side the Hard Problem in cognitive/neuroscience for a moment).  I am not blind, deaf, dumb, olfactory-impaired et al.  I navigate the world through (a) 1st order perception, (b) my hard-earned cognitive biases that translate things to me without "myself" even knowing it, and (c) my vigilance to filter out my cognitive biases.In a TTRPGing game with a shared imaginary space, none of (a), (b), or (c) is true as a matter of initial orientation to the fiction and gamestate.  I'm working entirely through a cipher or the lens of a second party (GM).  I'm then having to work through the process of orienting myself to this secondhand perception, sussing out how this cipher/lens has encoded information so I can make it intelligible (to my cognitive framework) and then work through my own (b) and (c) after that process is done.In no way does this resemble the orientation to agency that a person of full sensory capacity in real life (which is the only type I'm acquainted with as, thankfully, I have all of my senses).The way I see it, filling in certain details feels (cognitively and emotionally) infinitely more like the orientation to agency that I have in real life because of precisely what I'm talking about above.  Now I can't do this for the entire game (or even most of it) for all the reasons that we spoke of earlier; this is a game and creating both setting/situation > decision-point > resolution is no longer playing a game; its authorship.2)  Let us allow for a moment that our actual lived lives are agency-deficient (we live in a simulation and/or our decision-trees are overwhelmingly executed upstream of our frontal cortex coming online; that is to say, our life navigation is overwhelmingly rote programming of which we are not a party to).Even if that were/is true, that doesn't remotely mean that we would be/are incapable of postulating what an agency-rich existence might entail and then engineering a means (in this case, systematizing through a game's machinery) to achieve it.[HR][/HR]If you could somehow explain to me how (1) and (2) are wrong-headed, I'll be interested in furthering this corner of the conversation you're pursuing.  As of now, I don't see it.</blockquote>

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