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: 8149093" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yes, these are all game states, but lets examine this 'loss of agency' thing again. Suppose you enter into a dungeon and encounter a wall. This is a game state, right? We both define it as such. This obstacle is attached to a rule "you cannot walk through walls" (probably unstated, but lets call it a 'genre rule'). You can obviously try to argue, exactly analogously to your character mental state argument, that this is an imposition on player agency. But we will both plainly reject this specious argument, won't we? Why is it specious? Because there cannot be agency without the necessity of choice, without some obstacle to choose how to navigate, without some 'terrain' for the characters to operate within, there is no meaning to the term 'agency'. If I say to you "your character is in an infinite void, there is nothing in any direction stretching to infinity" it is plainly obvious that nothing can happen here and 'agency' is a worthless concept! You're not 'losing agency' when someone says "You lust after the Queen" you are simply in a different game state! It isn't any different from that dungeon wall. Again, this is where, in the end, I have to entirely bow to [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]'s argument about agency. Agency as defined as "degrees of freedom of movement within the entirety of the state space of the game fictional state." isn't meaningful. It is only meaningful to talk about agency IN RELATION TO THINGS THE CHARACTER WANTS/NEEDS/DESIRES! Or maybe something closely related to that. I mean, that can be as simple as 'gold coin' (classic D&D). It doesn't have to be.I'm all with you on what tastes you have and being told you lust after the Queen not being one of them, fine. But in the final analysis, its "can we have a story with the elements we desire in it?" that is all that can be the measure of agency when talking about an imaginary world.</blockquote>

Verification