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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8161483" data-attributes="member: 16814">Okay, I think I see what you're saying, here, and that's when an obstacle is presented (however) that the player can move his Character to deal with it (I swing my sword at the orc!), or the Situation (the orc doesn't notice Bob crouched behind him and trips over him when he steps back!), or the Setting.  To be honest, I'm not sure how Setting works here -- what does this entail that isn't in the Situation?  To me, it would have to be those things that are the base genre assumptions, or perhaps already established fiction, but we've talked about the retcon and the lack of games that actually instantiate this. I'm not sure I really agree with this, because there's so much overlap.  There's almost never a Situation move that doesn't also move the Character.  And, as I said, I don't follow what a Setting move would even entail that doesn't require a Situation move.  This is why I argue that there's no real use in trying to establish different categories of agency -- at the end of the day all of this boils down to the simple question "was I able to make a meaningful choice and enforce it's consequences?"  I've got a bit more to say on this formulation of agency, but I'll save it for the end.  Your framework here looks like it's trying to split hairs to develop another partially useful framework that ultimately results in more arguments than clarity (sorry for the frankness). To touch on your Protagonism, Tactical, and Strategic ideas, I still find these not coherent with each other.  Protagonism talks to why you do a thing -- who does it serve?  But both Tactical and Strategic point to when or how long a consequence of a choice operates.  "I stab the orc" is pretty tactical -- it's now, solving an immediate problem.  The Strategic problem would be more "what am I doing to eliminate the orc menace from X village?"  It's a long term consequence that shapes multiple scenes or sessions of play.  But, any student of war will tell you that Strategy is Tactics writ large, so this is a scales difference rather than a kind difference -- they're the same thing at different scales.  Protagonism, though is different beast altogether -- it's not concerned with scale, but about what motivates play or what play is about, and saying that I'm going to make play about my character.  This doesn't contrast at all with Tactical or Strategic, but is orthogonal to them.  Having orthogonal categories is not a useful way to organize analysis.  Also, there's a lack of a counterpoint to Protagonism -- what am I doing when I'm not engaged in Protagonism play?  So, yeah, not at all feeling this breakdown, just on the merits of it alone and disregarding my issues with the idea that the breakdown into categories is useful.--So, the formulation of agency I put above, which was "was I able to make a meaningful choice and enforce it's consequences," is meaningfully different from the concept of agency in real life.  The function difference is that real life enforces the consequences, while it's us that choose to enforce the consequences in the fictional world of play.  Nothing else will do so.  I think this difference is a key issue in a lot of the side discussions in this thread, where there are arguments about how those consequences should be enforced.  Particularly, the arguments put forth that consequence enforcement should be as close to real life as possible (ie, the ones talking about finding friends when you look for them being out-of-bounds for what a character could do).  These arguments fundamentally miss that there's no way to emulate the real life enforcement of consequence in a game -- there's only what the players do to enforce these.  The real issue is the privileging of one player with the role to make these determinations rather than sharing it out, at least in certain circumstances.  I think that this is also part of the impetus for the framework you're trying to build above.  I don't think it's very helpful, though, because it also is hiding the fact that it is us, as players, that are enforcing consequences.  I think there's a lot of merit in discussing how that's divided among players, but not in subdividing  agency because that is, at best, a far downstream consideration when looking at agency.EDIT -- although it appears that some of the point I'm making in this last paragraph has come up in the thread while I was replying.  Good.</blockquote>

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