An examination of player agency

[pemerton]

I assume for purposes of this discussion you're ignoring token play?

No. I was replying to a question about BW, and replied about BW, but accidentally typed D&D instead.

 

[pemerton]

I would posit that the ability to create and achieve previously unknown goals through play are a way that player agency can be increased.

I don't know how much work "previously" is doing in your post. If it's meant to be doing a lot of work, then I don't think what you say is at odds with the OP - as in, if the goal was previously unknown, but now as we try to attain it is known, that isn't an example of an unknown goal.

A loose analogue might be making decisions about which cards to hold or play in Uno, and having to adapt in real time to plays from other players that reverse the direction of play (and hence change when you have to play and who you are playing to).

 

[pemerton]

Did you not mean to say "D&D" in your post?

No I did not. It was an error. I was replying to a question about BW.

 

[Argyle King]

I don't know how much work "previously" is doing in your post. If it's meant to be doing a lot of work, then I don't think what you say is at odds with the OP - as in, if the goal was previously unknown, but now as we try to attain it is known, that isn't an example of an unknown goal.

A loose analogue might be making decisions about which cards to hold or play in Uno, and having to adapt in real time to plays from other players that reverse the direction of play (and hence change when you have to play and who you are playing to).

I am asking questions to better understand the presented point of view.

Does it matter if neither the referee nor the game tell the player the specifics of how the goal is measurably achieved?

Does it matter if the nature (and value) of the reward granted for achieving a goal is unknown to the player?

 

[Argyle King]

Reading through the OP a second time, I think that I somewhat agree with the end point and maybe the overall idea that is being presented.

I'm just not sure that I fully follow the path taken to get there.

Edit: I agree with being wary of opaque processes. A while back, I had a discussion with someone about how a particular DM turned me off of Eberron due to his excessive use of Changelings. At any moment, any NPC could turn out to have secretly been the BBEG in disguise. There was never any way to determine if the party was making progress.

From that perspective, I better understand (I think) how unknown goals remove agency. But, in the Eberron game, the players knew what the goal of the campaign was. There was simply no way to know if any actions taken by the players were in any way getting party closer to achieving the goal.

 

[pemerton]

But what about RPG's that don't have complete predefined rules and processes for play? I agree these games don't have the bridge like control over outcome you claim is needed for bridge like agency. The players in these games cannot force things like in bridge based simply on the game rules and procedures alone, because some of the rules and procedures call for a large amount individual judgement layered on top of them. And yet, while the individual judgements are never written and the procedures used to make those judgement are never set in concrete, players do intuitively learn to leverage such judgmental systems to help achieve their goals. Now the results are not guaranteed like in bridge, but they are there and tangible and there's a world of difference in how well a 'good player' will achieve their goals and how well a 'bad player' will in such games.

To me, you seem to have answered your own question - if the rules (or procedures, processes, heuristics, etc) are able to be learned by the players, and then leveraged by them to exert control over how play unfolds, we have agency. My understanding is that this is the actual trajectory that occurred among those playing with Arneson and Gygax in the early to mid-1970s

 

[zakael19]

It could be that I'm simply not fully understanding the concept.

I understand the concept that you would be receiving XP for an achievement (goal) that was unknown beforehand.

I'm not following how that occurrence means that a player has less player agency. I don't perceive receiving an award that you didn't know existed as being much different from opening a treasure chest and finding a magic item that was not known to be there. How does not knowing about an award remove control over the actions taken that lead to the award?

I'm not sure if this quite aligns with what @pemerton meant, but my immediate contrast in my head is between a) OSR style play that re-centers "treasure = XP" in a very classic way as a goal of play vs b) plotted narrative adventure time where the GM is using milestone xp. In the former, the players know that finding treasure means they advance, so they can use the mechanics of the game to find places where treasure exists, try their best to get it out, and prosper.

In b), the players have no choice but to follow along with the GM's plot dangles if they want to get anywhere. What leads to advancement? Who knows! The GM may have stuff written down somewhere, or like when I ran Curse of Strahd that way it was like "when they finish X marker, give them a level."

I think in the second option, player agency is rather curtailed in the aim of "providing a narratively interesting progression" and "hitting plot beats without having to rebalance encounters" or whatever

 

[chaochou]

My contention is that if a player's choice always produce the desired outcome, then they functionally haven't expressed any agency in making a choice.

I don't agree. I've just created a game - you're given a piece of paper and a pen and you have to draw three dots and then connect them by lines without the lines crossing each other.

You might manage to get three dots in an exactly straight line and so deliberately fail.

But anyone who chooses to can happily draw triangles. You posit that people drawing triangles are not manifesting any agency in the play of the game. I disagree - they know the rules and they know the goal, and are playing. They are not lacking in agency. I can see their agency manifest through a triangle drawn on a piece of paper in accordance with the rules of the game.

Now it could be that, over time, individuals started to realise that they like the look of specific triangles or combinations of them, and try to produce those exclusively. That would constitute an update to their goals of the game to draw a much more tightly defined set of triangles - which might be considerably more difficult to draw by hand. Something one could get wrong.

I would regard the agency in both games to be the same, although the skill requirement in the second to be much higher than the first.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not sure if this quite aligns with what @pemerton meant

Yep, that's an example of the sort of thing I had in mind.

 

[chaochou]

But some RPGing is undertaken in a way that doesn't permit this: I can exercise my authority as a player - say, to describe what actions my PC is taking - but that exercise of authority doesn't then have any impact on how the GM is able to use their authority. Or in other words, the GM can do more or less whatever they like with their move, regardless of what move I make as a player.

I regard the sort of RPGing described in the previous paragraph as very low agency. I also think that it's rather common.

My reason for mentioning Gygax in particular is not to connect agency to skill, but rather to point out that he does not advocate for the sort of low-agency play I've described. Rather, he is envisaging a rather intricate way of setting up the game, which means that the players do have the capacity, via their moves, to control or at least guide the GM's moves. And this is what makes "successful adventures" (Gygax's term) possible.

Hi @pemerton

Thanks for clarifying. Yes, I had misunderstood the direction of your previous post! And largely I agree with what you say.

So I think what you're describing is fleshing out what, in my formulation, is called the reliability of the rules. Or, more fully, the reliability of the rules to achieve your known goals.

I would describe the situation you present like this. The 'world' in an rpg is simply an imagined boardstate. It is a common feature of many rpgs that the only participant who is allowed to change the 'world' (ie the boardstate) is the GM. It is therefore self evident that any goals requiring a change in 'the world' can only be done by the GM - and so only the GM has agency to achieve them.

What happens in practice is that the sometimes the GM changes the boardstate in accordance with my wishes and then claims I exerted the agency. This is the heart of illusionism. Part of the same illusion is GMs who declare the boardstate independent of them, autonomous, with it's own causal and motive power. It's alive on its own. Utter nonsense when examined, and yet repeated again and again on these boards with complete seriousness. And the reason is to give GMs a fig leaf to pretend it isn't their agency changing the board.

Earlier, another poster asked why debates about agency are so frequent. My answer is because the predominant rpg playstyle is to give the GM all the agency, while denying that this is the case.

I played AD&D with friends (but no GM) and used the random dungeon generator and random encounter tables by dungeon level, random treasure tables. The game worked totally fine. We had reliable processes to generate what we needed. We could assess our ammo, spells, hit points and make judgements whether to move forward another room based on what we might encounter and what we might gain. All a GM would have done in this game is introduce unreliability into all these processes and overwritten our agency with their own!