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Dealing with agency and retcon (in semi sandbox)
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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9067169" data-attributes="member: 6690965"><p>I didn't find the initial post engaging so I feel like I've showed up late, but the last couple pages have gotten away with a conflation that I really don't think is fair or valid. We're once again conflating ludic and narrative agency. [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] put forth several criteria here that I largely agree with except for the final point that leads to that conflation:</p><p></p><p></p><p>It runs through all of these points, but this last one is the biggest place two things are being conflated. Ludic agency, playing a game with meaningful decision points, requires that more than one strategy be possible and that player choice has an impact ultimate success. Narrative agency requires that the scenario yields to player authorship, and the latter is not necessary for the former, and can easily conflict with it.</p><p></p><p>Given too much control of the board state, the creation of the setting and/or situation, you cannot have meaningful ludic tension, because players can define victory conditions thus that they cannot fail to meet them. A known (or at least fixed and discoverable) board state that exists separately from the players allows them to suggest goals informed by it, and then push forward actions to achieve their goals. Agency results from there being more than 1 set of actions that might achieve those goals, and players discriminating between them.</p><p></p><p>Moving one level of agency up, ideally, the game is well enough designed that the choice between those action sets isn't trivial and players have to choose meaningfully between different resource expenditures, potential failure points, overall risk, and in some cases differing degrees of victory.</p><p></p><p>To touch on a more recent thread, the card game War has no agency because the game has no decision points at all. Go Fish has very limited agency because the decision points are essentially random. Trick-taking games have higher agency because of the frequency of decision points, but can devolve into trivial optimization cases, which can lead to effective low agency play. </p><p></p><p>You can rate agency a few different ways in the context of games, looking at the <em>actual</em> decision space for actions available to players consisting of all legal moves, the <em>effective</em> decision space of all moves that can possibly advance the player's victory condition, and the <em>reasonable</em> decision space of all moves that a strategic rationale can be put forward for. High randomness in resolution collapses the space between those categories, lower randomness widens the space between them. "Actual" agency is usually pretty meaningless to evaluate in the context of table games (though more interesting for something like an open-world video game) and "reasonable" agency is particularly hard to evaluate in the context of TTRPGs, where player's victory conditions change over the course of the play and may move in unexpected directions.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 9067169, member: 6690965"] I didn't find the initial post engaging so I feel like I've showed up late, but the last couple pages have gotten away with a conflation that I really don't think is fair or valid. We're once again conflating ludic and narrative agency. [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] put forth several criteria here that I largely agree with except for the final point that leads to that conflation: It runs through all of these points, but this last one is the biggest place two things are being conflated. Ludic agency, playing a game with meaningful decision points, requires that more than one strategy be possible and that player choice has an impact ultimate success. Narrative agency requires that the scenario yields to player authorship, and the latter is not necessary for the former, and can easily conflict with it. Given too much control of the board state, the creation of the setting and/or situation, you cannot have meaningful ludic tension, because players can define victory conditions thus that they cannot fail to meet them. A known (or at least fixed and discoverable) board state that exists separately from the players allows them to suggest goals informed by it, and then push forward actions to achieve their goals. Agency results from there being more than 1 set of actions that might achieve those goals, and players discriminating between them. Moving one level of agency up, ideally, the game is well enough designed that the choice between those action sets isn't trivial and players have to choose meaningfully between different resource expenditures, potential failure points, overall risk, and in some cases differing degrees of victory. To touch on a more recent thread, the card game War has no agency because the game has no decision points at all. Go Fish has very limited agency because the decision points are essentially random. Trick-taking games have higher agency because of the frequency of decision points, but can devolve into trivial optimization cases, which can lead to effective low agency play. You can rate agency a few different ways in the context of games, looking at the [I]actual[/I] decision space for actions available to players consisting of all legal moves, the [I]effective[/I] decision space of all moves that can possibly advance the player's victory condition, and the [I]reasonable[/I] decision space of all moves that a strategic rationale can be put forward for. High randomness in resolution collapses the space between those categories, lower randomness widens the space between them. "Actual" agency is usually pretty meaningless to evaluate in the context of table games (though more interesting for something like an open-world video game) and "reasonable" agency is particularly hard to evaluate in the context of TTRPGs, where player's victory conditions change over the course of the play and may move in unexpected directions. [/QUOTE]
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