D&D General What is player agency to you?

[pemerton]

Some posters in this thread seem to be equating getting what one wants (preference satisfaction) with exercising agency (making choices and thereby bringing about change, by imposing one's will).

In social explanation, it's not uncommon to distinguish these things.

 

[FrogReaver]

Capacity can be a matter of degree. Both the capacity of buckets, and the capacity to bring about change.

You’ve brought buckets up a few times so let’s continue with that analogy.

Bucket A has a 10 gallon capacity
Bucket B has a 15 gallon capacity

I ask if bucket A has the capacity to hold the contents of a 1 gallon milk jug. Your answer is yes. I ask if bucket b has the capacity to hold the contents of a 1 gallon milk jug. You answer yes!

The definition asks whether a person has the capacity for X. That’s the way I’m using it (as shown above) and not the way you are.

 

[pemerton]

You’ve brought buckets up a few times so let’s continue with that analogy.

Bucket A has a 10 gallon capacity
Bucket B has a 15 gallon capacity

I ask if bucket A has the capacity to hold the contents of a 1 gallon milk jug. Your answer is yes. I ask if bucket b has the capacity to hold the contents of a 1 gallon milk jug. You answer yes!

The definition asks whether a person has the capacity for X. That’s the way I’m using it (as shown above) and not the way you are.

The parallel in the context of agency would be asking: do both people have the capacity to choose what they wear? What they eat for breakfast? Where they work? How they allocate their time at work?

And then we can aggregate these individual domains of agency and consider what sorts of social positions and social roles permit more or less agency. This is an actual thing that actual social scientists do.

We can also pull back from particular contexts, and aggregation, to make holistic assessments of agency that are enjoyed by those who hold different social roles. For instance, everything else being equal adults enjoy more agency over their lives than children.

Likewise in RPGing. No one in this thread is disputing that RPG participants lack agency per se (to count as a participant must mean that some agency is being exercised). But we can look at different ways the play of a RPG can structure participants' actions, and judge which of these ways permit more or less agency.

For instance, what capacity does a participant enjoy to frame scenes, or contribute to their framing? Establish what is at stake in a scene? Contribute elements to the content of "what happens next"?

I don't think these are particularly arcane questions.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What about the other examples then, if that one bothers you too much? Those were true agency on both sides.

As long as the criticism is granted...but it sounds, below, like it's not.

Cool. You like chocolate ice cream.

If this was supposed to have a point, I'm not getting it.

This is just word salad, since agency is subjective.


Here, let me help- "I want to fall in love for real. Except, I want it to be actual love, not just my own subjective feelings of love. Because actual love is more love than what I am feeling at the time."

Except that that's not at all what's being said.

"I want to have a loving relationship, except that I want it to be actually a loving relationship, and not simply someone faking expressions of love and care so they can get something from me." It's a reciprocity, not just a feeling in my head. The feeling in my head is an extremely important part. The status-in-the-world--that the feelings are sincere and reciprocated--is equally important. Without both things, it fails. Without me actually feeling love for another, it would be pointless. Without the feelings being reciprocated, it would be false and hollow--and would hurt to find out after a long period of believing it was true.

Feeling love and that I am loved is, absolutely, unquestionably critical. Actually being loved--and loving in return--is equally critical. They are individually necessary and jointly sufficient.

What you are subjectively feeling as agency ... is the agency.

No. It's not. It's not actually having any influence or control. Believing you have influence or control does not mean you actually do have such influence or control.

Now, tell me how to objectively measure agency. Instead of continuing to ASSERT that one thing has "MOAR AGENCY" explain to me, as if I was a slightly dumb golden retriever, how we objectively determine the difference in agency such that we can measure it.

Did you make choices which actually did influence (or even control) the state of play, outside and separate from the fiat declarations of anyone else?

If yes, you had agency (influence-and/or-control) over those things. If no, you did not. That's Maxperson's binary. Since this can occur both in many different events, and in many different forms, however, it is possible to have "more" or "less" of it in the macro aggregate, even though it is at the micro scale a binary. "Events" would, for example, be the difference between getting to choose what class, race, background, etc. you play, vs getting to declare what adventures are worth having (rather than pick from a list provided to you, or submit adventures for approval and processing.) "Forms," by contrast, would be things like having influence or control over fundamentally different kinds of things, for example agency (influence-and/or-control) over the personal actions, attitudes, and priorities of your character (my understanding of the term "character agency"); agency (influence-and/or-control) over the goal(s) and parameters of the gameplay (my understanding of the term "player agency"); agency (influence-and/or-control) over whether, and how, the game features themes of sex, abuse, or mind control (what I would call "content agency," addressed with tools before play like "lines" and "veils," and tools in-play like the X-card and O-card); and possibly others.

Games which offer more events of agency (influence-and/or-control) over something are preferable, to me, to those which offer fewer. Conversely, those which primarily falsely present situations as offering me agency (influence-and/or-control) over something are completely unacceptable, to the point of actively raising my ire, should I discover this is the case. I don't like being deceived, and doubly so with something like this where such deception is literally never required.

I consider it charitable to assume that a given table will, sincerely and not falsely, offer as many events of agency (influence-and/or-control) as feasible, with a generous definition of "feasible." And, as seems relatively(?) uncontroversial, both a "(neo?)trad" game and a "narrative" game will offer all the same events of agency (influence-and/or-control) of the form(s) compatible with the former's design. However, per other posters in this thread, the form often referred to here as "player agency" (which, again, I understand to be influence-and/or-control over the goals and parameters of play) is not only absent, but desirably absent from such "(neo?)trad" gaming. These other posters are in fact gratified by the fact that events of the player-agency (influence-and/or-control) form are not present--ever, if possible.

Hence, "narrative" games offer all the same character agency (influence-and/or-control over) events as "(neo?)trad" games, but they also offer a further, additional set of events of player agency (influence-and/or-control.) What other term should be used, then, but to say that the former offers more agency (influence-and/or-control) than the latter--both in terms of individual events (since player-agency, influence-and/or-control, events can occur in the former but not the latter) and in terms of general forms (since the payer-agency, influence-and/or-control, form is present in the former but not in the latter.)

This is not, at all, to say that it is universally better to offer more forms of agency (influence-and/or-control) than fewer, nor that it is universally better to offer more agency (influence-and/or-control) events than to offer fewer. I enjoy FFXIV, for example, which has essentially no player-agency (influence-and/or-control) at all, and sharply limited character-agency (influence-and/or-control).

Nope, I think you missed the point. Here, I'll illustrate again.

I was completely in love with that person. It was the strongest I ever felt about anyone. Later, I found out that the person was lying to me. I feel terrible now.

Was the person not in love then?

They felt love. But they weren't in a loving relationship. They simply--mistakenly--believed that they were. And that is what is actually analogous here. It's why your example player felt betrayed when they realized that their feeling of agency (influence-and/or-control) did not actually correspond to the reality of the situation. Why it stripped their past experiences of value when they learned that nothing they chose actually had any influence upon or control over the results; those results were always spindled, folded, or mutilated into being whatever the GM wanted them to be. They just were very good at faking the appearance of such influence-and/or-control.

Just as, sadly, many people IRL are very good at faking expressions of love--and thus there are quite a few one-sided relationships, where one person is using another. A person doesn't feel betrayed because they have a crush and then, later on, realize that that was just infatuation and not actually love. People absolutely do feel betrayed when they expressed love and thought someone reciprocated it, only to later find that that reciprocation was false. They still felt the love they felt for someone else--but the relationship was not there, even though they (at the time) believed it was.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

You’ve brought buckets up a few times so let’s continue with that analogy.

Bucket A has a 10 gallon capacity
Bucket B has a 15 gallon capacity

I ask if bucket A has the capacity to hold the contents of a 1 gallon milk jug. Your answer is yes. I ask if bucket b has the capacity to hold the contents of a 1 gallon milk jug. You answer yes!

The definition asks whether a person has the capacity for X. That’s the way I’m using it (as shown above) and not the way you are.

Frogreaver-

The conversation literally doesn't matter. Look, this is nothing more than hobbyists trying to elevate their playing preferences by borrowing terms from other fields.

There are people who have taken a serious look at this. For example, there have been empirical studies looking at how players negotiate these power structures in RPGs; these usually divide into two concepts, agency and authority.

For agency, you don't see the term "player agency," but instead would often see "character agency" (what a character is capable of) and "participant agency" (if a character's action have the desired effect of the player).

What is happening is that people are deliberately co-mingling the types of agency and the types of authority that are available. Agency is viewed as how the game participants should negotiate inputs into the game, while authority is how participants resolve the disputes. So arguing that people have agency because there is a different method of distributing authority ... well, that's not how it's being done. But that would require people to actually be interested in what academics are looking at, as opposed to putting a pseudo-academic sheen on their personal preferences.

So if people really wanted to be bothered to have a real conversation about this, as opposed to another version of ¿Quien Es Mas Macho?, they might actually look at what .... um ... actual sociologists have written about this, as opposed to continue the usual hobbyist debates.

But they aren't.

If this was supposed to have a point, I'm not getting it.

I've noticed. One more try.

Except that that's not at all what's being said.

"I want to have a loving relationship, except that I want it to be actually a loving relationship, and not simply someone faking expressions of love and care so they can get something from me." It's a reciprocity, not just a feeling in my head. The feeling in my head is an extremely important part. The status-in-the-world--that the feelings are sincere and reciprocated--is equally important. Without both things, it fails. Without me actually feeling love for another, it would be pointless. Without the feelings being reciprocated, it would be false and hollow--and would hurt to find out after a long period of believing it was true.

Feeling love and that I am loved is, absolutely, unquestionably critical. Actually being loved--and loving in return--is equally critical. They are individually necessary and jointly sufficient.

Except that's not how it works. You never can truly peer into the other person's head. Your feelings are just that- subjective. What, you can tell me how many kilo-luvums you feel, and compare that to someone else's love?

Or, put another way, let's say the person was lying to you, but you broke up before you found out, and then the two of you moved on. And you never found out. Same love, right? Same subjective feeling.

You keep trying to assert that there is some objective measurement, so I will return to the original point that you don't understand. If you are correct, then make it simple for the dummy that I am. Explain to me, using concrete numbers, how you have measured the player agency in various games, and how one game has MORE than another. If you cannot, then we can effectively end the conversation. Good?

 

[FrogReaver]

The parallel in the context of agency would be asking: do both people have the capacity to choose what they wear? What they eat for breakfast? Where they work? How they allocate their time at work?

If any one of those things is true it demonstrates both people have the capacity to make choices and affect change. Do you agree?

I’ll try to answer more in depth later. Will reply a bit sporadically for now.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've noticed. One more try.



Except that's not how it works. You never can truly peer into the other person's head. Your feelings are just that- subjective. What, you can tell me how many kilo-luvums you feel, and compare that to someone else's love?

Just because I can't peer into their head doesn't mean that whether the feelings are really there or not is pointless.

All this talk of "kilo-luvums" is the actual word salad here. There is no such thing. It's a non-sequitur, completely irrelevant.

Or, put another way, let's say the person was lying to you, but you broke up before you found out, and then the two of you moved on. And you never found out. Same love, right? Same subjective feeling.

Same subjective feeling. Not the same love. For exactly the same reason that any lie, never actually discovered, remains a lie.

There is no measurable unit of truth. There is no such thing as a kilo-truthum. And yet we absolutely recognize that one account can have more truth in it than another. How can this be, if truth is not a measurable quantity?

You keep trying to assert that there is some objective measurement,

No. I don't assert a measurement, because there is nothing to measure. That's a non-sequitur you keep inserting in here, completely irrelevant to the conversation. Literally no one here is talking about "measuring" anything--except you.

so I will return to the original point that you don't understand. If you are correct, then make it simple for the dummy that I am. Explain to me, using concrete numbers, how you have measured the player agency in various games, and how one game has MORE than another. If you cannot, then we can effectively end the conversation. Good?

I cannot explain a thing that I am not even claiming to do, let alone not doing.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

No. I don't assert a measurement, because there is nothing to measure. That's a non-sequitur you keep inserting in here, completely irrelevant to the conversation. Literally no one here is talking about "measuring" anything--except you.

Great!

So if you can't measure it, if (as you now completely agree) there is .... and I will quote you and bold it with regard to player agency, "nothing to measure,"

Then how can you say that one thing has more player agency than another thing?

Because "more" is a comparative (as opposed to a superlative). You understand that, right?

So let's use the two easy examples-
1. The Porsche is more expensive than the Ford.
2. Reading a book is more interesting than this conversation.

The first statement is something that is true, because expense can be measured. Cost is an objective measurement.
The second statement is a subjective preference, and has no more value than saying, "I like chocolate ice cream more than butter pecan."

Since we agree that there is nothing to measure, we can then agree that all of these statements about certain playing styles having more player agency than other playing styles is just using jargon to assert subjective preferences.

Finally!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Great!

So if you can't measure it, if (as you now completely agree) there is .... and I will quote you and bold it with regard to player agency, "nothing to measure,"

Then how can you say that one thing has more player agency than another thing?

Because "more" is a comparative (as opposed to a superlative). You understand that, right?

So let's use the two easy examples-
1. The Porsche is more expensive than the Ford.
2. Reading a book is more interesting than this conversation.

The first statement is something that is true, because expense can be measured. Cost is an objective measurement.
The second statement is a subjective preference, and has no more value than saying, "I like chocolate ice cream more than butter pecan."

Since we agree that there is nothing to measure, we can then agree that all of these statements about certain playing styles having more player agency than other playing styles is just using jargon to assert subjective preferences.

Finally!

How can one account be more true than another account, if there is no unit of measurement for truth?

How can one person be more kind than another person, if there is no unit of measurement for kindness?

How can one person be more intelligent than another, if there is no unit of measurement for intelligence?

How can one event be more influential on history than another, if there is no unit of measurement for influence?

These things can still be objectively true, without being about measured quantities. We look, instead, at other things. With truthfulness, we look for how many instances of true statements, empty statements, and false statements there are. That does not, at all, mean that we have developed some measurement system for truth.

One person can be kinder than another, and we find out by looking at their actions. Person A might show kindness to their children, but behave terribly toward hired help. Another might show consistent kindness to every person they meet. Person A is kinder than person B, even though there is no such thing as a "measurement of kindness." We look at instances, events, rather than at quantities. Same for intelligence. How do you determine whether someone is intelligent? You ask them lots of questions, and consider factors like speed and accuracy, but also subtlety and perhaps even wit. Intelligence is notoriously difficult to give any kind of "measure" to, and yet it is--I hope--widely understood that some people are in fact more intelligent than others, and indeed that "intelligence" may come in many different forms relevant to different contexts.

Historical events might even be more apt a comparison than intelligence here though. How could you even begin to measure "historical significance"? Yet we--I hope!--agree that the life of a certain Yeshua ben Yosef has had significantly more influence on human history than, say, a peasant in Ireland born on the same day. The creation of the Internet has almost certainly had more influence on human history than the invention of, say, Betamax. Etc. Some things are simply--objectively--more influential on history than others, even though there is no such thing as a measurable quantity of influence.

Or, if you want something completely mathematical:

First place is more successful than second place. Objectively. Yet there is no such thing as a measurement of place-ness. Ordinal data does not have some measure of kilo-successums that indicates first place is better, and we can't fall back on any other universal measurement either. Sometimes "first" place means fastest. Sometimes it means longest, or largest. Sometimes, in something like speedrunning, it can mean the shortest time meeting some other standard. E.g. you can topple a 3-minute "minimum percent" speedrun with a 3-hour run if you manage to find a way to reduce the percentage part instead of the time part--no single measure could ever capture the notion of "first place" in that context, because both parts are critical to the placement. Sometimes, with something like world records, it could cover any conceivable thing that can be recorded, e.g. something that takes a long time can be "first place" if that long time is a length of years, as in, old age.

A universal, commensurate quantity that can be used for evaluating all things is one way for something to be objectively more or less than another. It is not the only way. Virtue ethics in particular tends to reject the idea that there even could be such a single, universally commensurate scale for the "goodness" of actions, and yet many who advance virtue ethics embrace the idea that some acts are objectively good and others are objectively not.

 

[Umbran]

Whether the player (1) believes that they have choices, and (2) thinks that those choices are impacting the play experience is a subjective quality that will vary from player to player.

We can build this out a bit - agency requires action taken to produce a particular effect. If I didn't know the ogre existed, a choice to take one path over the other isn't agency, because that action was not taken to produce the effect of missing the ogre. Choices made in ignorance do not provide agency.

In addition, if I don't care about the possible results of an action, that will not provide agency either - the particular results are not things the player seeks. And going beyond that, if the players don't want to be involved in something, giving them a choice in that thing can reduce their agency - trolley problem choices can do this, ethically forcing the player to make a choice when they'd really prefer to not be responsible party in the matter.

Once we recognize that agency depends upon what the player wants, it becomes clear that it is a subjective matter.

Okay. I want a game where my subjective feeling is, in fact, true.

In a game assembled for you, personally, that can be done. But, there's no guarantee of being able to produce that for other people at the table with you - in rather the same way that your personal favorite pizza may not be good for everyone else at the table.

I expect this is part of why Snarf keeps noting that talking about agency broadly, in general is not useful. Speaking about specific techniques, forms, and modes that can produce or enhance agency becomes more constructive, because producing agency becomes an act of assembling compromise solutions.