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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9095594" data-attributes="member: 6690965">This is the ludic understanding of a magic circle. You constrain the means available to players and secure agreement to pursue a goal within those means to make their choices and decisions interesting and meaningful. Without constraint and/or without a goal (a slightly stranger proposition in TTRPGs, probably best constituted by the "agenda" we're discussing) there isn't a game. It doesn't particularly matter to a checkers player that a rook can move orthogonally, because they've entered into different magic circles and are acting under different systems of constraints.Any discussion of what players want in the context of a game is necessarily bounded by "what have players agreed to?" Agency isn't incomparable however, once you've established those two things. A game that doesn't actually provide the player much impact with the decisions they make within the given constraints to achieve their goals can clearly be said to have lower agency than one that does, i.e. War is a lower agency game than Rummy.The commonplace we're endlessly stuck on is the question of goal, which is simply not settled nor explicated clearly enough to measure agency across the various systems we're discussing.</blockquote>