Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9102369" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Yeah, I think we're sliding too far; agency certainly isn't a binary product. There is little to no player agency in Candyland, because players can't meaningfully make any decisions that influence the outcome. Replacing the deck of cards with a draft immediately improves things, but it's still not a particularly high agency game. The important point here was that agency is contextual, and relies on the goal of play to be evaluated. Candyland is a low interactivity race game; you can more or less directly compare agency in in to something like Flamme Rouge or Formula D, race games that provide significantly more player input on to the events. It's easier to generalize in board and card games in general, because we're just trying to win under a known and clear competitive goal. This discussion (perhaps unsurprisingly) mostly seems to be taking at least two different goals of play as normative, and then evaluating agency against them in various systems and coming to different conclusions.Unless we proceed from a commonplace of "what is the goal of play?" I don't think we can meaningfully evaluate agency in a comparative way.Perhaps we should be clearer in our terms? It's reasonable to formulate a game as a product of abridged agency (by limiting our actions down to a system, we constitute the grounds on which the game is played and all that) but there is absolutely a second dimension of relative impact on the goal of play that is also meant. That narrower category of agency within a game, vs. agency as a being playing a game is really more interesting and relevant to the discussion.</blockquote>

Verification