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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9109921" data-attributes="member: 6790260">And as I have said--repeatedly--what is essential for many players who care about agency is that you have two equally necessary criteria:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">You feel as though you have agency.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">You actually do have agency.</li> </ol>I, personally, don't think agency is binary. I have only been speaking of it as such because Maxperson specifically does, and I wished to respect parts of their conception if they aren't a problem for me. But, despite the criteria above being perfectly straightforward and appropriate, I've had no end of ridiculous responses, including things like "there is no such thing as actually having agency," "there are no forms of agency, it's all the same," etc.Yes. I've covered that. I've explicitly said that people IRL often lack agency (which, I mean, that should be obvious, but evidently not.) Also...if you're suffering a calamity, legal agency isn't really that relevant, is it? Financial and personal agency is rather more prevalent, both of which tend to be massively curtailed in . Midlife crisis is not really about agency; no discussion of the topic on any medical or personal discussion thereof mentions "agency" (except in the "organization" sense.) Instead, it is about whether one's past actions, skills, career, etc. have meaning, which is related to agency but not the same.It is quite possible for a person to be mistaken about whether they have agency or not--but surely that is not simply a matter of opinion, it's also a matter of fact, and misunderstandings of fact can be clarified. Just as, for example, it is not simply a matter of opinion whether one has a functional limb, or money in one's bank account, or various other things. Certainly, one can (mistakenly) believe that one has little money when in fact one has much of it, but that mistaken belief is easily fixed by being informed of the true state of affairs. Things can be less obvious, of course, as with the functional limb or the like, but the fact of the matter generally tends to be quite persuasive here.Okay. I want objective agency. I've been quite clear about that; as I said before, I want to believe I have agency, and I want that belief to be correct. If others do not share that want...okay! That's no skin off my back. People have instead been telling me that it is impossible for that belief to be true or false, that I am a fool to even think it.This requires that I grant what you said above--that one can objectively have agency, and yet feel that one lacks that agency. Note the "that"--one can feel one lacks (objective) agency of some specific type, and prioritize that type over other types one actually has, without a problem. But it would be a mistaken belief--one easily corrected by better information--to think one simply lacks a form of agency one truly has. If we assume good-faith discussion, I don't see how such a mistaken belief wouldn't be ameliorated by a conversation between adults.Whereas I think it's belittling to presume that others will be unreasonable and immature. They may disappoint you, but giving others the benefit of the doubt is important.And...you're talking about this as though anyone here is trying to convince anyone else to switch systems. We aren't. We are literally only defending the position that, all else being equal, games which offer objective agency (to use your term) of the "player agency" type in addition to objective agency of the "character agency" type...offer more agency. Hence why I have spoken of things like the two kinds of game both offering equivalent instances of (objective) character agency, but one of those types additionally offering (objective) player agency as well. These things are quite front-and-center, essentially impossible to be subject to the misplaced-belief stuff above, which some posters in this thread have made clear is part of why they do not want to play such games, because they don't like (objective) player agency, do not wish to have instances of it in their games, and very much prefer its absence. For them, all else being equal (meaning, equivalent instances of [objective] character agency), they prefer a lower-agency game--and that is a perfectly cromulent preference to have.</blockquote>

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