Agency: A Brief Sketch

Posted by JonathanWalton on October 19, 2005 at 09:58 PM

Here’s my first significant attempt at an idea that’s been bothering me for quite a while now.  I’ve been frustrated by designers’ attempts to hide the secrets of how best to play their games from readers, forcing people to stumble upon the intended methods during actual play, if they discover them at all.

The World is Not Enough

Most games explain setting and system, character creation and combat, and then end with a statement along the lines of “Now you’re ready to play!  Have fun!”  At this point, new players, who lack experience in how begin play, reasonably ask, “That’s great, but where do we start?”  The options are too numerous, obscuring a good choice.  This often happens with more experienced players as well, especially when encountering a new game with unusual requirements or one that encourages a style of play that is unfamiliar.  The empty optimism of most game texts, proclaiming “the possibilities are endless” and “you are limited only by your imagination,” is rather unhelpful in this regard.

What you need is not empty encouragement but concrete knowledge.  Traditionally, this knowledge was all learned by trial-and-error or passed along by experienced players.  This method of transmission is semi-functional for relatively common games like Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire, and even GURPS, where you can expect the existing player base to have a hand in teaching the next generation.  But, when this doesn’t happen, it is quite likely that different groups will play the same game in categorically different ways, ways that go quite beyond the amount of divergence normally encountered.  Ron Edwards and several others have written about how various “versions” of Dungeons and Dragons developed in the 70’s when isolated groups did their best to figure out how to play, using an often vague and incomplete set of guidelines. 

While this may have done a great deal to encourage the development of game design (individual groups filling out the rules with their own creations) and give players a sense of personalized ownership over the game, this tradition of incompleteness and customization, which is very much alive and well in current roleplaying design, doesn’t help people learn how to play.  The game text covers preparing for play quite thoroughly, and, consequently, there are many roleplayers who spend a large part of their time preparing for play that never happens.  The texts assume (intentionally or not) that preparing for play is all you really need to do.  Learning how to play, then, is the task of experience (trial-and-error) or instruction (experienced players).

However, it seems to me that the lack of player agency is not helpful to independent roleplaying games and, in the long run, not good for mainstream roleplaying either. 

Indie games, with their limited player base, should not rely on experienced players teaching the inexperienced how to play.  You might think this is obvious, but the easy access of the Internet is a new threat.  If I have a question about Dogs in the Vineyard or My Life with Master, I just have to send an email to Vincent Baker or Paul Czege or post a message on a prominent bulletin board.  Experience will come to my aid.  This can lead (not that I’m accusing Vincent or Paul of this, necessarily) to laziness in design and writing.  When a wealth of experience and additional information is readily available online, the amount of information that a game text has to explain is minimized.  This should not, however, become a crutch for designers.  Games that require additional explanation and searching online have given themselves higher requirements for play, additional barriers that keep them from being enjoyed “out of the box,” and that may limit their audience and the amount of play they see.

Secondly, trial-and-error is not a friend to indie games.  My initial experiences with a whole host of indie games (including Continuum, Nobilis, Universalis, My Life with Master, Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures, and Polaris) were filled with double helpings of my own mistakes and those of my fellow players, sometimes because I had ignored certain rules or guidelines (not the game’s responsibility), but also sometimes because I simply wasn’t told how to play.  In most indie games, players cannot simply rely on the instincts that they’ve honed through years of roleplaying.  Often, these instincts will be totally inappropriate for the new style of play the game seeks to create.  Mistakes, then, can be unusually prominent and harmful to enjoyable play.  Many of the mistakes I made during early play of the games above resulted in play being suspended, unenjoyable, or just significantly less fun.

Agency

I’d like to talk about agency, an idea I first encountered in contemporary Native American Studies, when scholars began to speak of changing the way Native Americans were written about in history books, seeing their annihilation not as something inevitable and tragic, but a complex series of millions upon millions of choices made by Native Americans, Euro-Americans, and African-Americans.

Now, it may seem that players already have the power of choice.  Roleplaying offers infinite freedom to create whatever your mind can concoct, but freedom and true agency are two different things.

Agency, in this context, is the ability to play a game intentionally, efficiently, and with significance.  Don’t think of these as new jargon (God forbid!) but as an application of the words’ existing meanings to games.  This is description, not an attempt to be definitive.

1) Intentionality is knowing your options, weighing them, and then making a choice.
2) Efficiency is making the best use of the resources you have to achieve your goals.
3) Significance is being able to influence the current situation and create real change, within the context of other people’s choices.

Players are unable to play intentionally when they do not have enough information to make a decision, when they are not aware of all options, or when they are not allowed to make a choice.  I can think of many situations where this happens, especially when only some of the players are familiar with the published roleplaying texts that the game is supposedly based on.  You hear such players say “Can I do X?” a lot or hear more experienced players telling less experienced ones how best to handle certain situations.  Which leads us to…

Players are unable to play efficiently when they don’t know how best to maximize their potential to achieve their goals.  Consider the process of character creation, which, in my Rifts fanboy days (and I gather the situation is similar in D&D), required a fair bit of “secret knowledge” in order to create a competent character who was likely to survive a typical adventure and not embarrass the player who created them.  In Rifts, if you didn’t take critical skills like “Stealth” or be sure to upgrade to “Hand to Hand: Martial Arts,” you would only regret it later on.  Combat or social tactics work similarly, even when players are familiar with the rules.  Obviously experience helps tremendously, but a large part of it is simply knowing how to play your cards, so to speak, having some idea of what you should be doing in order to achieve X.

Players actions lack significance when they don’t seem to make a difference in the direction of the game, whether because the other players reject their suggestions, or because they are accepted, glossed over and never become a central part of what play is about.  It’s okay to play Robin to someone else’s Batman, as long as Robin matters to the story.  If game play could more or less occur exactly the same with or without your participation, you’re lacking in significance.  This last component of agency is traditionally not something that game designers have really worried over, leaving it up to the players to make sure that everyone manages to have some say in things.  However, it is a growing area of design interest (see Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures, Polaris, etc.)

The Point

This is obviously just a brief sketch of a concern of mine, but the point is that it’s not bad to let people know what they should be doing in order to achieve effective play.  These are not some design secrets that you need to horde like the recipe for Secret Sauce. You don’t have to make them stumble around in the dark and figure it out on their own. 

And telling people, “Do whatever you want!” is (almost always) extremely unhelpful.  Too many choices is no choice at all.