Chapter 5: Agency
Hamlet on the Holodeck:
The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace
Agency
• The more realized the immersive environment,
the more active we want to be within it
Things
we Do
Tangible Results
Sense of Agency
• Agency is the satisfying power to take
meaningful action and see the results of our
decisions and choices
Agency
• Participation in narrative is circumscribed in a
way that generally limit our sense of agency
– The story is designed to unfold in the same way no
matter what individual audience members may do to
join the fun
– Music and theater participatory forms are successful
because they rely on careful cueing and formulaic
behavior
– Sing along with chorus, square dance vs ballroom
dance
Agency
• Electronic environments have similar formulas
and rules for structuring participation
– Examples?
• What is the crucial difference between folk art
rituals and computer-based interactions?
– In computer, we encounter a world that is dynamically
altered by our participation
– When things are going right on the computer, we can
be both dancer and the caller of the dance = feeling of
agency
Agency beyond participation
• Agency, goes beyond both participation and
activity
• Game-makers focus on the number of
interactions per minute, is a poor indicator of the
pleasure of agency
– Chess vs game of chance
Navigation
• Moving through a geographic or abstract space can
be enjoyable
– This participatory pleasure in the organized sport of
“orienteering” is a satisfying activity regardless of the
space is real or virtual
• Zork-like dungeons, informational webs
– Allow us to experience pleasure specific to intentional
navigation
• Pleasure of orienteering in electronic environments
– Solvable maze
– Tangled rhizome
The story in the Maze
• Maze as challenge to find solution in space
– Physical and/or mental challenges
– Must find the exit
– A classic fairly-tale narrative of danger
and salvation, with maze as the road
map for telling the story
• What is the drawback to the maze orientation?
– It moves the interactor towards a single solution
– Our desire for agency in digital environment makes us
impatient when options are limited
Rapture of the Rhizome
• Rhizome rejects a single path, single solution, or
single meaning
– Any point may be connected to any other point
– System design can get in way
of agency
– If done right, the reader need
not worry about the loss of
the plot
• “Dear Dad – this game will never end. William.”
– Longing for closure and separation
– Lingering forever in an unfolding process because it can
never ends
Between Maze and Rhizome
• Both overdetermined single-path maze and
underdetermined Rhizome work against
pleasure of navigation
– Generating anxiety
• Stories should be goal driven enough to guide
navigation but open-ended enough to allow free
exploration with satisfying dramatic structure
– No matter how the interactor chooses to traverse the
space
Between Maze and Rhizome
• Violence hub as model
– A dramatic event
– Many perspectives
• How different and how
same from existing
games and hypertexts?
The Journey Story
• The navigational space of the computer makes it
suitable for journey stories, which are related to
mazes but offer additional opportunities for
exercising agency
– Huckleberry Fin, The Story about a Real Man
• Computer based journey stories offer this
pleasure of uniting problem solving with
navigation
– Confined space until the solution to a puzzle is found
Games into Stories
• Games seems on the face of it to be very
different from stories and to offer opposing
satisfactions
• The Myst
– The game is well designed in that
all the evidence on which to base
a decision is, as in any good detective
story, available to the player
– Win/lose ending
Games as Symbolic Dramas
• Protagonists and plots
– Enacting relationships to
the world
• More abstract interpretations
– Social meaning in Monopoly
– Drama in Tetris
• We need to take advantage of
the symbolic drama of contest games to
create suspense and dramatic tension
without focusing on the interactor on skill
mastery
Constructivism
• The constructivists pleasure is the highest form
of narrative agency the medium allows
– The ability to build things that display autonomous
behavior
– In Fallout 4, players have the ability to construct and
deconstruct buildings and items and use them to build
settlements.
• It is likely that more and more people will turn
from win/lose game playing to the collective
construction of elaborate alternate worlds
– Are we there yet?
Constructivism
• MUDs as a model
– Can play existing stories or
create new ones
– Can be individual or social
• Live-Action Role Playing
– Separation of GM and players
– Works because of persistent relations between players
The Interactor as Author
• There is a distinction between playing a creative role
within an authored environment and having authorship of
the environment itself.
– Interactors only act within the possibilities established by the
writing and programming
– Problems with shared authorship
• Procedural authorship
– It means writing the rules for the interactors involvement, where
the conditions under which things will happen in response to the
participants actions.
– In electronic narrative, procedural author is like a choreographer
who supplies the rhythms, context and steps that will be
performed.