Agency has been one of the foci of this week’s theory component.  An extremely interesting concept, it deals with ideas surrounding player control and the extent to which people can make meaningful choices, resulting in genuine consequences, when playing video games. I found it a fascinating topic and was encouraged to draw links between the concept and some games I’ve recently played – Inside and The Stanley Parable – in which the developers encourage a player to question how much control she really has when playing the game.

For part of yesterday’s discussion, we spoke of agency in relation to the Survival Horror genre – apt given Halloween’s rapid approach! As we’d learnt from this week’s readings, part of the appeal of Survival Horror games is the way in which they go against the grain of many other genres and reduce player agency in a bid to induce anxiety. The academic, Tanya Kryzwinska, offered an interesting example of the way in which horror games can toy with a player’s agency in her ‘very-clever-but-slightly-too-wordy-for-my-liking’ article. Speaking of Silent Hill – a horror game in which a player’s avatar roams the streets of a fog-shrouded town while trying to avoid legions of nightmarish creatures roaming in the mists – Kryzwinska explains how the fog reduces a player’s agency and, in so doing, increases his anxiety. While disorientated in the fog, the player knows that enemies lie in wait, ready to pounce, but he’s forced into a more improvisational position due to the fact the fog obscures his foes and, thus, he’s unable to tell from which direction they might attack. Curiously, I seem to remember a friend of mine once telling me that the fog in Silent Hill was used, primarily, as a means of disguising the game’s poor draw distance when it came out back in the 1990s. How wonderful, then, that the fog should have such an interesting – and unaccounted for – effect on player agency.

Meanwhile, in this week’s games design session, much fun was had playing a selection of board games designed by my MA buddies. For one of our weekly challenges, Chris had assigned us the task of learning the rules to the game Go, after which we were to design our own versions of the game taking some of its original elements and adding a few ‘twists’ of our own. A particularly interesting moment came, for me, when playing Samantha’s game. In her version – ‘ExGOsion’ – she’d included a mechanic that added a chance element to the proceedings, potentially allowing a player to turn the tables on her opponent. At a moment when a player’s counter would be captured, the player was allowed to roll a ten-sided die and, should the roll result in a nine or a ten, the captured piece would ‘explode’ wiping out all of the opponents’ surrounding counters. It was a novel idea and I continually found myself tempted to place my counters in peril in the hopes of a glorious ‘explosive’ outcome.

In the discussion afterwards, Ashley raised the valid point that by placing one’s own counter at risk, a player was, statistically, far more likely to ‘lose out’ than ‘win’ in the die roll since there’s only a 1/5 chance of rolling a nine or a ten and ending up victorious. Therefore, she explained that if she’d been playing competitively it’s unlikely she would ever have been tempted by this game feature. Conversely, I explained how I’d always be tempted by a feature like this – despite the lack of strategy or logic – since the narrative pleasure that would be evoked in the unlikely event I might ‘explode’ my opponent’s counters would always make the risky move feel meaningful to me.

How interesting it is learning about the different types of players and the different motivations for why we play!