High Agency Games

By Yanai Levy, Dec 6th, 2023

We’re at the close of 2023 and it’s a post-pandemic world. This isn’t to say that the Covid-19 pandemic is gone, but life has moved on and words like “lockdown” and “social distancing” are no longer in the forefront of our minds. Despite that encouraging statement, the scars the pandemic left on the world and on its denizens are fresh and deep. Not only did the pandemic itself hurt us and our experiences, it brought issues into our awareness while we had nowhere to run from them. This refers to the nebulous, uncomfortable feeling that many people who lived through the pandemic experienced of the world closing in. Restricting us, making it hard to move, to breathe, to progress. There are plenty of reasons for feeling that way, and not all of them can be attributed to the pandemic. It just made them plain to people who could previously distract themselves or run away. Socioeconomic mobility is declining. Housing prices rise unfettered by the stagnation of wages. Wars are fought to no avail, the oceans fill with plastic, and the outlook a realist must possess is grim. While it would be great to tell you this piece holds the panacea that will take all these problems away, it doesn’t. What it does hold is an explanation of how you might be able to reclaim some of your freedom in a dour, obstructionist world.

One treatment people have found for this feeling is playing particular types of videogames. Videogames are interactive pieces of art and storytelling that cannot be separated entirely from the reality they exist in. These factors include technological limitations, market conditions, player dispositions, and real-world events. The limitations imposed on people living in the real world are significant and growing. Studies have shown that people feel their socio-economic mobility has been declining and the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated these symptoms by limiting our physical movements and social connections. Within this context, it is no surprise that people have turned to virtual worlds to allow them the freedoms they are denied elsewhere. (Türkay et al.). One could simplify this need into escapism, simply distracting yourself from your very real problems, and there is a grain of truth to that. However, this only account for the need to play videogames at all, it does not account for why these particular types of games are gaining in popularity.

In the last decade, a marked rise in videogames that offer greater amounts of freedom or agency to players has occurred and the gaming industry has responded to successes in the genre readily. This piece aims to uncover the relationship between decreasing agency in the real world and the seeming response of videogames providing more of it. Open world games have been popular in some guise since The Legend of Zelda topped sales charts in 1986 but remained highly structured in their progression objectives. Other open-world genre defining releases such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the Grand Theft Auto series have also sold extremely well but follow a critical path through their events that is inviolable.

The form of games to be addressed in this piece are games such as ABZÛ, Minecraft, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which have broken the established video game formula in recent years and found significant success. Despite having little to no narrative structure or direction given to the player, these games have the potential to procure and retain player interest for longer than their predecessors while boasting a high level of replayability. First time gamers are particularly drawn to these games since they do not have to be fluent in the traditional gaming “language” of established tropes and mechanics.

While significant research has been done in the realm of why certain players are attracted to certain genres of play, the topic of player agency remains mostly unaddressed. Agency refers to the amount of influence a player is allowed by the game designers to exert on the game environment and its elements. For example, in a game such as Call of Duty you play though story missions that fail you if you do not walk the right way, use the right items, or do not shoot a given character. This game allows you very little agency since there is a single correct path and your actions must follow it. Contrast that with a game like “Minecraft” where a player is not only unpenalized for following their desires and whims, but no such “correct path” even exists. Player agency is almost unlimited within the bounds of the game mechanics in “Minecraft”. These types of games are answering an unaddressed desire that the real world is only strengthening within players.

There are four pillars of a HAG (high agency game).

1.      Multi-solution problems.

2.      Acceptance of player types.

3.      No keys, no locks.

4.      Unprescribed paths to success.

HAGs provide problems with many solutions. These games are the opposite of a puzzle game in which you need to tease out the correct way to move forward. Let’s say your problem is that you need to get down a tall cliff. You can talk to an in-game character to get a parachute. You can build a protective cage out of wood to preserve you on your way down. You can notice a hidden hatch with a ladder in it. The idea is not to make these games “walking simulators” in which you are unchallenged and unengaged. The idea is to make smart problems that allow that “Aha!” moment to be had by the player in a different way than their friend did. To make them feel smart, capable, and creative.

In these games the player experience is dictated by the player themselves. The developers of these games provide the sandbox and things inside the sandbox to be engaged with. They trust the player with the power to make the game into what suits them. Are you a fighter? Fight as many enemies as you wish. An explorer? Run into the wild and find ruins and secrets. A sightseer even? Avoid the combat entirely and gaze into sunsets and forests. All of the above and more are intended game experiences in a HAG, and they allow players to feel their mode of gameplay is effective and legitimate.

Games of this type do not require the player to collect critical items to progress. The Youtube channel “Game Maker’s Toolkit” creator Mark Brown describes these items as “keys” and “locks” in a conceptual sense (Brown). The game has points in which a “lock” is presented. You may not progress further if you do not have the requisite “key”. This means the aforementioned sightseer player is not denied progression because they didn’t force themselves to be a fighter and get an item held by an enemy.

In a HAG, you may or may not be given an objective, but you have no prescribed way to get there. “Breath of the Wild” tells you in the first five minutes of the game that you need to defeat the evil Gannon, but not how or when. “ABZÛ” has doors that lead to the next area but offers no guidance and no time limit in which you need to move on. The creators of these games give the players the power to choose their path and their strategies based on their own desires and understanding of the virtual world.

This is all to lay the groundwork for what it is that HAGs provide to players in the context of a restrictive world. Self-Determination-Theory is a framework for understanding human motivation and personality, however the applicable part of it for this piece is the Basic Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT) mini-theory. BPNT states that “psychological well-being and optimal functioning is predicated on autonomy, competence, and relatedness” (Ryan and Deci). This statement holds the key to understanding why playing a HAG can help a person who is psychologically suffering due to real-world conditions that do not allow them to feel they have their autonomy or that they are incompetent.

Games that follow the HAG philosophy are uniquely positioned to fulfil those needs that BPNT posits are essential to wellbeing. Let’s take the three aspects one at a time. Autonomy is perhaps the most obvious benefit of playing a game that allows you to make your own choices. If you are allowed to blaze your own path to an objective, followed by solving whatever challenge you meet there in a way that you came up with, you feel that you are the master of your in-game-body, and your desires can be enacted.

Competence is the next piece of the puzzle. In games where there is one correct solution, a player may feel stupid for not being able to find that solution or struggling to do so. Especially given the real-world context we established earlier; this kind of feeling can be a real blow to your estimation of yourself. Conversely, a challenge in a game designed to have many solutions can foster feelings of capability when a player’s attempted solution succeeds, even if it is not the same solution the developers intended or expected. One such event by itself will not turn a person’s psychological outlook around, but having many of these affirming experiences throughout a game that can span hundreds of hours most assuredly can.   

Lastly, we come to relatedness. While you may expect relatedness to only be applicable in multiplayer/online games, this is not the case. In browsing online game discussion forums and from anecdotal evidence, it is evident that whole communities form around debating solutions and showing off individual paths through HAGs. One need only look as far as the massive Minecraft centric YouTube groups that exist to show off player’s creations within the title to see how much belonging is attributed to playing the game. When I personally played through “Breath of the Wild” for the first time, one of the first things I did was confer with others who played the game to see if they had followed a similar path or not. There is a ton of potential for interaction and community-building around games that are designed to provide an individual experience for each player.

The videogame industry has shown its subservience to the power of the dollar time and time again. Usually in a negative way such as “Horse Armor”, a term originating from a paid downloadable content pack for the game “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” back in 2006. The pack did what it says on the box and provided a player with purely cosmetic armor for their mount. Horse armor opened the door for microtransactions in games despite widespread criticism from players and has only become more popular since, because players repeatedly show developers they are willing to pay for such things. The same effect works in the reverse as well. Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time with over 300 million copies sold (Wikipedia). Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is also an impressive 20th on the all-time list, with over 32 million copies. These HAGs sell and sell well. While copies and sequels are certainly part of the game development world, developers can look at the basic components of these games to inform their development of new games, with a reasonable expectation that they will also find commercial success if they manage to tap into the same psychological need satisfaction that those games provide. Hopefully, the pillars of HAGs that were identified earlier in the piece can help explain to developers why players are only going to be increasingly searching for this type of game and how to create games that answer their search.

References:

Brown, Mark. “Boss Keys.” Game Maker’s Toolkit, YouTube, 4 Oct. 2023, www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc38fcMFcV_ul4D6OChdWhsNsYY3NA5B2. Accessed 6 Dec. 2023.

Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci. “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being.” American Psychologist, vol. 55, no. 1, 2000, pp. 68–78, https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68.

Wikipedia. “List of Best-Selling Video Games.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 Sept. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games. Accessed 6 Dec. 2023.

Türkay, Selen, et al. “Self-Determination Theory Approach to Understanding the Impact of Videogames on Wellbeing during COVID-19 Restrictions.” Behaviour & Information Technology, 1 July 2022, pp. 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929x.2022.2094832. Accessed 15 Aug. 2022.