Game Storytelling: Agency

Let it be known at the top that there are two forms of agency in games. The first is conventional narrative agency, or a character’s ability to affect and drive the plot. Player agency, on the other hand, is a player’s effect on the events of gameplay, which includes the story. This is one of the many times narrative and design bleed together so it is imperative to denote these various definitions and the relation between them before beginning. Also, in order to make certain points, there will be minor spoilers for Fire Emblem Fates and The Witcher 3.

To begin, let's start with narrative agency, as player agency springs from it. In a story, there are two forces at play that dictate the events played out on screen, page, and stage. Those factors are the plot and the characters within those stories. Now imagine these two forces driving together in a car. Plot has the map and knows roughly where to go, what exits to take, stops to make, and their eventual destination. Character, on the other hand, is the one at the wheel and it is up to them to listen to the plot or go off on their own. They may want to see things that are not on the map, or they know a shortcut, or they might have to pee before a rest stop. While these interruptions may or may not get the car any further to the destination, it does make the trip more interesting. That is character's job: to inject personality into a tried and tested route that has been traveled by thousands of other cars.

Now apply this logic to film. It is a known fact that there are only about ten-ish stories, or plots, out there to tell. So if you take one of these plots and run with it as is, sure, you are going to get to your destination perfectly fine and within time, but your audience is going to be bored out of their minds. There is no conflict, no character, no personality—nothing that someone hasn’t seen before already, that is. On top of that, you are making the characters on those journeys less human, because they are simply following an invisible map with no other goals or ambitions in mind. Characters always want something and it's that want that drives them to make decisions that shape the world around them. So if that voice is ignored, then things become less believable and your characters more robotic.

For example, take Fire Emblem Fates: Revelations and how it treats recruiting Takumi and Ryoma. On Corrin's quest to unify her two families to stop the machinations of Anakos, she rescues her birth brother Takumi from enemy forces. Now up to this point, Takumi has been depicted as a brash, angry and distrustful man. One who would not accept Corrin's arrival as he thought she had already turned against her homeland. However, upon arrival and freeing him, Takumi joins Corrin’s cause, betraying what his character set up. As there is no decision on Takumi’s part, as he is more or less forced into joining his sister though divine intervention and not his own volition.

However, you can argue this one somewhat, Ryoma is another question. As Ryoma, a man who is so dedicated to his beliefs and his country that he would wage war on his own sister. Decides to just drop everything and join Corrin because he wants to make up for being weak. Now, this was never addressed before this moment: no character talks to Ryoma about his failures nor did Corrin do anything special to give Ryoma pause for thought. The plot simply dictated that Ryoma needed to join Corrin, so he conformed.

Rigidly adhering to a plot creates only an illusion of development, something magnified if done poorly in games. Video games have always been interactive media, allowing the player to dictate what happened in the game. This is player agency. So when designing a story for games, you must consider your player as a character within the story as well. Even in stories that don’t have things like dialogue trees or moral choice systems, if a player's actions in gameplay do not have an effect on the story or gameplay, then it is equally as frustrating as a film just following a plot. It removes the player's importance in the story and the world, making them just another indistinguishable part of the larger whole.

Now, this can work in some games: From Software did a great job within the Soulsborne series. However, even then, the player had an effect on the game and its world. They made decisions that may have run counter to the plot and the game adjusted and began telling a new story with these new desitions. A great example of this comes from one of the early Witcher quests in Witcher 3.

Early on, Geralt comes across a man who is looking for his lost wife who disappeared in the woods. Geralt goes looking for her and, long story short, turns out the man is a werewolf and his lover tricked him into murdering his wife. When the husband finds out about this, he is enraged, as he was going to try and make things better with his wife, and moves in to get revenge on his former lover. So now the player (and Geralt) have a choice: leave the cave and let the werewolf have his justice, or protect the lover and kill the werewolf. If you go with the former, then the wolfman will ask for death after the deed is done and you won't have to finish fighting him. However, defend the lover and Geralt will have to finish the werewolf off like normal.

These are meaningful choices, choices that reverberate throughout the mission or game that alter the path forward. Here the player has control over what happens in the story and this is possible with any kind of game, not just large RPGs. MegaMan X has a great sense of player agency in its story because it’s a story about getting stronger. So every power-up, armor piece, and boss weapon plays into the story and helps that sense of agency.

However, no matter the game, what is important is making the player feel like they are having an effect on the story at large. They cannot just be accessories to another non-player character or set dressing. If you're doing that, then why are we not playing as those people? Players should be in control of the characters affecting the greatest amount of change. Games should encourage this by respecting the player's decisions and working with them to tell a story where they are the center. If they do that, then the journey will be like nothing seen before.