I felt, almost all of the time, as if what I was doing was what I wanted to do and I felt a desire to keep doing it - it mattered.
The philosophical concept of agency is useful here. Agency is your capacity to act in the world and, ultimately, your ability to impose your will upon your environment. Deus Ex is, for me, a "high agency" game because I was able to act and my actions appeared to change the world.
We are strongly conditioned to appreciate, and even desire, roles with a higher degree of agency because this is what most of our fictional and historical narratives present. There are few movies that feature a protagonist who is never in control at all and has no influence on the world. Even Seinfeld, the ultimate non-event, gives the protagonists agency. They are, rightly, finally dealt with because they have chosen to have no impact at a critical time. The choice to do nothing is, however, a choice. Had they been incapable of action and then have been locked up, there would have been no humour - instead we would have expected a righteous break-out or injustice plot, in order to provide an avenue for the reassertion of agency.
History tells many stories but the stories of those who did nothing are cautionary tales, often more folk lore than fact and rarely presented as full stories. The truly 'great' are often presented with many accounts of their constant control and influence over the world. These days, a naval commander who finished a game of bowls before heading off to fight the Spanish Armada would be court-martialled, not feted. (Yes, yes, Tower of London eventually but that was geo-political).
There are very few games with broad appeal that do not allow the players to feel as if they are controlling the world in key ways. For the most part, it's an illusion, as it almost always must be. I must briefly note a game called Pathologic, which a friend mentioned to me, that I am trying to track down to play as it appears that half the game is trying to work out how to become a free agent! There is a key difference between being able to make choices and being able to make world-changing choices. This is as true socially as it is in games. If the only choice you can make is between two cheap tins of beans, there's no real agency there.
Even with the body of ... curious ... games coming out of Japan and Russia, I look at the popular games and I see First Person Shooters and MMORPGs of many waters. FPS games almost all run on rails and your choice is too frequently limited to which gun you pick, your mission is generally heavily constrained. MMORPGs have many large-scale distributed systems problems to conquer and get around this in a number of ways, but frequently by using instances, event separation and zoning. Can you actually change the world? Some players on Acheron's Call tried to hold off a server upgrade, by standing and defending a point that was supposed to be overrun, and nearly managed it. That, however, is rare and the house always wins, because no single subscribed player on a game server should be able to change everyone's playing experience. Even the cachet of being a Scarab Lord changed nothing, except possibly your bank balance when your boss worked out how much time you'd spent playing WoW. Killing friendlies? Killing other players? Attacking other players? Special kid-friendly areas? Swearing control? Any fragments of agency can come and go at the flick of a software switch and may be limited in order to protect the agency of other players. The cost of interaction with humans, instead of machine AI, is that you have to play sufficiently nicely that you won't cost the parent company subscriptions.
(EVE Online is a counter-example here, as they appear to have allowed for almost any form of activity that can be supported in the game, as long as the communications go through the game. EVE appears to be, however, either highly rewarding or highly frustrating depending on whether you are in on the con or you are staring at an empty hangar or the destroyed dust of your capital ship. But can anyone carry out in-game research as a skill to develop a wormhole weapon that can obliterate other planets?)
I was reading about the last days of Star Wars: Galaxies and, at the end, when it no longer mattered, players could change the world. They were told who had won and lost on each server. A Star Destroyer hovered over a city and small groups took up X-Wings to battle it in the atmosphere. I read that and thought "Who wouldn't want to play a game like that? An exciting world where the small can make an impact on the big?" But it was only free because it was ending. No-one's subscription was at risk so anyone could change the world.
Even without agency, it still feels like you have a choice in many ways. Some of this, I believe, comes from the 3D visual environment. Back in the old text days, you had to guess the particular phrase, or have the particular item, or knock on the wall 10 times because it opened every 10th knock (Yes, I've seen it). There's an example in a closed area of TinyTIM (1991 and still going...) of a door lock that requires you to have not only read a relatively obscure work but to know which phrase of those found on the 104 pages of the novella will be needed to open the door. The frustration levels in old games could be very high because there was no "running at it from another angle" which is easily achieved in any game that allows graphically supported three dimensional movement.
This did require the puzzle makers to be clever, however, as they had to balance ease of solving with potential frustration level. Rather than impose a strict order of box jumping, or precise pixel positioning to achieve a goal (hello, Tomb Raider), hints had to be left, or actions rewarded, in a way that a persistent and thoughtful player would be rewarded.
However, I would be lying if I said that the levels of agency were higher for conventional players in these games, they typed commands and read the results - but, of course, the big reward back in the days of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) was that one could eventually become a wizard, someone who could write the code that would literally change the world and add new adventures or features. I am still a wizard on TinyTIM, although this now mostly amounts to taking out the virtual trash occasionally, and have been a wizard of both LP and DIKU MUDs. Changing the world is both fascinating and onerous.
These days, the coding required to build worlds and add features are heavily protected, strongly bound into concealed and proprietary bundles and merely playing through to top level doesn't guarantee you any world-changing status at all. Yes, you are free to range across giant vistas as much as you like and there's no doubt that there is a great deal of personal reward in being the best skinner in the plains, but is that the same as, one day, being able to raise up a giant castle using your knowledge and skill and seeing people who are just like you were, when you were started, being tested by your devices and earning great reward? (Guilds, of course, offer a useful agency analogue for players as you are creating and maintaining a structure that does, effectively, change the world for your group. But could your guild take over the city and become its government? Could your guild form an alliance of guilds and march on another continent? Are you seeing the walls on the cage yet?)
Let me digress for a moment to talk about a gaming system, or systems, where one would appear to have a great deal of agency but, in reality, you don't. The worst of these are generally based on successful movie or book franchises. Who didn't come out of Star Wars wanting to wield a light-saber or fly the Falcon? (You? Well, you're weird.) You've been raised on high agency narrative - you want in to this Universe!
Only, if you play the Star Wars RPG, you are not going to be anybody at all to start with. Maybe if you play it for a long time, you can end up powerful but, take a breath, you'll never be Leia, Luke, Han or Vader. In fact, most of these games specifically prevent you from becoming a leading character and you can't start at a level of power where you can do much, if any, of what you see in the movies.
Games, like most systems that use rules, try to hold a careful balance between defining how the Universe works and stating exactly what can and can't happen. However, the more freedom that you are allowed, the more you depend upon the human(s) who are interpreting the rules. (If you don't know what the term 'rules lawyer' means, go and check it out now.) Some of these rules are intrinsically limiting your ability change the world in ways that would otherwise make sense.
Simple example: you have the power of telekinesis, say, and can lift a weight of up to 5kg with your mind. Hmm, ok, then, I'll use that amount of force to close off the blood supply to my opponent's brain. Instant death. This is perhaps the simplest example to illustrate why magical powers and mind effects have to be heavily proscribed by the gaming system and, for continued game enjoyment, I can see why you would make that trade.
(It makes sense. So you have POWER COSMIC INFINITE as a character. You sit in your chair and say "I win." Fancy another game? Some rules are put in for enjoyable game play and to create a situation where conflict can be sustained for both narrative and play effect.)
Some rules are just prescriptive... because. Who cares if you actually have a million Darth Vaders? (Shout outs to Elf Only Inn here!) If your system is good, and your narrative engine (game master), can carry it off then I can see something amazing about the Vader Clone War, not the least of which is that I doubt that the Vaders would trust each other.
Now, going to back to electronic games, the only way you can be the Amazing Hero Protagonist character is if at least one of the following conditions holds (some are mutually exclusive):
- It's a single player game. You get to be the big cheese in the original Knights of the Old Republic because it was just you, playing on your computer.
- The multi-player allows you to rotate roles, or you have cookie cutter characters that can be customised with more play or money but you are holding an archetype rather than a specific character. Examples include Team Fortress 2 where you can buy/play your way to being the biggest baddest X, where X is one of the available characters. However, you can't be the ONLY one of these.
- The multi-player is LAN-based, so the user base is formed by relatively usual social cohesion, there are no subscription fees to maintain.
- There are no subscription fees or, to put it another way, you holding that spot will not reduce someone else's enjoyment to the point that they will stop paying - and playing.
- Your tenure on the role is so brief, and guaranteed to be so, that all the patient need to do is wait, or all the scheming need to do is scheme. The play-by-e-mail game En Garde features a ferocious struggle to be the French aristocrat with the highest social status but it is a very slippery pole and many variants of the game immediately remove the 'winner' once they attain top rank. The player can come back in, but with a new character, to try again. It is strangely addictive and I have made it to the top, mostly by being beaten to a pulp in duels.
The dominant model for sustaining large user bases - the MMORPG - cannot afford to grant large amounts of agency to 'untrusted' players because the risk is too high that they will do something that will cause damage to the enjoyment of the paying player base. Can this be solved economically? Well, how much money would it cost to risk alienating the player base on an entire server by granting one guild 'Kingship' of the server and the ability to control large areas of cities? More importantly, would ti be worth it to that guild if everyone then packed up and left?
Try starting an LPMud from scratch and walking around an empty world as a god - it gets dull quickly.
Even the simple requirements, making any change to a graphical world, can be challenging because it requires the developers to provide all of the alternative graphics - a far harder job than putting up some alternative text!
Finally, however, the problem is keeping the game playable in the face of player actions. Let's say that in Bioshock you managed to damage the environment by breaking the glass and jamming the doors open - everything floods and everyone dies. Uhh - victory? One of my pet hates is the protection of 'key non-player characters', because you never really know when you'll be able to kill them and, quite often, it is quite obvious to the player that something is up but you have to run along on narrative rails until you are finally allowed to act. For all of the reasons I've already discussed, this is frustrating. But I can understand why it's done. It is still likely to be an indicator of a strongly linear storyline - I don't want to read your script, I want to write the story myself!
I was very happy in Deus Ex when I managed to blow up Anna Navarre in the Jumbo (through careful use of potted plants and grenades) and the game actually dealt with it properly. The writers had realised that it could happen and that it was a sneaky and Deus Ex-y of dealing with the dangerous opponent. Then again, I also enable some cheats later on, killed some key characters and watched the game fail miserably as it tried to make actions happen through non-existent characters. Come on, guys, I'm sneakier than a bag full of weasels - prepare for the possibility that I might want to try and do this. I don't want to stand there during long speeches and throw cactuses at people with no effect - make it obvious that the game (and its inhabitants) is watching me like a hawk!
This 'continued playability' problem magnifies in multi-player environments - you only have to look at Corrupted Blood in WoW to see what can happen when existing protective boundaries are violated, even accidentally. Imagine if someone in the game deliberately brought a plague animal back and dropped it in a city water supply. We know what extremists can do in this world and we don't have anywhere near the same level of real-world control in a virtual environment. One buggy piece of software will leave us far more vulnerable than we ever could be in reality!
I realise that what I want in a game is an almost unattainable goal because I want a game where my actions are effectively unlimited, but I still want a fun game, and one where I may even run into real people. I also want a game where the actions that I am free to take are useful and interesting actions so I'm as bound by a desire for narrative fulfilment as the next person, but at the same time I want the convenient illusion that someone is writing a story where I am the hero and events unfold in a way that keep me immersed in the game.
Sounds like I have some serious game design to do. :)
