Photo by Marek Kapolka, courtesy Mojang.

The differences between interactivity and agency aren’t entirely clear, but one way of looking at it is to see an interaction as an atomic element–one action and one reaction–and agency as the sum of an agent’s potential actions. More important, though, is to distinguish the aesthetics of interactivity and agency from the aesthetics of non-interactive elements within a video game. When creating an interactive system, there are necessary non-interactive elements that deliver information about the state of the system to the player. In a game, these might be avatars showing the position of the player characters or health bars displaying their physical state. These non-interactive elements have their own aesthetic and can contribute significantly to the overall feel of a game, but they do not necessarily indicate the level of agency for players.

In digital video games, the distinction between interactive and non-interactive elements is understood, respectively, in terms of “gameplay” and “visuals,” “graphics,” “sound,” etc. It is generally accepted, among gamers, that gameplay has a preeminent position among the other facets of a video game. A game that has very airy and lighthearted visuals can still feel claustrophobic if interactive player agency is too limited. The other facets are nice. They are a spectacle and can keep a game intriguing, but they are not a game’s artistic raison d’être. In other words, artists working in different media can express non-interactive ideas better than with video games, whereas artists working in the domain of games have the unique ability to advance ideas about interactive player agency.

Photo by Marek Kapolka, courtesy Nintendo

Most gamers are not self-declared artists, however, and they do not share the same artistic goals. Games qua games exist as a platform on which to learn how to better manipulate and conquer the system of play. They provide an environment with rigidly defined rules, clear winning and losing conditions, and a limited set of potential actions that players can take. The players’ goal is to become better at winning. The design ideal is to constantly present challenging problems that players must surmount, so that as they defeat the challenges they are bathed in exaltations.

To some video game artists, however, this myopic focus on challenge is asphyxiating. Although games are unique in their ability to provide this kind of confrontational, direct challenge, there is another potential paradigm–to explore agency in terms of interactive aesthetics as an end in itself, rather than as a means to challenge players. Simply acting within a video game can provide an immense amount of aesthetic pleasure, even if those actions are not challenged by the hostile requirements of an antagonistic system or directed towards the completion of a mandated task.

The aesthetic potential of undirected interaction has been proven in several existing video games: for instance, jumping around aimlessly in the castle garden of Super Mario 64; carving out mines to build castles in Minecraft; or, driving around in Grand Theft Auto. Each of these undirected interactions, even if taken outside of the larger context of the game, would be interesting and engaging. However, for some reason when artists do venture to make a video game that sets aside the larger narrative and stacked challenges, such as in the case of Noby Noby Boy, critics accuse them of making something pointless, which raises the question: what’s the point of a goal-driven game?

By Marek Kapolka

That video game artists are becoming more and more capable of emulating these other modes of narrative storytelling is technically astounding, but considering the potential to generate new and unique formats from these borrowed techniques, mere emulation is not impressive. Storytellers throughout history have succeeded at depicting fixed narratives, in lieu of making something dramatic happen and in a variety of ways. Video games push storytelling even further, offering genuine simulations of causal events. They can be approximations of what it is to exist within indeterminate stories, to gain a better understanding of how they unfold, better than what is possible from passive observation. Currently, however, video games neglect to explore these possibilities and this is dissatisfying.

An early milestone in the evolution of video game narratives was the transition from lo-res raster images and text to fully cinematic sequences with sets, stunts, choreography, acting, lighting, and cameras. During this maturation period, both players and storytellers developed a new understanding of and taste for the medium. Proper terminologies developed from critical discussions, and the discourse on gaming technology commenced. Today, it would seem that video games have long surpassed that initial nascent era, given the proliferation of games that are examined within academic and artistic contexts. Now, serious exploration of new conceptual frontiers has not only been proven possible, but also necessary if video games are to continue evolving into a more respectable and culturally significant artistic medium.

Confronting video games as more than a compilation of elements from other established modes of storytelling raises the more complicated issue of defining those frontiers that are worth exploring. Genuine simulations are one possible area of games worth exploring, and among the most straightforward; they are a logical progression from storytelling, given the opportunities granted by new technologies, such as real-time interactive virtual cameras. Interactions between player-characters and non-player-characters, even those that are hard coded–that is, those that occur for every player that experiences the game–are immensely more effective than interactions observed. To see a story element carried out onscreen details the natures of characters and sets precedents for the relationships between interacting parties. If a character involved is an avatar, a player-character, then the act that results ultimately happens due to the decisions that player has made that have, in turn, brought their avatar to a particular point in the game.

Relationships in simulated game stories belong to players in addition to their characters. Players must take some degree of responsibility for their avatars’ actions, as they themselves are the entities who propel the story forward. It is only through the input of players that game stories progress. Everything that occurs is the result of decisions made by players. This responsibility, this sense of ownership, makes events much more emotional and personal as players are not ultimately detached from the story. Whatever connection players have with the avatar is within the story; it is the bridge by which they effect events inside the game as much as they are affected by those events. If storytelling is a way of teaching significant lessons, addressing morality, or simply a means to entertain, there is no greater method of impacting an audience, no greater way to raise the stakes, than to position the audience as players who have direct emotional investments in the story.

A video game story that is effected by its audience raises a number of questions as to how it might be crafted. Instead of constructing narratives alone, game designers must also consider environmental conditions. Whereas previous storytelling mechanisms embraced the presence of the author’s guiding hand, well-crafted video game narratives are guided by an invisible hand. Narratives “told” in games invariably contain more elements than the central plot line. It is even possible to omit a central plot altogether, to instead build worlds that are stocked with a number of interesting stories, each with the potential to have numerous outcomes. As plot progression moves away from a single fixed idea presented by a single author and branches out into a wider array of possibilities that depend on player input, the genre of emergent video game stories begins to materialize. In this way, video games transcend other media because they move beyond the singular story with one title and invariable message and introduce crafted possibilities of numerous stories. To discuss a video game with other players is, in some cases, to call to mind a particular story about which you may collectively reminisce in a manner similar to discussing a film or book. In other cases, discussing a game with other players may be an opportunity to share any number of possible stories that occurred within a limited contingent reality. Certain plot points, themes, characters, and sets may or may not be similar, creating journeys that are unique and personal.

Leading video game artists have established a storytelling spectrum much broader than other mediums–their own specialized craft, yet still much more limited than reality. Their video games share many features and require much of the same skill sets to produce as the other established modes of storytelling, but they also have exclusive and distinct characteristics. On one hand, it is worrisome that, given all these unexplored frontiers of storytelling in video games, so much of the money within the commercial industry is focused on emulating the quality of other narrative mediums and then reconciling those facets of production with interactive elements to make a seamlessly packaged product. On the other hand, the video game is still a young medium that, while no longer in its infancy, is certainly struggling through its incipient phase where both players and developers are operating within cultures that are only just acknowledging the potential for exploring new conceptual conceits.

By Michael Tucker

Photo by anonymous, courtesy molleindustria

Instead, video game artists can train players to acknowledge their own agency in a way that carries over from the virtual to the real world.
Measured against this activist standard, Every Day the Same Dream is an evil application of the medium. Depicted in the video game world is a poetic facsimile of the upper-middle class nuclear family, proceeding along the tedious course of a white-collar white man’s life, and it is built in such a way that denies players any agency to change their subjected status.

Photo by anonymous, courtesy molleindustria

Characters do not even have the ability to futilely resist. The most empowered actions the characters perform are “don’t put on clothes” and “touch a cow.” This video game’s message is clear: you cannot escape. The artists have consciously depicted their target player audience; who else but those who sympathize would spend their time on such a tedious video game? It seems an ironic gesture that the real world white-collar players are so controlled and subdued that they would never dream of rebellion within this virtual white-collar world. Even the most radical actions they can consider will lead them nowhere. Their only option is suicide, which many of their colleagues have already chosen. Every Day the Same Dream fails to pose any critical commentary on contemporary life. The video game introduces nothing to its players with which they do not already agree. It is a reckless perpetuation of the imagined mythic chains that bind them, pandering to purportedly disenfranchised players.

As if reinforcing the enslavement of its players was not enough, the video game also creates an internal hierarchy of its component media to keep established forces in control of the revolutionary. Video games can be seen as a gestalt comprised of elements of many other media: visuals, sound, plot, and interaction are some of the elements that contribute to the game as a whole. However, the interactive component of Every Day the Same Dream exists only as a means of displaying the non-interactive parts. When playing, the only reason the player continues is to watch the vignettes that serve as aglets for the shoestring paths of the video game. Controlling the character provides minimal interest for players.

This hierarchical infrastructure of media is by no means unique to this video game. It seems a common idea among certain types of video game artists and thinkers that, if passive art has such an established history, then games can only be art if they embrace this traditional mode of viewership. This tradition stems, in part, from the notion that art relies on the exact and genius vision of one artist who controls precisely what the viewers are supposed to see. If video games allow the players to make choices, the artist has given up this control. Not only is this an outdated definition of art – there are plenty examples of generative, participatory, systemic, and other art forms that require the artist to relinquish some degree of control over the finished product – it is also a completely inaccurate definition of video games.

Photo by anonymous, courtesy Tale of Tales

Video game designers have absolute control over every action the player can perform within the bounds of the game, and any action the player takes that puts them beyond the realm of the game causes the player to cease playing the same game.

These passive video games are not solely coming from those working within the machinery of the mainstream culture industry. The most egregious offenders come from those who supposedly represent the avant-garde in video game design: self-professed conceptual artists like Tale of Tales and Jordan Magnuson, who have thought long and hard about the medium, separated themselves from external pressures, and all but declared that yes, it’s clear, the future of video games as art is to do away with the player’s agency. We’re dreadfully sorry, but it just has to go – how else can video games be art? No other form of art lets you do things. It’s for the best.

Using video games in this way demeans the potential of play and perpetuates the reign of passive art. Although it’s fast becoming a truism, it bears repeating: there is a seemingly infinite amount of squandered potential in video games. Everyone seems to acknowledge this, but almost no one is doing anything to approach that potential, either because they are paralyzed by financial necessities, enjoy creating meaningless paracosms that satisfy mainstream tastes, or are stuck in the past, making video games that prostrate themselves in front of their non-interactive artistic predecessors.

By Yomi

Someone who makes games can tell you that get kind of a glorified toy box. Sometimes it’s fun to play in, sometimes it’s not.

It’s interesting how players and playtesters react when you do this. Without explicit or implicit goals, a unifying structure, or anything to unlock, most people think something like this: Hey, it’s maybe kind of neat that this guy can walk around, and bump into stuff, and you can put this thing on top of that thing, but this game is not ultimately fun enough to spend time or money on.

A lot of games have a sandbox mode or a level editor. These routinely get less attention from most players than the “actual game”.

Meanwhile, if you add goals and structure to your game, players will decide that it is worth playing.

Why is this?

Well, there are nicer and nastier reasons, and they depend on how the player is motivated.

On the one hand, we have players motivated by the challenge of the thing. Their goal with the game is to improve their skills, maybe show off to friends, maybe compete with other players. It’s the same stuff that motivates athletes. Players might learn valuable life skills: resource management, teamwork, timing jumps.

On the other hand, we have players motivated by the promise of later content. Their goal with the game is to see everything that the game has to offer, and games offer all kinds of stuff. Art, environments, characters, a story, music, the breadth and depth of the game mechanics themselves — save for the last, the kinds of things we find and value in other media.

If you’re motivated by challenge, goals and structure are a very good thing. A game can act like a coach, telling you what and how you need to improve. It can withhold complicated challenges until you’ve mastered the fundamentals. It can reward you for your especially hard work, providing extrinsic reward when the intrinsic reward isn’t strong enough. This kind of approach can be tremendously helpful when you’re making an educational game, especially one that teaches and measures a skill.

If you’re motivated by content, goals and structure are poisonous. You’re not playing the game because you enjoy the mechanics; you’re playing the game because you want to see the next thing. That is, of course, a simplification — most content-oriented games have at least somewhat compelling mechanics. But if they’re subsidiary to the content, you’ll become more frustrated and resentful with repetitive or difficult gameplay than if the mechanics were the point. Since the reward is extrinsic, you’re less willing to apply yourself to difficult tasks.

Moreover, the structure of intermittent, inconsistent reward (in the form of content) for your actions (in the form of gameplay) effectively turns the game into a Skinner box. Like casinos!

To create a game with entertaining content, you have to accept this tradeoff: if you want your players to work to earn the content, you can’t challenge them too much, or they’ll get frustrated along the way.

So players expect that a game will contain goals and structure, and there’s a temptation for developers to conform to this expectation.

But while this is appealing to players — for better or for worse — and therefore dominant in games, these conventions aren’t really necessitated by the medium. If you’ve been playing traditionally structured games for a long time, it’s hard to think of games without explicit goals or reward structures. But doing so can be instructive in making better games, and in extending the benefits of games into other domains.

Moreover, by omitting goals and reward structures, you can avoid the detrimental effects they have on many games:

An Interlude Leading Up To More Detrimental Effects that Goals and Reward Structures Have on Many Games

A common way of coming up with a full game is actually to start by making a toy — a gameplay prototype that doesn’t have goals or structure, whose sole purpose is to find a nugget of fun that can be expanded into a full game.

World of Goo and Crayon Physics Deluxe, for example, started as simple one-week prototypes. Nintendo has a trick that I will call an empty room test: before a protagonist is allowed to explore the game world at large — that is, before the developers are allowed to create the game world to begin with —, the protagonist has to be fun to play with while just running and messing around in an empty room. The idea is that if the core interaction of the game — building a tower of goo, drawing physical objects with a crayon, and navigating the environment, respectively — is fun, that fun will spread throughout the entire game. It’s a simple strategy, and it’s yielded a lot of success for a lot of developers. And it’s very easy to tell, as a player, whether it’s a process that was applied during development: do you ever find yourself messing around instead of making progress?

To add a goal and a challenge to a toy, in order to make it into a game, you need to decide what you want your player to get good at, and you need to find some way of measuring their success.

In Super Mario Bros., for example, the challenge is to master Mario’s running and jumping behavior and quirks, so that you’re able to navigate a 2D environment, touching the things you want to touch (coins, mushrooms), and avoiding the ones you don’t (fire, mushrooms).

The Mario development team measured this by designing a sequence of levels — if you get past this level, it’s because you were able to jump over this, and under this, and avoid this turtle.

In Tetris, the challenge is to get really fast at assembling a 2D puzzle. Inventor Alexey Pajitnov measured this by recording your progress one horizontal line at a time.

Kyle Gabler designed World of Goo to reward players for using as few goo balls as possible in building structures as fast as possible. The game doesn’t let you win levels unless a certain number of goo balls are left after you’ve finished constructing, and you get a little badge for winning levels using even fewer goo balls.

Often, as a game maker, you’ll come up with a toy that you can’t easily turn into a game for one reason or another.

Maybe you can’t because it’s hard to measure player success.

For example, in a game based on dancing, drawing, or any other kind of creative activity, the computer can’t really be programmed to assess aesthetic value. So those games either aren’t graded at all, or their grading is based on your ability to recreate something that already exists — in Dance Dance Revolution, you have to follow a pre-existing dance, and in Picross, you have to follow the numbers to uncover an existing picture.

Maybe you can’t because it’s hard to determine what constitutes player success.

For example, teddy bears and rattles and books and travel vacations and model airplanes are awesome. (We can agree on at least a few of those, right?) But if you try to grade them, you end up just marginalizing the breadth of value of the thing. If I get really inspired by this book, whereas it taught you a lot on a topic you didn’t know much about, who won? If I love building model planes and you love flying them, can’t that be enough?

You don’t need to be good at these things in order to enjoy them. But a lot of games do require that you become good at them in order to see everything they offer.

Why don’t most games allow players to simply look at everything in the game? Why don’t they let players fly through the game world, watch all cutscenes at the very beginning, play with the weapons that you’re only supposed to unlock at the very end?

Because limiting players in this way — making them work to attain cool things — makes them appreciate their unlockables more once they get to them.

But it also wastes players’ time and effort. You know how games have a reputation for that? Well, that’s why.

Most games today have a linear, do-this-to-get-this structure. And it’s not always a bad thing! It’s useful for telling players a story. It’s useful for training players to gradually get better at in-game skills. It’s useful for avoiding overwhelming players with too many options for what to do at any given time.

But.

If you make a large game nowadays, most of your players won’t see most of your game, because they don’t have the time or interest to invest in beating everything. After all, some games take an entire workweek to complete! Even a short, brilliant game like Braid has only a 30% completion rate. Which is a crying shame, given that it has a terrific ending.

Blocking players off from content is probably the most frustrating thing games do. If a game offers a challenge with no reward, and a player is unable to beat it, the player only blames themselves, and decides, perhaps, that meeting the challenge isn’t worth their time and effort. But if the game prevents the player from seeing the rest of the game because he or she hasn’t done this really hard or boring thing yet, the they will become aggravated that they can’t actually see the things they played the game to see.

The technology we have available to us lets us make amazing things. The psychological frameworks we’ve become accustomed to let us keep players artificially engaged with what we make. But this comes at the expense of them actually enjoying it as much, and often it comes at the expense of them playing it at all.

These psychological frameworks shouldn’t go away for good, because they’re very useful in some circumstances. But in the circumstances where they’re detrimental, it’s worth thinking about alternative ways to achieve their benefits, and make our games, our industry, and our players a little bit healthier.

By Kelsey Higham