IS Entry No. 4: Agency and Immersion

Guest Lecturer: Owen (Agency, Character, and Emotion)

What is agency in a story?

Owen described agency as the choices we give the player that have the ability to affect change and the ability for personalization or expression of individuality. Of the types of agency those ones that I was intrigued by was pace and reflection, as I hadn’t considered those as elements of agency that I could manipulate as the story/game designer.

The nature of my story doesn’t leave the reader very much agency because I’m delivering it in a way that sort of “surveys” their response with the goal to hopefully serve as a reminder as they navigate similar situations in real life. Therefore, I hadn’t considered to control the pace of the story to manipulate another facet of agency. It could be a simple way that I encourage the reader to continue progressing throughout the story as there will be a pattern could get a bit repetitive.

Secondly, I was surprised to hear Owen mention ‘reflection’ because I hadn’t originally considered that to be a factor of agency. Also, I was happy that he was able to provide some insight on this topic as I wondered how I would encourage the reader to approach my story prepared to reflect in earnest. It’s a tricky situation because I’ve decided on a story idea that doesn’t have many sensational elements and requires that I successfully communicate the moral of the story in order to be effective. Therefore, it requires the willing and (to an extent) sincere participation of the reader.

This led Owen to introduce the concept of the Trust Triangle which can be applied to any relationship we engage with, and in my case is between me and the reader:

Given that the player decides that the payoff is greater than the risk, their level of trust increases which then makes them wager more risk. Therefore, in order for the reader to reflect throughout my story I have to consider how to incentivize them.

I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to implement this but I think that could be through offering another facet of the narrative with each call to action I ask of them. For example, if I’m asking my player to actively reflect on the question of “how are you feeling”, depending on what they answer it can trigger another path or part of the story that they would otherwise not get to experience.

I consider these as the extra “candy” paths to my otherwise ‘string of pearls’ linear story pathway. Also, I want to design my story so that the player can choose to repeat the story as many times as they would like. Hopefully, being able to explore different consequences to their responses, and allow them to fully understand the message behind the inception of the “game”. I think it would be incentivizing to have something as simple as a counter in the corner of the screen noting the number of ‘lives’ they’ve cycled through. When I played A Dark Room it illustrated to me that incentivization of of having the counter to game-ify the story. There are definitely technical parts I’ll have to keep in mind to see what I can actually implement in the given time but I’m excited to have these concepts in the back of mind to guide how I design this story with the player/reader’s experience in mind.