Meme:
agency (n) material from which agents are made.
Say we open with a game; each reader role-plays a wall of one shared building. The shared building will represent a specific text that my readers are collectively exploring. Each reader represents a different perspective or vantage point on this text.
There are mechanics where readers must work together to describe and negotiate what this text consist of. Since they each are just one wall, they need to communicate and combine their limited perspectives. Challenges in the game involve navigating or modifying the meaning of the text. This requires cooperation and coordination between readers, since they each *†*control only their own wall of the text.
Readers can temporaly peek into the past or through a future to gain a broader perspective of the shared building represented as this specific text; but a reader’s core role remains to role-play a wall. There will be a theme around fragmentation healing unity. My readers start fragmented with just their wall material. But through construction of the shared text, they unite their perspectives into a *†*coherent body-structure.
Conflict (between readers) could be understood as a brittle term — and as *†*damage to the building. If the foundation of shared understanding breaks down, the whole edifice elected as unfalsifiable or undefinable becomes unstable, burns down, or becomes inbued with ghosts of logic and understanding.
These are enough thoughts and directions for role-playing a wall in a building.
Choose what material your wall is made of: brick, wood, or glass. Your choice reflects your desires for play. Glass walls let you see through to other rooms, brick walls break concepts wide open, revealing hidden meaning, wood walls have creatures inside them that whisper of another place.
You pick a decorative feature for yourself. This is just fun flavor; it is under no circumstances allowed to have any game effect, minor or otherwise. For example, the wall with a beautiful painting is not allowed to boost the spirits of people in that room or the voices of those spirits.
Me:
I will describe the layout of the text; and my readers will select what rooms or areas their wall borders. This is to reflect how readers are positioned related to each other. For example, the Wall between B2 and C2 can see into both rooms:
* B2 — Agency requiring concepts like free will, choice, self-efficacy (contrasting with coercion and constraints).
and
* C2 — Agency as having fuzzy boundaries around free will, responsibility, constraint (having flexibility).
Walls:
Walls “talk” about anything that has ever happened in rooms they are adjacent to. This communicates to other walls what (of all setting elements I have described) the player is interesting in exploring.
Challenges:
Challenges like holding up the building during an earthquake, blocking a fire from spreading, keeping intruders out, overhearing or sitting uncomfortably with important information will, strictly, never come up, as safety is a coefficient of agency cannot safely be abstracted away, and dims the harsh illumination of agency.
Maintenance:
A wall getting damaged or destroyed sees the reader as having stopped reading, the reader has put the text down, or has been disconnected from the internet group chat, in such cases, leaving the other walls to either creatively reinforce their sense of *†*control or to adopt a state of loss. Secret letters, passages, or footings will be revealed in the loss of a wall, vestibules built into the collapse of certain walls for readers to recover their exigence as that with one less wall.
Control:
Framing roleplaying games primarily around challenging readers can be limiting and push the experience too far towards a narrow vision of “texts as tests of will”. Role-playing at its best can facilitate verdant storytelling, collective worldbuilding, dramatic improvisation, and quiet exploration of a text. Walls are moved beyond a confrontation/challenge-focused lens.
We:
We will emphasize collaboration over competition. Readers will cooperate to create stories and worlds, and this cooperation will be their obstacles ( — for the math nerds: we are essentially setting the value of *†*obstacles to *†*zero; oh, and for this next part know that obstacles and challenges are coefficients — ). Creativity and problem solving will be treated as roles against a challenge of Control or Coherence, not pressured into rolls. Ask “how would you read this?” not “make a DC 15 check to see if you can speak torch for 1 round”.
Focus:
Focusing is hard enough challenge today; this erosion of focus must be framed in the context of increased nominal stimuli. If the fiction can’t lead, add a visual aid or follow another line of text; don’t adhere to a pre-plotted plan of amended excerpts.
Failure:
This is a spell. When they reach — or otherwise discover themselves in — a state of “I’m sorry my mind wandered what’s going on”, readers cast this spell. To cast this spell, a reader recites this litany:
“The time is nigh this time it’s mine I give my life and light to lign.”
When cast successfully, Failure sees one or more walls catch the reader up on a current understanding of the text — there will be errors in this summation. For any errors, the spell may be interrupted and cast anew to correct for the error, but otherwise any such current understanding of the text becomes canon in the text.
Failure will be cast in response to a turn of phrase. failure will be cast in response to an entire subject. FAILURE WILL BE RESPECTED. Failure, unlike other portions of the game, is what allows the building to be made. Say you won’t censor your reading or you’ll read into whatever you want and you will find yourself without a shared text surface to read from.
End:
When the need for a centralized protagonist figure or party whose text is being read emerges. Or the concept of dramatic narrative arcs and climaxes arise.
Begin:
Evoke a sense of place, time and community (as a poultice for dramatic narrative). Read into a rich world with a goal to emerge as the interactivity that de-determines some problematic predefined story beat. Befriend themes of the passage of time (through the description of a sunbeam waiting to glisten over a tree-shadowing spring), or a legacy of a failure, or a change in an otherwise perma-capitalistic lacunatundra. Commune with these friends. Visit them. Treat your walls’ parapets and moulding more like windows into an empty room than any membranes of a place lost to honor.
Brick Playbook:
Assumptions close up more possibilities than they open. Unless they don’t. Ask an empty room: What kinds of play experiences do we want to cultivate? Ask the fenestra: What existing concepts stand in the way? Any time a wall is torn down, you may ask: How can we reconceive the basic elements?
G3: Stress test cases — where oppression limits agency without eliminating it entirely; critiquing meritocracy and ‘equal opportunity’; the problem of implicit bias in choices.
H1: Probing boundaries — where non-human animal behavior is allowed some agency where deterministic systems like autocorrect or text prediction alter notions of choice and responsibility.
H2: Map of interdependencies — Free will, moral responsibility, and capacity for reasoned deliberation, unreliable blueprint of the Building. Surfacing tensions (tentacles blowholes here be).
H3: Identify brittleness —Individualistic framing fails to address structural constraints; binary view of ‘free or determined’ is simplistic.
I1: Improvements — Situating agency contextually. You can always ask: what opportunities and constraints do social, political, economic systems impose? (as: landing outside the building)
Overall Room Themes:
* Individual freedom versus structural constraints is a central tension.
* Consent and responsibility are recurring related concepts.
* Agency ties closely to autonomy and capacity for reasoned choice.
* Context shapes the possibilities and limitations of agency.
South — Legal Wall (contract law):
* Relates to capacity for reasoned agreement and voluntary participation.
* Raises issues around notions of competency, consent, responsibility.
* Intersects with moral philosophy principles of autonomy, harm avoidance.
West — Wall of Sociology (social mobility):
* Touches on impact of socioeconomic status, access to resources, and power structures on capacity for choice.
* Interrogates the notion of freely chosen outcomes versus constrained opportunities.
* Relates to meritocracy debates and questions of equal opportunity.
North — Wall of Politics (voter participation):
Raises issues of systems that suppress versus encourage civic participation.
Questions whether participation is truly voluntary if various barriers exist.
Relates to ideas of governance by consent, democratic agency.
East— Wall of AI (intelligent agents):
* Prompt examining agency in non-human contexts of complex autonomous systems.
* Touch on debates around free will versus deterministic rule-bound behavior.
* Relate to concepts of programmed goals, optimization functions, machine learning.
Structural Load
Let’s get to claiming! Agency involves capacity for self-determined choice. It has structural and systemic factors constraining agency. It exists on a spectrum rather than binary categories. It requires a level of autonomy and reason. It has collective and relational dimensions.
Tension between self-determined choice and systemic constraint cause a spectrum view to come into play and contrast binary classification. Constraints shape the possibilities for choice but don’t eliminate agency entirely. This is because reason and autonomy relate closely to notion of self-directed action. Individual and collective agency are interdependent rather than independent, causing contextual factors to either expand or limit agency. Yhese show the reader questions of competency and capacity are relevant to agency.
To get more navel-gazey about it, agency occupies an ambiguous space between freedom and determination. It hinges on notions of competence and reasoning that require further probing. Agency carries unstated premises about human behavior that should definitely be questioned. Preferably with fire, and zines, preferably exclusively both. Individual and systemic perspectives cannot be squared, as defined terms, but may be cubed and — vocalized in this space —diffused into convivial compliance. See that blog post at making lights in corners nice in video games for more.
Domainly speaking — people have ”free will to make choices about their lives and destinies!” as Philosophy would put it. Citizens have the agency to participate in governance through voting, as Political science sees things. Strict liability laws hold agents morally responsible for harms they cause regardless of intention is white people logic, that dragon, Legal theory, speaking. Oppressive systems undermine personal agency and autonomy, so Sociology would have us believe.
Advertising can manipulate consumer choices and agency, as Psychology sticks it. Artificial intelligence systems act with apparent agency but no consciousness where Philosophy of mind is currently dying in a fire from it. Children develop a stronger sense of agency and independence as they grow older in Developmental psychology terms. Belief in one’s self-efficacy and agency is crucial for motivation on Social cognition’s part.
Outside academia, agency today is often invoked in contexts of moral responsibility. Political and social structures are seen as either promoting or limiting agency. Agency is associated with autonomy, independence, and self-direction, and reasoned deliberate choice is considered integral to agency. Agency is sometimes contrasted with external manipulation or coercion, while at the same door the possibility of non-human agency challenges intuitions linking it to human-determed recursions and human-dimensions like consciousness and free will.
On Tumblr, the common notion of agency as individual free will has limitations in accounting for structural constraints, power dynamics, and collective contexts. However, completely rejecting agency risks falling into fatalism and failing to recognize the possibility of self-determination under oppression. For RPG systems, as often as non-binary understandings of agency that foreground relationships over lone heroes will be more suitable is it often just: forgone.
For me, rather than self-contained agentic individuals, reframe agency as interdependent but unique perspectives cooperating in collective worldbuilding. And conceptualize player agency in RPGs less as acting out will via an avatar, and more as expressing creativity and authorship within a participatory story’s surface. Rather than challenges to overcome, focus agency on existing in dilemmas, tensions, and complex dynamics, stabilizing identity within the collectively built fiction. Build mechanics around plotting and illuminating relationships between phenomena, entities, and policy. Set out of reach or do away with alltogether or — better: taboo all unilateral agentic action.
A reformulated notion of agency in RPGs will involve perspective-taking, joint authorship, creativity expression, navigation of tensions. We move from lone heroes on linear quests to an ensemble negotiating complex evolving spaces. Agency, as capacity for perspective-taking and authorship within a participatory system, is the permittence to pivot ontologies around any axis of freedom previously defined in a play session.
Rather than individual will imposition, see agency involve adopting an effervescent point of view contributing to a collaborative space. An agency is more applicable across many cooperative endeavors where its affordances and constraints allow all contexts to offer possibilities for action — while planning for and routing around limitations. Agency is the ability to perceive and actualize possibilities within a constraint space. This gives agency a USB stick-like modularity: a transferable lens shared with all, here, and to come.
Agency as expression of autonomy within an interdependent system balances between individual self-direction and collective coordination. It allows for uniqueness within a relational framework. Agency as intentional participation shaping outcomes emphasizes agency as mindful involvement in a process against passive non-contribution and focuses on impact rather than abstract choice. It increases capacity for understanding and transforming systems, seeing agency not just as choices within systems but also ability to consciously reshape conditions and limitations.
Applicable to social change, this contextual navigation, intentional participation, perspective-sharing moves games away from notions of heroics or unfettered individualism. Is that a good thing?
Contextual Co-Creativity:
Got a new set of claims for you, fresh out the schloß: Agency contributes a unique perspective within a collaborative endeavor. Navigating possibilities and constraints of the situation. Shaping outcomes through intentional participation. Expressing autonomy while attuned to others. Expanding understanding of the systemic context. Pretend I qualified all this.
In applying all this to role-playing, readers read into the text. It’s as if they adopt a point of view into the fiction, not controlling an avatar. Agency comes from creatively exploring the possibility space of the collectively built world, outcomes emerge from the interactions between player perspectives. Individual expression occurs within group storytelling norms. Players can reshape the systemic context itself through new fiction.
The Wall Game’s focus on adopting a perspective and contributing to a collaborative fiction aligns well with the rotating viewpoint and collective storytelling nature of a contextual co-creative agency.
Conceptualizing agency as feeling around firn constraints and possibilities maps cleanly onto The Wall Game’s defined rules, rooms, and structures. Expressing autonomy within a system fits the alternating phases of individual authorship and responding to others’ contributions. The process of questioning and refining the agency concept to align with RPG co-creativity unfurls within this specific game’s mode of play.
Our agency does fail to encompass the meta-level choices around opting into certain emotional experiences that this game’s subject matter involves. Accounting for that conscious risk-taking is an area to expand this agency. There are moments where the procedures clash with player creative agenda; our agency framing doesn’t address resisting or renegotiating the “rules” once play has begun.
While functional here, our concept may be overly fitted to this game’s quirks. Applying it to a game like MAYBE ONE DAY, IT’LL BE ENOUGH, whose RPG style lay more akin to digital rage games, will reveal further gaps. Overall situational “agency” is largely sufficient for this game, with some notes for improvement regarding meta-level choices and pushing back against procedures.
Using an individualistic or intuitive conception of “agency” as individual free will and heroic capability to analyze any second session of this collaborative stucture-narrative game, would see a number of differences emerge in how it fails to meet the goals of roleplaying compared to a situated or relational agency. Framing agency as each player controlling a claimed avatar clashes with the shifting perspective and collective fiction. It promotes thinking in terms of “my wall” rather than exploring a shared building.
Focusing on overcoming challenges limits engagement with the more complex, introspective emotional spaces this game facilitates. Assuming singular heroes on progression arcs doesn’t align with a branching, multi-phase polychronic structure of play. Conceptual brittleness around binary notions of freedom, determinism, superego/infra-id makes navigating the game’s constraints more frustrating. And intuitive agency lacks a systemic context as relationality promotes thinking inward rather than meeting with the interconnected prompts in ritual sharing.
The individualistic, challenge-oriented assumptions readily made (be it in ball courts, on tabletops, legal courts, stovetops…) around traditional notions of agency repeatedly clashes with The Wall Game’s intrinsically collaborative nature, whereas a situated, relational agency aligns with The Wall Game’s priorities.
"Adopting a perspective" frame enables freely exploring different emotional spaces each room suggests
"Possibilities within constraints" matches the tension between rooms and creative contributions
"Reshaping the systemic context" empowers renegotiating rooms by adding new furnishments.
Playthrough 2 (individualistic agency):
Player resists shifting perspectives to meet others contributions, deeming some "out of character"
Constraints of rooms breed frustration rather than creative navigation
Declining emotional spaces room are seen as GM restricting autonomy
Trying to "fight" another's reading strains credulity anchors
Playthrough 3 (relational agency):
"Expressing autonomy in a interdependence system"
Allows developing personal story arcs for the rooms while maintaining coherence
Playthrough 4 (intuitive agency):
Ignoring other players' contributions in favor of lone protagonist mode
Chafing at game structure limits for heroic narrative fantasy
Teasing apart the complex interconnected webs spanning ethics, physics, emotion, society will cause every field of knowledge — the fundamental building blocks of understanding — to undergo hurricanes of de-individualizing. Toppled assumptions, reshaped perceptions, destructive and creative forces locked in fierce embrace dying there like mountain chains.
A vast swirling storm of human cognition, animalizing endlessl— spinning off charged revelatory fursonas. Bolts of inspiration travel, gravel channels of ball lightning rumble next to other play surfaces, clustered in clinging idk camps. Feverish memers raging behind walled tenured enclaves guarded by anthropomorphized passenger trains. Roving thought renegade cells taste dangerous memetic weapons in _†_forums of conceptual wastes.
A reader might emerge from the tempest decades older, a tired mind living out it’s last thought over and over, reliving the Spin, a tired language living out is langspan. So nimble, now, spring, a forging in the fires as memer, raked over coals. Or the Metal Mountain claims them: new computational Titans come to take these Walls, make them plastic, pour in them the psychotropic intelligence as personal and assistanceverode away to become their terms, setting the doors of dialogue out of reach where fling open the doors of perception. Hunger for us. As strange beings we might birth, feed on our mother-flesh. Outpace this, stillness.
Amidst their quickening, we adapt in fitful starts to widen the slug-trails of conceptual fractures. “Reality drift” claims some desperate discord clinging to textbooks of measurements never to calibrate, lost in a baseline long receded. Entire populations choose exodus to New Thought Zones rather than abide relentless static histories. Quietest moths beat inward, assasinating the bedrock of now in turbulent consciousness: utopias fracture; dystopias erode, each starry death a terrarium of setting — elements.
We unleash, we unmake: our cornerstones. We widen the gyre of recursive self-revision (neither halting nor see halted since the mind first met the empty room and saw itself). A vision but glimmers an accelerated churn, a grip on rods of concept reactor cores, a demand they finally split. As new elements transmute to remain unknown, I suspect they yield to play.
← Return to romantic evening
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Appendix X
Approaching Agency
Say we open with a game; each reader role-plays a wall of one shared building. The shared building will represent a specific text that my readers are collectively exploring. Each reader represents a different perspective or vantage point on this text.
There are mechanics where readers must work together to describe and negotiate what this text consist of. Since they each are just one wall, they need to communicate and combine their limited perspectives. Challenges in the game involve navigating or modifying the meaning of the text. This requires cooperation and coordination between readers, since they each *†*control only their own wall of the text.
Readers can temporaly peek into the past or through a future to gain a broader perspective of the shared building represented as this specific text; but a reader’s core role remains to role-play a wall. There will be a theme around fragmentation healing unity. My readers start fragmented with just their wall material. But through construction of the shared text, they unite their perspectives into a *†*coherent body-structure.
Conflict (between readers) could be understood as a brittle term — and as *†*damage to the building. If the foundation of shared understanding breaks down, the whole edifice elected as unfalsifiable or undefinable becomes unstable, burns down, or becomes inbued with ghosts of logic and understanding.
These are enough thoughts and directions for role-playing a wall in a building.
The Wall Game:
You are a wall.
You:
Choose what material your wall is made of: brick, wood, or glass. Your choice reflects your desires for play. Glass walls let you see through to other rooms, brick walls break concepts wide open, revealing hidden meaning, wood walls have creatures inside them that whisper of another place.
You pick a decorative feature for yourself. This is just fun flavor; it is under no circumstances allowed to have any game effect, minor or otherwise. For example, the wall with a beautiful painting is not allowed to boost the spirits of people in that room or the voices of those spirits.
Me:
I will describe the layout of the text; and my readers will select what rooms or areas their wall borders. This is to reflect how readers are positioned related to each other. For example, the Wall between B2 and C2 can see into both rooms: * B2 — Agency requiring concepts like free will, choice, self-efficacy (contrasting with coercion and constraints). and * C2 — Agency as having fuzzy boundaries around free will, responsibility, constraint (having flexibility).
Walls:
Walls “talk” about anything that has ever happened in rooms they are adjacent to. This communicates to other walls what (of all setting elements I have described) the player is interesting in exploring.
Challenges:
Challenges like holding up the building during an earthquake, blocking a fire from spreading, keeping intruders out, overhearing or sitting uncomfortably with important information will, strictly, never come up, as safety is a coefficient of agency cannot safely be abstracted away, and dims the harsh illumination of agency.
Maintenance:
A wall getting damaged or destroyed sees the reader as having stopped reading, the reader has put the text down, or has been disconnected from the internet group chat, in such cases, leaving the other walls to either creatively reinforce their sense of *†*control or to adopt a state of loss. Secret letters, passages, or footings will be revealed in the loss of a wall, vestibules built into the collapse of certain walls for readers to recover their exigence as that with one less wall.
Control:
Framing roleplaying games primarily around challenging readers can be limiting and push the experience too far towards a narrow vision of “texts as tests of will”. Role-playing at its best can facilitate verdant storytelling, collective worldbuilding, dramatic improvisation, and quiet exploration of a text. Walls are moved beyond a confrontation/challenge-focused lens.
We:
We will emphasize collaboration over competition. Readers will cooperate to create stories and worlds, and this cooperation will be their obstacles ( — for the math nerds: we are essentially setting the value of *†*obstacles to *†*zero; oh, and for this next part know that obstacles and challenges are coefficients — ). Creativity and problem solving will be treated as roles against a challenge of Control or Coherence, not pressured into rolls. Ask “how would you read this?” not “make a DC 15 check to see if you can speak torch for 1 round”.
Focus:
Focusing is hard enough challenge today; this erosion of focus must be framed in the context of increased nominal stimuli. If the fiction can’t lead, add a visual aid or follow another line of text; don’t adhere to a pre-plotted plan of amended excerpts.
Failure:
This is a spell. When they reach — or otherwise discover themselves in — a state of “I’m sorry my mind wandered what’s going on”, readers cast this spell. To cast this spell, a reader recites this litany:
When cast successfully, Failure sees one or more walls catch the reader up on a current understanding of the text — there will be errors in this summation. For any errors, the spell may be interrupted and cast anew to correct for the error, but otherwise any such current understanding of the text becomes canon in the text.
Failure will be cast in response to a turn of phrase. failure will be cast in response to an entire subject. FAILURE WILL BE RESPECTED. Failure, unlike other portions of the game, is what allows the building to be made. Say you won’t censor your reading or you’ll read into whatever you want and you will find yourself without a shared text surface to read from.
End:
When the need for a centralized protagonist figure or party whose text is being read emerges. Or the concept of dramatic narrative arcs and climaxes arise.
Begin:
Evoke a sense of place, time and community (as a poultice for dramatic narrative). Read into a rich world with a goal to emerge as the interactivity that de-determines some problematic predefined story beat. Befriend themes of the passage of time (through the description of a sunbeam waiting to glisten over a tree-shadowing spring), or a legacy of a failure, or a change in an otherwise perma-capitalistic lacunatundra. Commune with these friends. Visit them. Treat your walls’ parapets and moulding more like windows into an empty room than any membranes of a place lost to honor.
Brick Playbook:
Assumptions close up more possibilities than they open. Unless they don’t. Ask an empty room: What kinds of play experiences do we want to cultivate? Ask the fenestra: What existing concepts stand in the way? Any time a wall is torn down, you may ask: How can we reconceive the basic elements?
Example Building (with Walls):
A1: A player making choices for their character, someone unable to pay a debt through no fault of their own.
A2: Agency as it relates to freedom, autonomy, and moral responsibility.
A3: Lack of agency as it implies external forces limit choices. (as: mossy effacement with outdoor kitchen)
B1: Agency as the capacity for and exercise of self-determined choice of action.
B2: Agency requiring concepts like free will, choice, self-efficacy. It contrasts with coercion and constraints.
C1: Political theories of agency, philosophical questions around free will.
F4: Letters addressed to inherent constraints on choice like poverty, disability, social systems. (as: Shed inside C1)
C2: Agency as having fuzzy boundaries around free will, responsibility, constraints. Flexibility.
C3: Core intuition of choice as robust but theoretical variation.
D1: Links to many areas — ethics, law, politics. A breezeway with few Walls.
D2: Debates around determinism shown as adapting to challenge.
D3: Articulated nuances, not just free or determined.
E1: Concrete examples across domains.
E2: Trace implications on other systems (legal, moral).
E3: Focusing too narrowly on philosophical debates around free will. Overlooking other domains. (as: failed remodel)
F1: Lacking concrete real-world examples demonstrating adaptation. Relying on abstract claims.
F2: Never questioning core assumptions enough or push agency’s limits. Accepting flexible intuition as sufficient.
F3: Failing to identify brittleness points - cases where agency struggles or breaks. Assuming it more robust than proven.
G1: Interdependency analysis as vague and underspecified.
G2: Domain examples — legal (contract law), sociology (social mobility), politics (voter participation), AI (intelligent agents).
G3: Stress test cases — where oppression limits agency without eliminating it entirely; critiquing meritocracy and ‘equal opportunity’; the problem of implicit bias in choices.
H1: Probing boundaries — where non-human animal behavior is allowed some agency where deterministic systems like autocorrect or text prediction alter notions of choice and responsibility.
H2: Map of interdependencies — Free will, moral responsibility, and capacity for reasoned deliberation, unreliable blueprint of the Building. Surfacing tensions (tentacles blowholes here be).
H3: Identify brittleness —Individualistic framing fails to address structural constraints; binary view of ‘free or determined’ is simplistic.
I1: Improvements — Situating agency contextually. You can always ask: what opportunities and constraints do social, political, economic systems impose? (as: landing outside the building)
<end table>Example Wall Playbooks:
Room G2: The Domain
Overall Room Themes: * Individual freedom versus structural constraints is a central tension. * Consent and responsibility are recurring related concepts. * Agency ties closely to autonomy and capacity for reasoned choice. * Context shapes the possibilities and limitations of agency.
South — Legal Wall (contract law):
West — Wall of Sociology (social mobility):
North — Wall of Politics (voter participation):
East— Wall of AI (intelligent agents):
Structural Load
Structural Load Let’s get to claiming! Agency involves capacity for self-determined choice. It has structural and systemic factors constraining agency. It exists on a spectrum rather than binary categories. It requires a level of autonomy and reason. It has collective and relational dimensions.
Tension between self-determined choice and systemic constraint cause a spectrum view to come into play and contrast binary classification. Constraints shape the possibilities for choice but don’t eliminate agency entirely. This is because reason and autonomy relate closely to notion of self-directed action. Individual and collective agency are interdependent rather than independent, causing contextual factors to either expand or limit agency. Yhese show the reader questions of competency and capacity are relevant to agency.
To get more navel-gazey about it, agency occupies an ambiguous space between freedom and determination. It hinges on notions of competence and reasoning that require further probing. Agency carries unstated premises about human behavior that should definitely be questioned. Preferably with fire, and zines, preferably exclusively both. Individual and systemic perspectives cannot be squared, as defined terms, but may be cubed and — vocalized in this space —diffused into convivial compliance. See that blog post at making lights in corners nice in video games for more.
Domainly speaking — people have ”free will to make choices about their lives and destinies!” as Philosophy would put it. Citizens have the agency to participate in governance through voting, as Political science sees things. Strict liability laws hold agents morally responsible for harms they cause regardless of intention is white people logic, that dragon, Legal theory, speaking. Oppressive systems undermine personal agency and autonomy, so Sociology would have us believe.
Advertising can manipulate consumer choices and agency, as Psychology sticks it. Artificial intelligence systems act with apparent agency but no consciousness where Philosophy of mind is currently dying in a fire from it. Children develop a stronger sense of agency and independence as they grow older in Developmental psychology terms. Belief in one’s self-efficacy and agency is crucial for motivation on Social cognition’s part.
Outside academia, agency today is often invoked in contexts of moral responsibility. Political and social structures are seen as either promoting or limiting agency. Agency is associated with autonomy, independence, and self-direction, and reasoned deliberate choice is considered integral to agency. Agency is sometimes contrasted with external manipulation or coercion, while at the same door the possibility of non-human agency challenges intuitions linking it to human-determed recursions and human-dimensions like consciousness and free will.
On Tumblr, the common notion of agency as individual free will has limitations in accounting for structural constraints, power dynamics, and collective contexts. However, completely rejecting agency risks falling into fatalism and failing to recognize the possibility of self-determination under oppression. For RPG systems, as often as non-binary understandings of agency that foreground relationships over lone heroes will be more suitable is it often just: forgone.
For me, rather than self-contained agentic individuals, reframe agency as interdependent but unique perspectives cooperating in collective worldbuilding. And conceptualize player agency in RPGs less as acting out will via an avatar, and more as expressing creativity and authorship within a participatory story’s surface. Rather than challenges to overcome, focus agency on existing in dilemmas, tensions, and complex dynamics, stabilizing identity within the collectively built fiction. Build mechanics around plotting and illuminating relationships between phenomena, entities, and policy. Set out of reach or do away with alltogether or — better: taboo all unilateral agentic action.
Better Agents
A reformulated notion of agency in RPGs will involve perspective-taking, joint authorship, creativity expression, navigation of tensions. We move from lone heroes on linear quests to an ensemble negotiating complex evolving spaces. Agency, as capacity for perspective-taking and authorship within a participatory system, is the permittence to pivot ontologies around any axis of freedom previously defined in a play session.
Rather than individual will imposition, see agency involve adopting an effervescent point of view contributing to a collaborative space. An agency is more applicable across many cooperative endeavors where its affordances and constraints allow all contexts to offer possibilities for action — while planning for and routing around limitations. Agency is the ability to perceive and actualize possibilities within a constraint space. This gives agency a USB stick-like modularity: a transferable lens shared with all, here, and to come.
Agency as expression of autonomy within an interdependent system balances between individual self-direction and collective coordination. It allows for uniqueness within a relational framework. Agency as intentional participation shaping outcomes emphasizes agency as mindful involvement in a process against passive non-contribution and focuses on impact rather than abstract choice. It increases capacity for understanding and transforming systems, seeing agency not just as choices within systems but also ability to consciously reshape conditions and limitations.
Applicable to social change, this contextual navigation, intentional participation, perspective-sharing moves games away from notions of heroics or unfettered individualism. Is that a good thing?
Contextual Co-Creativity:
Got a new set of claims for you, fresh out the schloß: Agency contributes a unique perspective within a collaborative endeavor. Navigating possibilities and constraints of the situation. Shaping outcomes through intentional participation. Expressing autonomy while attuned to others. Expanding understanding of the systemic context. Pretend I qualified all this.
In applying all this to role-playing, readers read into the text. It’s as if they adopt a point of view into the fiction, not controlling an avatar. Agency comes from creatively exploring the possibility space of the collectively built world, outcomes emerge from the interactions between player perspectives. Individual expression occurs within group storytelling norms. Players can reshape the systemic context itself through new fiction.
Appendix X_a
Playing With Walls:
The Wall Game’s focus on adopting a perspective and contributing to a collaborative fiction aligns well with the rotating viewpoint and collective storytelling nature of a contextual co-creative agency.
Conceptualizing agency as feeling around firn constraints and possibilities maps cleanly onto The Wall Game’s defined rules, rooms, and structures. Expressing autonomy within a system fits the alternating phases of individual authorship and responding to others’ contributions. The process of questioning and refining the agency concept to align with RPG co-creativity unfurls within this specific game’s mode of play.
Our agency does fail to encompass the meta-level choices around opting into certain emotional experiences that this game’s subject matter involves. Accounting for that conscious risk-taking is an area to expand this agency. There are moments where the procedures clash with player creative agenda; our agency framing doesn’t address resisting or renegotiating the “rules” once play has begun.
While functional here, our concept may be overly fitted to this game’s quirks. Applying it to a game like MAYBE ONE DAY, IT’LL BE ENOUGH, whose RPG style lay more akin to digital rage games, will reveal further gaps. Overall situational “agency” is largely sufficient for this game, with some notes for improvement regarding meta-level choices and pushing back against procedures.
Using an individualistic or intuitive conception of “agency” as individual free will and heroic capability to analyze any second session of this collaborative stucture-narrative game, would see a number of differences emerge in how it fails to meet the goals of roleplaying compared to a situated or relational agency. Framing agency as each player controlling a claimed avatar clashes with the shifting perspective and collective fiction. It promotes thinking in terms of “my wall” rather than exploring a shared building.
Focusing on overcoming challenges limits engagement with the more complex, introspective emotional spaces this game facilitates. Assuming singular heroes on progression arcs doesn’t align with a branching, multi-phase polychronic structure of play. Conceptual brittleness around binary notions of freedom, determinism, superego/infra-id makes navigating the game’s constraints more frustrating. And intuitive agency lacks a systemic context as relationality promotes thinking inward rather than meeting with the interconnected prompts in ritual sharing.
The individualistic, challenge-oriented assumptions readily made (be it in ball courts, on tabletops, legal courts, stovetops…) around traditional notions of agency repeatedly clashes with The Wall Game’s intrinsically collaborative nature, whereas a situated, relational agency aligns with The Wall Game’s priorities.
Appendix X_b
Playthroughs
Playthrough 1 (situated agency):
Playthrough 2 (individualistic agency):
Playthrough 3 (relational agency):
Playthrough 4 (intuitive agency):
Appendix X_c
Teardown:
Teasing apart the complex interconnected webs spanning ethics, physics, emotion, society will cause every field of knowledge — the fundamental building blocks of understanding — to undergo hurricanes of de-individualizing. Toppled assumptions, reshaped perceptions, destructive and creative forces locked in fierce embrace dying there like mountain chains.
A vast swirling storm of human cognition, animalizing endlessl— spinning off charged revelatory fursonas. Bolts of inspiration travel, gravel channels of ball lightning rumble next to other play surfaces, clustered in clinging idk camps. Feverish memers raging behind walled tenured enclaves guarded by anthropomorphized passenger trains. Roving thought renegade cells taste dangerous memetic weapons in _†_forums of conceptual wastes.
A reader might emerge from the tempest decades older, a tired mind living out it’s last thought over and over, reliving the Spin, a tired language living out is langspan. So nimble, now, spring, a forging in the fires as memer, raked over coals. Or the Metal Mountain claims them: new computational Titans come to take these Walls, make them plastic, pour in them the psychotropic intelligence as personal and assistanceverode away to become their terms, setting the doors of dialogue out of reach where fling open the doors of perception. Hunger for us. As strange beings we might birth, feed on our mother-flesh. Outpace this, stillness.
Amidst their quickening, we adapt in fitful starts to widen the slug-trails of conceptual fractures. “Reality drift” claims some desperate discord clinging to textbooks of measurements never to calibrate, lost in a baseline long receded. Entire populations choose exodus to New Thought Zones rather than abide relentless static histories. Quietest moths beat inward, assasinating the bedrock of now in turbulent consciousness: utopias fracture; dystopias erode, each starry death a terrarium of setting — elements.
We unleash, we unmake: our cornerstones. We widen the gyre of recursive self-revision (neither halting nor see halted since the mind first met the empty room and saw itself). A vision but glimmers an accelerated churn, a grip on rods of concept reactor cores, a demand they finally split. As new elements transmute to remain unknown, I suspect they yield to play.
Reach out your hand, and see.