Game Design Decathlon - Week Two

Frost on Mars (2008)

I want to talk about agency. It's an important part of what makes a game a game, but it's a heady concept to get your head around. Broadly speaking agency is the capability to consciously affect change within a space. We're all humans here [citation needed] so we all have agency in the world around us. You pick up a pen and let go, it'll fall. You caused a change, then a larger system took over when you relinquished control. That's how I define agency.

Your agency as a player within the confines of a game is malleable, as your limits are defined by the designer.It's important to afford the player some form of agency, otherwise they're just films made by people who can't unionize. To me, a game can give the player two forms of agency; direct and indirect.

Direct Agency is pretty much what you'd think. You press left and something moves left. You press A, something happens. Think Mario. You tell Mario to jump, he jumps.

Indirect Agency is a little bit more complicated. You as the player have the ability to affect things which other aspects of the game are influenced by. Think Lemmings, you mark down where you want some stairs, and if a lemming encounters it, they'll start building some stairs.

I find indirect agency very interesting as a concept, and I have a few thoughts on how it's best used. Taking it out of a context of something like Lemmings, it works better when the user is placed in a position of oversight. Simulators and to a lesser extent RTS games.

Which is what leads me to my concept. Something people in reality don't fully have agency over at the moment is the exploration of Mars. Currently the only planet we know of fully populated by robots. Sure, there's people at Mission Control telling the rover what to do, but with a 5-20 minute delay between telling the rovers what to do, and them responding, you can hardly call it direct.

So what I'm picturing is a set of systems where you iteratively learn more and more about a planet, in line with receiving technological improvements that afford you more options the next time around. Things like launching probes that relay telemetry data, until you can replace that with satellite imagery. Immobile landers a la Viking being replaced by small rovers akin to Sojourner, which are in turn replaced by larger rovers a la Curiosity.

I can picture some level of abstraction between the player and their actions, be it through the delay between input and action, or through just giving the player the ability to tailor the probe/lander/vehicle to the specific mission, and then watching it unfold based on their choices.