On Player Agency
Older Types of Media
I do and always have enjoyed good books and good movies (and sometimes even bad ones!). Books are hands-down the best way of telling stories - they can describe everything, including a character’s thoughts and feelings, in as great detail or as vaguely as the author desires. Descriptions can be as literal, or as figurative as the author desires. Actions can be colored through use of adverbs and comparisons. Incerdibly deep plotlines can be built up and unfold over many hundreds of pages.
Movies are the best way of showing stories. They don’t have that power of description that books have - but instead they have the benefit of being audiovisual, and of the powerful artistic expression of the filmed actors. Sound and music can evoke strong feelings, just as the actors can express feelings with their bodies, faces and voices. This can be very emotionally impactful, in a way that’s hard to achieve with textual descriptions.
This gives movies some clear strengths and weaknesses compared to books. And the well-known movie-credo “show, don’t tell” expresses that movies should fully embrace their own unique strengths, and not just emulate the story-telling methods of books or theater. When movies were young, it took them years to learn this lesson, but over time they did evolve their own expressive language and methods of showing things to the audience. The result of showing, not telling, and using it’s own expressive methods catering to the unique strengths of film, is what causes this “cinematic” feeling, we all know and love.
Movies can of course emulate books and theater as well. They can use narrators to describe exposition like a book would, or they could have characters say out loud how they feel or what they think like theather would - instead of showing these things visually. That’s fine too, if that’s the feel the director is going for - but it’s decidedly NOT cinematic that way.
Video Games
Video games are different though, because of their interactivity. When reading a book or watching a movie, you are put into the role of a passive observer. The writers and directors have decided what is going to happen long ahead of time - and you just sit there, and watch things unfold as they are depicted. It’s one-way communication. But in a game, you take control, you press the buttons, you decide what happens. You, as the player, are an active participant, and you have agency.
This is where the unique strengths of games lie. They offer gameplay, and player agency. In some specific ways, video games have more in common with board games, than they do with books or movies. But where movies have learned this lesson of “show, don’t tell”, games would have to learn their own lessong of “let play, don’t show” - and they seem to be severly struggling with that.
Games do use text do explain or describe things - you have ingame journals, quest-texts, sometimes talking narrator voices even - and they do use cut-scenes and scripted events to show. But while you read that text, while you watch that cut-scene or scripted event unfold - you are put into the role of a passive observer again, and gameplay sort of pauses for a while. You could even argue, that for those short intervals, the game ceases to be a game, because you are not playing, and your player agency is severly limited. And no, having a quick-time-event prompt you to “press X not to die” is NOT player agency.
Games use recordings (both voice and motion capture) of real actors, sometimes even Hollywood stars, for their cut-scenes. Games try hard to be “cinematic” - which literally means to emulate movies. But anything pre-recorded inherently makes you a passive observer. You cannot influence or have agency over what has been recorded - you can only watch it play back. The best you might get, is branching storylines… but even that is little more than emulating “choose your own adventure” style books. What it is decidedly NOT, is gameplay.
And in fact, this discrepancy between gameplay and the pre-recorded story, has not gone unnoticed. With many games switching between phases where the player has agency, and phases where the player watches recorded story - contradictions pop up. Because this is so common in games, it has even gotten it’s own name: “ludonarrative dissonance”. Why does someone have to die in a cut-scene, when you still got dozens of Phoenix Downs in your backpack? How can one single shot in a cut-scene kill a companion that regularly absorbed hundreds of shots while you were playing? How can you be the shining hero, while murdering people by the hundreds without any remorse and stealing everything you can get your hands on?
Every time you cannot talk to others about something that happens in a game, because that would be spoilers - you know you are just a passive observer with no agency. And the game is just emulating other types of media. Other types of media which are decisively better at what the game is trying to do there. Movies will always be more cinematic, because you can’t be more “movie-like” than a movie is.
But every time you did something in a game, that makes for an interesting story to tell others - you have experienced some of the unique strengths of games. The “story” that you are telling, was born from gameplay and came about through your agency. And that story isn’t going to be as well-written as a book, or as well-acted as pre-recorded Hollywood starts would - but it doesn’t have to be, as long as it is uniquely your story.
And that’s what games have to aim for, if they want to learn to “let play, don’t show”. They have to evolve their own expressive language and methods, that work through gameplay. Games have to stop being cinematic, and have to embrace being “game-a-matic”. We don’t even have a word coined for that, and the closest term we do have: “gamey”, is negatively connotated. That should be very, very telling.
The Stories Gameplay Can Tell
In an ironman playthrough on classic difficulty of XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012) I had a soldier by the name of Maria Garcia (I believe). Just a randomly generated soldier, like all of them are. She made through the first few missions unharmed and became an assault. She was fierce and fearless - always charging in ahead of the rest, and she was soon leading the alien kill count by quite some margin. She got badly injured during the teams’ first encounter with a Sectopod. Also saw a lot of her teammates die in that same fateful mission. But someone managed to drag her body back to the lander, and to flee the blood bath. That blow nearly meant the end of XCOM. Between funding cuts and being short on experienced soldiers, things looked very bleak for a while, and I barely hang on. But eventually Maria recovered, other soldiers had leveled up, and the main team was to back to strength again. Maria would go on to be the one to deliver the final blow to the final boss and thus “win” the game. Many other players may have experienced similar stories happen in their own playthroughs - but to me, the story of Maria still feels special, and that’s why I still remember it, even after all those years - while barely remembering the actual plot of the game.
In my first playthrough attempt of Rimworld, I had a lady - sadly don’t remember her name - who was the heart and soul of the settlement. She was the main cook, and also a relatively good medic, but most importantly she was good-natured and helped keep the spirits up, even when the goings where tough. At some point she got badly injured in a raid - and the wound would never fully heal. She’d get back to working hard, and uplifting others - but there always was little pain in her leg. She got married and was pretty happy for a while, but then her husband died in a mining accident, and between that and the residual pain in her leg, she’d develop an alcohol addiction. It was mostly under control at first, and I felt it was okay, if she skipped a day at work every now and then, because he had sleep of a night of binging. I kinda felt bad for still having her work hard at age 72, but the colony was struggling, the replacement cook I’ve been training had died, and the other medic/doctor also worked a second job where they couldn’t be easily replaced. Her work output slowly declined, and that only increased the overall pressure on the colony, since so much had come to rely on her. During one last drinking binge in the midst of Winter she finally snapped, got into a fist-fight, and ran off into the freezing cold. By the time she came back to her senses and could be brought inside, she already was gravely ill, and passed away a few days later. And without her support and positive nature, the whole colony spiraled into chaos and was lost soon after.
There’s also that famous story about cats getting drunk in Dwarf Fortress because of a bug. My own playing of Dwarf Fortress produced many stories as well. Beer shortages caused by not having enough barrels to actually hold the liquid gold that was being produced. Sudden appearance of a were-rabbit tearing up the soldier squad real good. Food going bad in the storage causing clouds of miasma to appear, making dwarfes sick. An underground farm caving in. A dwarf falling into and drowning in the water reservoir they were building for winter, when the creek would freeze up. Demonic snatchers stealing children - and lots and lots of other stuff. But with a fortress quickly growing beyond 50 or 70 inhabitants, to me these stories tend to feel a little less personal. It’s hard to keep an close eye on that many dwarves, so a lot of stuff that is happening, might not even be visible to the player. Still, the game is very good at producing these kinds of stories.
I do love stories like these, because nobody wrote them. They just happened in the game, during gameplay.
Massively Multiplayer
Another type of game that is very good at producing such unique stories, are MMORPGs. Reason being, that player to player interactions are highely dynamic, and for such stories to emerge, you do need dynamic systems that they can emerge from. But even then, some games are more dynamic than others. I like to call the latter “massivey single player games” - because of how much they combat and limit player agency and dynamic player to player interactions. These games are hell-bent on making each player go through exactly the same pre-recorded, static questlines as everyone else, but completely independent of each other. And have a story that does not acknowledge, that other “chosen ones” exist - while the game is actually chokfull of them.
But when somebody starts a war in EvE online, that might be a story big enough to have actual journalists of the gaming press report on it. Just like they did, when the fuel-rats organised a complicated rescure operation to help a stranded space-ship that had gone further out into the universe of Elite Dangerous than anyone else before. The story of Lord British getting roasted by a wall of fire in Ultima Online is a classic that keeps getting retold even twenty years later. And the first appearance of a Jedi initiate in Star Wars Galaxies was a story that got widely reported upon, at the time.
But player stories don’t have to be that big and impressive. Nothing I do in a game will ever be reported on by a real world news paper - and that’s perfectly fine. That’s not the important part. What matters is that each player can experience their very own, unique, individual stories. Stories that emerge from gameplay, and aren’t pre-written and pre-recorded. Stories that the player actually was a part of - instead of just being a passive observer. And even if no tell-worthy stories emerge - having that sort of player agency and freedom still is a very unique strength of games, and something that books or movies can never do. And the games which do produce such stories, those are the ones actually try to “let play, don’t show” - instead of just putting the player on pre-determined rails.