The Theme of Agency in Interactive Media

The Theme of Agency in Interactive Media
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The Theme of Agency in Interactive Media

One of the profound markers of the fourth industrial revolution is the rise of interactive media (IM). Also called interactive multimedia, IM refers to any computer-based electronic system that allows users to control, combine, and manipulate different media types, including sound, text, video, graphics, and animation. Examples of the most common forms of interactive media include websites, interactive TV, gaming, mobile telephony, and interactive advertisement. In some ways, IM provides users with a sense of agency. According to Moore (2016), a sense of agency refers to controlling actions and their consequences. Thus, concerning interactive media, a sense of agency implies that users have a significant level of control over actions or outcomes that occur within the media due to media-user interaction. Or do they? According to Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009), in interactive media like video gaming, pleasures of the agency are often co-opted to reinforce social inequities. In this view, while users may feel they have a sense of agency in the interactive media, it is only up to a certain extent after which users have no control over actions or their outcomes.

User Agency in Video Games

            The agency is how a player or user can invoke or cause a significant change in the gaming world when it comes to video games. In other words, player agency is the ability to impact the story through gameplay or game design. Without player agency, players or users become pawns used to tell another person's story. In this case, a user has no power to manipulate the narrative or the storyline. Since many people are frustrated by such objectification, user agency is vital for keeping users glued to the game and making them part of the story. There are two types of agency games: low and agency and high. In low-agency games, there is limited interactivity, busywork, or nudging. On the other hand, high-agency games allow players to significantly change the state or world of objects within the gaming world with every action.

            Thus, there are three criteria by which an agency can be defined. The first is that the player controls their own character's decisions. In essence, the user decides the actions or decisions their characters or avatars will take in the video game. The very nature of developing avatars to fit user or player needs is part of the agency. Secondly, the user decides to create an avatar with a specific impact level within the game environment. To this end, the third criterion is that the player is sufficiently informed of the consequences to anticipate before making decisions within the gaming environment. Based on this criterion, it is almost impossible to have a game that does not provide som...