Agency As Commitment To Meaning: Communicative Competence In Games

Agency has long been considered one of the core pleasures of interacting with digital games. Recent treatments of agency in games culture and game design have grown increasingly concerned with providing the player with limitless freedom to act. While this describes one form of pleasure, in narratively focused games it has the unfortunate consequence of pitting the agency of the player against the will of the designer. We contend that for narrative games it is valuable to refocus our definitions of agency on the notion of meaning, and propose a treatment of agency that emphasises communicative commitments. This form of agency draws on ideas from speech act theory, and relies on a degree of 'communicative competence' on the part of both the game designer and player in order to function. We discuss mechanisms for training players in the necessary literacies needed to commit to meanings in games, and provide an example analysis of a game that successfully accomplishes this task.