Against Agency (two short ramblings)

C. Thi Nguyen says that the medium of games is composed of agency. I don't know if that's true broadly, but I also think that it's definitely not true for TTRPGs. If we wanna imagine TTRPGs as being in relation to agency though maybe one thing we could do is think about anti-agency, or playful restrictions.

In a video game, agency is granted to the player through the providing of allowances. You stare at a black screen and nothing is possible. Then, a small man appears, and you can move him around, and make him jump. Actions are granted and agency is afforded through the medium. There's a certain degree of fundamental denial present. If you want agency the game doesn't structurally provide, you're shit out of luck (unless you have the skills to modify the game file).

Tabletop RPGs flip it turnways. When you sit down at a table, all actions are possible. We allow a combination of factors — most crucially the gametext, but also our culture, our ideology, our fellow players, and so on — to restrict and limit our agency, until we have a rather limited set of actions we can take. This is, however, entirely imagined. If you want agency the gametext doesn't provide, you can simply seize it.

So tabletop RPGs are anti-agency: games emerge from trying to deny agency and the players agreeing because it's fun. No agency is actually restricted.

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Okay, so what if "agency" is the wrong framework entirely for thinking about this? What if the reason all of this starts to struggle under its own weight is because agency as a concept doesn't help us understand TTRPGs?

What if instead, we think of RPGs as a system of gifts? I've been reading Braiding Sweetgrass and thinking a lot about the gift economy. What if the problem is that people think game designers wield power, when actually they just hand out gifts? A gametext is a pile of ideas and fun gifts for the players. Players utilize these gifts how they want to and then give gifts to each other. The idea of providing agency or restricting action is purely illusionary, because it's ultimately all gifts one gives someone else.

Gifts are a good metaphor here because sometimes gifts suck. Gifts can be coercive or unwelcome or unproductive. A gift is not fundamentally a good fit for you and your table. If I gave you a gift that you didn't want, then I hope you don't use it, even if it was an important component of the other gifts I gave you. I hope I also gave you the gift of understanding how these fit together, so you could make your own choices about what to do with them.

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Thinking about this following conversations with The Bonn Lab for Analog Games and Imaginative Play.