I keep wanting to recommend Stacey Mason's Responsiveness in Narrative Systems, but “go read this 300 page PhD thesis” is asking a lot, so here is a nearly-3000-word overview of the big ideas, both as an introduction and as an invitation to dip into the full document for (much) more depth.
It's entirely possible I'm mistaken in parts of my understanding (I discovered this time through that I was not clear on some of the distinctions between formal/material/real affordances) but none of these ideas and examples are mine: I'm almost entirely quoting and paraphrasing, hopefully without misrepresenting it too much.
Also, this is almost entirely focused on the first half of the paper: a lot of the best stuff is in the back half, but once you have the basic theory I think you can sample the rest as your interests suggest.
—Josh Grams, July 2024
So.
This paper asks us to view interactivity as a dialogue between a player and a game system that take turns considering the other's input and answering it. It frames agency as the player experience of this loop, and builds a theory of responsiveness as the game's side of the loop: how much (and in what ways) does the system change its communication as a result of player actions? Does it offer direct feedback? Does it shift the player's expectations of what their character can do? Does it change its mechanics?
The goal is that this model should:
This chapter lays out Mason's philosophy and values for this investigation:
It explicitly does not ask whether this the perfect set of crystalline boxes to divide the world into. Instead it's about investigating what we might learn by looking at games and at our design practices from this perspective.
“Games and narrative are not at odds. Or at least, they do not need to be. [...] I believe that agency within a narrative is the true magic of our medium.”
Tension between agency and narrative, between author and player, can often be usefully analyzed as failures of alignment between player and author. Perhaps the player doesn't accept the offered fantasy; perhaps the author (inadvertently or otherwise) breaks the player's trust by failing to follow through on the possibilities the game seems to promise.
Games offer a variety of pleasure-experiences—they “may be trying to evoke catharsis, disgust, or cerebral reflection [...] Chess is striving for a very different pleasure-experience from The Sims.” And we need to consider what games are (or seem to be) attempting in our analysis instead of crushing them into one-size-fits-all ideas of what is “good” or “fun.”
This chapter looks at existing models of player agency, attempts to reconcile various theories, and presents the Listen-Think-Speak loop model, where the player and game take turns listening to the other's “speech,” thinking about it, and then “speaking” in turn.
Agency is a central pleasure of interactive media - perhaps because of this, we often lump everything pleasurable about interactive media into the term “agency” and it has gotten unhelpfully watered down. For instance, the ability to successfully navigate a platforming challenge or to employ a preferred tactical strategy in a puzzle game are more usefully considered a separate thing. (Josh: which isn't named: maybe “skill” would be a good term?)
Agency and interactivity also often get lumped together. But again, here we're using interactivity to mean the whole Listen-Think-Speak loop, and separating out agency as the player experience of this loop.
Agency requires intention - while some players may feel agency whenever they discover that their actions have affected the game world (even if they made the inciting choice at random), most of us need to feel that we acted with some intention, and this paper is starting from that assumption.
This is also where the term “counterfactuality” is defined as the existence of roads-not-taken. (Josh: I had trouble remembering this meaning: my brain wanted it to attach to the current path, instead of meaning that other paths exist that are not true in this playthrough. I don't know why, but this took a long time to sink in for me.)
Agency is bounded by game mechanics but also by story genre and other implications about what the player should expect to be able to do. Again, agency within a narrative.
When we play a first-person shooter, for example, the fact that we cannot stop to write poetry for the enemies does not feel like an imposition on our agency. If we found we could not fire our gun, on the other hand, that would certainly feel like a limitation, despite the fact that firing guns in real life is a relatively rare occurrence.
—Wardrip-Fruin, Mateas, Dow, Sali: Agency Reconsidered
We borrow the term affordance from Don Norman's 1988 book The Philosophy of Everyday Things. An affordance is an action that an interface strongly suggests: “the handle on a teapot affords picking up the teapot with your hand. The handle cries out to be grasped.”
Michael Mateas further divides these into formal affordances (the motivations suggested by the narrative, genre, etc.) and material affordances (the actions and strategies offered by the game's interface and mechanics).
Agency requires buy-in and trust - so again, try to consider failures of agency as failures of alignment between game and player rather than a fundamental tension between agency and narrative.
Karen Tanenbaum and Theresa J. Tanenbaum define agency as “the process by which participants in an interaction commit to meaning.” They argue that while the freedom offered by agency is often an illusion, the discussion of whether this illusion is real is misguided.
Agency is felt through feedback - you need to find out (in some way) that your choices were heard by the game. But agency is dependent on feedback, not consequences - it's useful to separate immediate feedback that the game understood your input (Josh: and intent?) from the later consequences of that feedback, which may recontextualize or subvert the player's intent.
Agency exists at different levels of abstraction simultaneously - in a fighting game, you might:
Mason then discusses Marie Laure-Ryan's categorizations of types of interactivity, and Sam Kabo-Ashwell's A Bestiary of Player Agency, and ends chapter 3 by going into more detail on agency as the player side of a Listen-Think-Speak loop.
Where did the term “affordance” come from? Do we think of affordances as inherent properties of an object, or a user's purely mental construction, or some combination of the two? How does other work define and theorize about the term?
It discusses the term's origin in ecological psychology with James J. Gibson's 1979 theorizing about how animals perceive the world and its popularization in interface and product design through Don Norman's 1988 book The Psychology of Everyday Things.
It continues with Michael Mateas's division (initially for interactive theater) into formal and material affordances. Formal affordances are the motivations suggested by the genre and the “dramatic probabilities” of the plot so far, versus the material affordances, which are the possible actions and strategies constrained by the structure and vocabulary of the medium. Mateas argues that agency is “maximized” when these two are in balance: that is, when actors have the dramatic vocabulary to express the things that the unfolding plot motivates them to do.
The chapter then adds Rogelio Cardona-Rivera and Michael Young's model of perceived/real affordances and feedback, which shifts into a more pragmatic mode, distinguishing not between motivation and action, but between what players think is possible and what is actually supported by the game's systems.
Mason points out that “It is tempting to simplify ‘real affordances’ to ‘system features’ but we must remember that affordances operate at multiple levels of abstraction.” So real affordances are not just what buttons you press but also learning enemy behaviors and strategies or perhaps the “meta” of multi-player games (which shifts over time as players discover new strategies or developers tweak the balance).
The chapter concludes:
The idea that agency is achieved when what the player is motivated to do as motivated by formal affordance is balanced by what the player can do as mediated by material affordance makes sense as a general abstraction, but the extended vocabulary offered by other models of affordances, aided by a deeper understanding of the assumptions therein, allows us to fill in additional details and add information to the model.
Sidebar: a couple favorite quotes from this chapter: Mason points out that Agency, Reconsidered applies its ideas to:
Super Mario Bros, a game whose player motivations more arguably arise from mechanical motivators and feedback than from a player's narrative expectations of plumbers in mushroom worlds invaded by tyrant turtles.
Also this excellent paragraph:
For games, I would argue that a lot of pleasure lives in the gap between the player’s mental model and the system’s true nature. The constant loop of a player realizing the outcomes of her actions—exploratory or performatory—and the process of updating that loop is what keeps motivation and keeps the player motivated to continue moving forward. The gap is the carrot. As soon as our mental model stops expanding, a game becomes “solved.”
One of the most exciting promises of our medium is the feeling that a system has heard our intent and has responded. Agency is the ability to take meaningful action — form an intent, take an action, and have the system carry out that action — but in order to do that, the system must understand us. At its most basic, the system does what we request; but at its most brilliant, it collaborates with us, offers a response that demonstrates that it has recognized our input and is taking it into consideration as it offers us new possibilities. Responsiveness, like agency, is an aesthetic experience that the player feels.
Definition:
I argue that a system's responsiveness is the degree to which the system alters its feedback and affordances as a result of the player's inputs.
You want the game to do something to respond to player output, not just have the player “shouting at a wall” with no response. Mason suggests that you can do this by:
Feedback can be done in ways that feel more or less responsive: “without changes to affordances, an interaction will soon feel shallow [...] much more like uses than conversations.” So you might have basic feedback like a light turning on and off when you flip a switch, or you might have feedback like Bastion's narration (“The kid just rages for a while”) which feels much more like a conversation even though “the narration effectively serves as feedback that parrots the player's own actions back to them.”
“Changes to formal affordances are one of the key ways we recognize narrative progression as players.” We might meet new NPCs with new problems, learn new information about the murder we're investigating, find out about a new location to visit. “The key to a formal affordance feeling responsive is that it must feel that it has come as a result of the player's actions.”
This may seem expensive, but “often clever writing and design can circumvent expensive branching.”
“Outside of adventure games and hypertexts, changes to formal affordances feel under-leveraged in many genres of interactive story [...] rarely do townspeople react to the player differently after she has defeated powerful enemies [...] it is a common joke of MMO RPGs that [they ask] her to slay some menial pest only moments after declaring her a legendary hero for defeating a formidable enemy.”
In an interactive narrative context, material affordances are deeply-felt by the player. They might encompass things like:
- What actions/verbs the system offers the player
- What actions/moves the system itself can perform
- System changes its rules for evaluating what to do next.
Mason mentions A Dark Room switching from resource management via button pushing to wandering a world map as an adventurer: “Much of the delight of the game rests in its affordances continuing to change in surprising ways as the game progresses.”
If responsiveness is about changing affordances, what happens if we focus on changes to the player's perception without offering them new motivations or mechanics?
Mason quotes Cardona-Rivera and Young discussing an example from Skyrim in which players encounter a waterfall: most won't try jumping off, assuming it leads only to death, but the game triggers an achievement for “Bard's Leap Summit Discovered” to hint that there might be a possibility here.
Her Story (Josh: or for a non-narrative example, one of my personal favorites, Toki Tori 2), are other examples of games where the player's perception changes while the games mechanics stay the same. Her Story doesn't even have a formal ending: “the game ends and credits roll when the player decides to log off from the database.”
Remember to think about this at different levels of abstraction:
How responsive a system “feels” can often be related to the level of abstraction [...] an opponent who blocks when a punch is thrown is changing formal affordances, but players expect some of their moves to be blocked by an opponent AI [...] the player probably does not expect an AI opponent that builds a complex player model of how often she tends to employ a zoning strategy and for how long, and thus comes prepared with the appropriate counter [...] the higher level of abstraction makes the advanced player model feel [...] more responsive.
Is responsiveness actually separate from agency? [...] a distinct phenomenon or are we actually talking about a component phenomenon? The answer, I would argue, is both[.]
Games can respond in ways that can “enhance and foster feelings of agency,” but can also respond in ways that undermine agency: Mason relates an experience with Dark Souls 2 where part of the difficulty of one boss was the enemies on the way to the boss, and says “I had finally figured out the boss's attack patterns [...and] was sure I would get it this time” but then the game removed the enemies on the way, making the boss fight easier and undermining that sense of achievement.
So beware of calling games “more” or “less” responsive than others unless comparing things in very broad strokes: they may not be comparable and it's more interesting to look at the ways in which different games feel responsive in accordance with their different goals.
The responsiveness of Bastion is very different from the responsiveness of Crusader Kings 3, and subtly different from the responsiveness of The Stanley Parable. All of these are also very different from responsive controls in a platformer. Yet with this framework, we can understand that where Bastion is focused on responsive narrated feedback, Crusader Kings 3 is focused on responsive emergent narrative moments, and both of these are operating at a different level of abstraction from the moment-to-moment responsiveness of “tight” controls or the macro-responsiveness of an adaptive AI opponent.
There's a lot of material here: half of the 280-page paper. And most of the craft discussion and application of theory is in this half. But it's also more of a collection of pieces rather than a progression toward a single theory. So it's hard to choose what to leave out, and it's more reasonable to pick and choose what parts of this you read. And by now you probably know what you're getting into, so the table of contents may be enough of a guide for you.
This chapter puts the framework to use by working through a few examples of how systems show responsiveness: different ways might appeal to different tastes.
Chapter 7 looks in detail at the system/game side of the Listen-Think-Speak loop and considers ways we might design each phase to support greater responsiveness.
Chapter 8 is a fairly deep dive into the Lume narrative engine, its motivations, and how it tries to allow new approaches to responsiveness.
Chapter 9 looks at a work-in-progress game and talks about the successes and challenges encountered, including what Lume makes easy/difficult.
Chapter 10 briefly lists the contributions of this thesis and spends a while talking about promising avenues for future work and research.