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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Video games can do something conventional fiction generally does not: they give the audience a share in the machinery that moves the story forward. When a player’s input becomes avatar action and changes the game’s state, the player takes part in the sequence through which events unfold, rather than only receiving and interpreting them. That is a real difference in what the medium affords. The phrase “fiction still cannot do” goes too far, however. Readers and viewers already interpret, imagine and emotionally commit to fiction. The narrower and more defensible contrast is that authored fiction does not let audience input alter how its events unfold. Even inside games, responsiveness does not automatically add up to meaningful agency, and agency does not add up to authorship.
What “co-opting the player” can precisely mean
The phrase works best as a metaphor for a specific design move: the game converts player inputs into actions performed by the avatar and into changes in game state, so the player helps perform the story’s events. It does not mean that every player becomes a co-author of the work. Scholars who study this area draw that line deliberately, and the line matters for any honest account of what games do differently.
Four terms keep the discussion clear. They are working distinctions drawn from the scholarship discussed below, not a standardized measurement scale.
- Interactivity: the system responds to input.
- Ludic agency: choices change play, abilities, resources, position or game state.
- Narrative agency: choices have meaningful effects on how the story unfolds or how it ends.
- Authorship: control over the environment’s rules and content, which ordinary player choice usually does not confer.
Most of the confusion in popular discussion comes from treating these four as one thing. A game can have strong interactivity and ludic agency while offering little narrative agency. It can also deliver a tightly authored plot in which the player’s choices change only the texture of a scene.
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Agency is designed, and it is bounded
The most useful definition in this debate comes from Bettina Bodi and Jan-Noël Thon, whose 2020 article in Frontiers of Narrative Studies (vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 157–190; DOI 10.1515/fns-2020-0012) treats agency as a design property rather than a feeling. They write: “This article conceptualizes player agency as the possibility space for ‘meaningful’ choice expressed via player action that translates into avatar action, afforded and constrained by a videogame’s design.”
Two parts of that sentence carry most of the weight. The first is “possibility space”: agency is the set of meaningful options a designer has made available. The second is “afforded and constrained”: the same design that opens options also closes others. A player can only take the actions the designers built, and the meaning of those actions depends on what the game does with them afterward.
Four dimensions of agency
Bodi and Thon also distinguish four dimensions of agency. The distinction matters because a game can be strong on one and nearly absent on another.
| Dimension | What the player shapes | Typical example in the sources |
|---|---|---|
| Spatial-explorative | Movement through and discovery of a space | Procedural spaces in Astroneer |
| Temporal-ergodic | Timing, sequence and pacing of events | Not specified case-by-case in the excerpts consulted |
| Configurative-constructive | Character, world or built structures | Character building in Disco Elysium; construction in Astroneer |
| Narrative-dramatic | The direction and outcome of the story | Narrative choices in Disco Elysium; dramatic agency in Astroneer |
The practical lesson is that a game may offer a great deal of exploration or construction without letting the player reshape its main plot. Treating “agency” as a synonym for branching plot leaves out most of what games actually do.
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Input is not authorship
Jamie Stang’s 2019 article “This Action Will Have Consequences”: Interactivity and Player Agency, published in Game Studies, reviews theories of agency and co-authorship and draws the distinction that the co-opting claim most often blurs. Stang separates “playing a creative role within an authored environment” from having authorship of that environment. A responsive system can produce a strong feeling of control while the player still has no say over the underlying rules or the authored structure. The boundary of the authored environment, on Stang’s reading, remains with its designers.
Stang also quotes Janet Murray’s definition of agency, which is often cited in this field: “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices.” Murray’s sentence is quoted here as Stang presents it, and the wording and attribution come from Stang’s article.
This is the point to hold onto when a reviewer says a game “lets you write the story.” Usually the player writes inside a space the designers wrote. That is still a real creative contribution, and it is different from the designers’ authorship.
How narrative structure decides what a choice can change
The MIT Press chapter “Narrative and Gameplay – Theoretical Perspectives” offers a practical continuum of narrative structures, and it frames each one as a trade-off between predictability and control on one side and player impact and flow on the other. The excerpt consulted does not establish a publication date for the chapter.
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| Structure | How the story responds to the player | Trade-off stated in the source |
|---|---|---|
| Non-interactive narrative | A set storyline that play does not change, often integrated with gameplay | Maximum authorial control; no narrative choice for the player |
| Fixed branching | The player selects among branches in a stable narrative graph | Choices are predictable and authorable, but bounded by the graph |
| Dynamic | The narrative graph itself changes with game state | Greater expressive potential, with more management complexity |
| Modular | Smaller narrative graphs nested inside a larger structure, such as quest structures in open-world games | Not spelled out in the excerpt consulted |
| Emergent | Systems produce narrative elements during play rather than the designer scripting each resulting story | Highly unpredictable and difficult to author, but able to allow high agency and autonomy |
The chapter’s own conclusion is that design choice should follow the intended player experience and the balance the designers want between authored story and agency. The categories explain tendencies. Many games mix them, and few fit neatly into one box.
Comparing games on the right axes
When you compare two games on how much their players affect the story, five questions produce more useful answers than asking whether the game has “choices”:
- Outcome reach: does the action alter only the immediate encounter, or later story events and endings?
- Agency dimension: is the player exploring, shaping time and sequence, configuring a character or world, or changing narrative outcomes?
- Structure: is the story fixed, branching, state-dependent, modular or generated by systems?
- Choice significance: are the options meaningfully distinct in consequence, or mainly expressive?
- Control and complexity: how much predictability and authorial control does the design keep as player autonomy grows?
Bodi and Thon’s comparison of two 2019 games shows how these questions separate otherwise similar-looking experiences. Their article characterizes Disco Elysium as a nonlinear role-playing game that primarily affords configurative and narrative agency. It describes Astroneer as a sandbox adventure whose procedural spaces and open mechanics primarily afford explorative, constructive and dramatic agency.
| Question | Disco Elysium (per Bodi and Thon) | Astroneer (per Bodi and Thon) |
|---|---|---|
| Genre as characterized | Nonlinear role-playing game | Sandbox adventure game |
| Primary agency | Configurative and narrative | Explorative, constructive and dramatic |
| Where the player’s influence shows | Shaping the character and the direction of the narrative | Exploring procedural spaces and building within open mechanics |
The contrast is the lesson. Neither game is measured by how many plot branches it has. Each affords a different kind of agency, and the article’s point is that these kinds should be named separately.
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Case study: when the felt weight of a choice exceeds its mechanics
Stang uses BioShock’s choice to save or harvest the Little Sisters as a case study. The moral framing invites players to feel that the decision carries heavy ethical stakes. Stang relays Miguel Sicart’s criticism that the reward difference between the two options was limited, so the supposed ethical decision was less consequential than its framing implied.
BioShock therefore illustrates a gap between the felt weight of a choice and its mechanical consequence. That is a claim about one design as interpreted by Stang and Sicart. It is not an audit of every outcome the game can produce.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Do narrative and agency have to trade off?
The Journal of Games Criticism article “Assessing Mass Effect 2 and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Using Collaborative Criteria for Player Agency in Interactive Narratives,” published 2023-07-24, argues that narrative agency and ludic agency can coexist. It proposes collaborative assessment criteria for player agency and discusses how players are represented and how interactive outcomes are handled. It also warns against assuming that a stronger narrative must necessarily reduce agency.
Treat this as a scholarly argument rather than a proven rule. It shows that the opposition between authored story and player freedom is contestable, which is different from showing that the two always fit together. The same caution applies to the claim, drawn from the MIT Press chapter, that narrative can become a procedural element and a source of agency in its own right. That is a position argued within game studies, not a settled consensus.
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What designers say about the tension
Game designers have been openly skeptical about this relationship. In a 2016 TIME interview, designer Jonathan Blow criticized the friction that appears when a game’s action undermines its dramatic themes. He described The Witness as deliberately minimizing conventional interaction and using puzzle forms to explore its ideas.
In the same interview, Blow was critical of story-driven games compared with novels and films. He said: “I don’t feel like they’re there in terms of that craft of storytelling.” He also summed up the difficulty of reconciling authored narrative with agency in one line: “It’s just that it’s hard.” These are one designer’s views, reported in a 2016 interview, and they should be attributed to him rather than presented as a finding of scholarship.
Testing a specific claim about a game
Use this sequence when a review or essay says a game’s story is shaped by its players:
- Identify the single choice or action the claim depends on.
- Trace its outcome reach: does it change one encounter, a later scene, or the ending?
- Name the agency dimension it uses, following Bodi and Thon’s four categories.
- Check the structure around it. A fixed branch and an emergent system give the player very different kinds of control.
- Ask whether the options differ in consequence or only in tone.
- Decide whether the evidence shows narrative agency, ludic agency, or only interactivity. Reserve “authorship” for claims about the environment’s rules and content, which the player rarely controls.
A claim that survives these steps is usually specific and modest. One that fails them is usually a statement about how a game feels rather than about how it works.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteThe better case for games is therefore narrower than the title suggests, and stronger for it. Games can make the audience perform the story’s actions and can, in some designs, let those actions change the outcome. Whether a given game does so meaningfully is a question about its designed possibility space, and the answer varies with each design.
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