@mechapoetic not to anything like the same inherent degree, surely? the guy playing Hamlet has no valid option to not stab Polonius.
@mechapoetic sure. i don't actually see agency as anything but making choices within the constraints one is subject to.
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@chaosprime agency, particularly in games marketing rhetoric, is about making choices in a really egocentric way that overrides constraints -
@mechapoetic okay. well, i'm gonna disclaim that usage. to me it's about having choices and having consequences occur for those choices.
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@chaosprime but that's not true! it's fundamentally a lie to make the player feel more powerful, like a Randian hero! -
@mechapoetic i'm vaguely aware that that's how the marketing rhetoric for gung-ho sandboxes like GTAs goes? but i'm not buying into it.
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@mechapoetic you kinda seem to have defined it out of existence, really. nobody, ever, can make choices that aren't available to them. -
@chaosprime i never said otherwise. agency *can* exist in more mutable, flexible systems, but usually most people don't have much of it -
@mechapoetic sure, if nothing else because consequences are modeled poorly or not at all. which is when i get all simulationist, whee. -
@mechapoetic 10,000 fake choices that have no effects suppress agency more completely than two choices that do things. -
@mechapoetic or, y'know, you have IRL, where consequences are modeled perfectly but agency is limited because most uses of it will kill you. -
@mechapoetic that's crystallizing a thought i like about games as a learning exercise in how the bounds of survivable agency can be expanded -
@mechapoetic i mean, IRL there's a lot of agency we could have that we don't because the default posture has to be inaction and compliance -
@mechapoetic and we don't necessarily have good strategies for testing when deviating from that posture is safe or survivable
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