tpwrtrmnky:

one thing about choices in video games is there’s a space in terms of choice impactfulness where on the one extreme your choices end up meaningless and don’t give the player any agency, and then on the other hand you’ve got the case of “there are Wrong choices, which are definitively worse, and you’ll simply never want to make them” which also ends up, in practice, as a lack of agency

This way of wording it made me think about a sort of soft personal life crisis i went through a couple years ago, where I was feeling like I didn’t have agency in my own real life

and really like maybe the whole idea of agency in real life didn’t exist

because i was feeling like i was just being pulled along by the narrative, not making any choices that really drove my own life.

But when i tried to imagine what such a choice could be, all I could come up with was:

1. I get the option to choose between two courses of action where I’m certain that one is better. This doesn’t feel like agency or a choice, because duh. Of course you pick the obviously better one. Do I eat cereal for breakfast, or broken glass, or the neighbor’s baby? Yeah I ate cereal, I’m not patting myself on the back for having agency and making a choice there.

2. I get the option to make a choice between two things but it’s a hard choice… both have serious pros and cons and I agonize over which option is better. Either I eventually become totally certain (and then it becomes scenario 1 again, see above) or I never become certain and I just pick one because I have to, and am never sure it’s the best one. That also doesn’t feel like having agency.

3. I don’t really get a chance to think about making the choices at all, I just rush on through life always have to just pick something fast without being sure what’s best. This also doesn’t sound like choices, it sounds like randomness.

And that’s all the options I could think of! So do agency and choices really even exist?

Well the only reason I got out of that low point and started feeling like I was steering my own life, was because I was lucky enough to get into a position of having enough control to (usually) choose the option that I was very sure was best.

Turns out, scenario 1 feels more like a real choice if you also have other breakfast options that are not only better than babies and broken glass, but even better than cereal.

Dunno why that makes the difference in terms of feeling like a choice. It still doesn’t logically seem like real agency or control.

But hey. I’ll take it.