Defining Agency (from Susanne Eichner, Agency and Media Reception: Experiencing Video Games, Film, and Television)

Defining Agency (from Susanne Eichner, Agency and Media Reception: Experiencing Video Games, Film, and Television)

Agency describes the way we, as individuals, aim to perceive ourselves as empowered subjects. While acting in this world we are not only restricted by circumstances, by limited economic, cul- tural and/or personal resources, by societal and political structures, and by our physical body, our aims may also collide with and be restricted by the aims of other individuals, organisations, institutions, and governmental systems. Exercising our own agency might deprive others of agency, and vice versa. Mische and Emirbayer therefore describe agency as “toward something, by means of which actors enter into relationship with surrounding persons, places, meanings, and events” (Mische/Emirbayer 1998: 973; emphasis in the original). Agency is therefore not restricted to personal or individual agency... Agency depends on dispositions and resources, and is neither fixed nor stable; individual agency in a society is accordingly not equally distributed nor does everyone have the same capacity for agency...

The experience of agency as a way of performing power through text has been discussed since Murray’s 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck. According to Murray, “agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful actions and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Murray 1997: 126). Since then, agency has repeatedly been elaborated as one of the core pleasures of playing video games, and the quality distinguishing video games from other media. Games, so the assumption goes, require their players to perform actions, unfolding only through player action, thereby generating the game-specific experience of agency...  The video game appears to be a media device ideally suited to generating experiences of agency, since it enables players to make inputs with direct and ‘watchable’ results: by simply pressing a button in the first-person shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops (Treyarch, Ideaworks, 2010), a gun is fired, the screen shows the result of this action as a big explosion, and the player experiences the power of agency within the video game environment.