Designing Player Agency in Games
The beauty of playing a game is uncovering the underlying patterns, and testing your decision-making skills. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing your choices directly shape the gameplay.
Players are always seeking new patterns to master or fresh data to deepen their understanding of existing ones. Boredom, at its core, is the absence of learning. When a game stops teaching us something, it starts losing our interest. Players do not want to be bored!
Both game designers and players succeed when the ability to take different paths is possible to achieve different results. Doing so rewards the player for conscious decision-making, and makes gameplay meaningful.
Successful player agency consists of:
Understanding Tools
Tense Situations
Meaningful Decision Making
Significant Consequences
Understanding the Tools
Games are an arbitrary set of rules defined by its designers.
Only the game itself sets expectations, creates opportunities and outcomes, all of which are promised by the tools they make accessible to the player.
In Mario Kart, no matter how much you might want to, you can’t hop out of your kart and go fishing - it’s simply not part of the game. This principle extends beyond video games. In soccer, we’ve collectively agreed that kicking a specific ball crossing a specific line counts as +1 goal. These arbitrary rules shape the game and how it feels to play.
Players must first understand the tools and rules of a game before they can make meaningful decisions.
In Chronostrike, the Explosive Enemy is introduced to the player early on in the main story. This enemy type explodes when hit, creating a blast that multi-kills other closeby enemies. After more reinforcement, the player then associates explosive enemies with potential for skill expression, and has the ability to make meaningful and informed choices about how to optimially face new challenges. As new scenarios are given to the player, explosive enemies act as a key tool in the players belt.
After giving enough information and experience on how these mechanics should work to the player, designers facilitate choices through dynamic situations to allow players accomplish what is achievable.
It’s extremely important to outline design intentions of each mechanic, and ensure it’s placement in the level is purposeful. There’s no purpose for Explosive Enemies to be far from other enemies.
By creating varying situations, the tools the player has allow them to express their understanding of the patterns in front of them. Creating memorable moments because you understand the tools is fun!
Chronostrike - Explosive Enemy
Pattern Recognition
Good game design builds player mastery through pattern recognition and gradual toolset expansion.
For example, Explosive Enemies share visual and mechanical properties with Bombs and Ancient Objects in Chronostrike. Explosive Enemies are an evolution of a standard shooter enemy. Bombs can be caught and thrown before their timer expires. Ancient Objects are static and explode when shot. Each explosive mechanic encourages player agency through careful timing, level understanding, and pattern recognition.
Mechanics with similar behaviour should share similar visual design, acting as an affordance that reinforces a familiar pattern, expanding player understanding of the rules the game world sets.
These mechanics must be introduced in a deliberate order: first Explosive Enemies, then Bombs, followed by Ancient Objects. Only after a mechanic is reinforced countless times can a new tool be added. Each new element must feel like a logical extension of existing knowledge.
Chronostrike - Explosive Ancient Objects
Making Choices in Tense Situations
Mario Kart is incredibly approachable with a single, clear objective: reach the finish line as fast as you can. This simplicity makes the core gameplay loop easy to grasp - just hold accelerate and race. Easy, right? :)
The real fun kicks in when items enter the mix. Getting a game-changing power up and deciding when to use it adds a strong layer of strategy and decision-making. Throw the shell forward or backwards, which direction to face, or maybe even let other players pass you so you can get better items since you’re lower on the leaderboard. These decisions become especially intense you’re neck-and-neck with Waluigi for 1st place on the last lap, and he smashes you in the face with a green shell (I hate you Waluigi).
Making quick, calculated, meaningful choices is what makes these experiences so satisfying. It’s that sense of agency that keeps players engaged and eager to learn from each decision.
Players are constantly seeking more data to refine every pattern they encounter, and storing that data to use to their advantage next time. That’s what makes games fun.
“Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun.”
Quicker Conseqeuence = Clearer Understanding
For choices to feel meaningful, they must have clear consequences.
The faster a game delivers feedback on a decision, the quicker players understand the cause/effect relationship. If using a tool doesn’t lead to feedback or a noticeable outcome right away, there’s a strong chance the connection is missed.
This highlights the importance of ensuring players clearly understand the tools they’re interacting with, and new interactions stand out enough to make me understand “I’ve made X decision that had X effect”. Only then, I’m able to start experimenting with patterns and their use cases.
Rewarding smart decisions encourages players to keep using and experimenting with their tools. This extends to negative consequences as well. Decisions need to carry weight, making experience more engaging and choices more important.
Too Many Choices Becomes Overwhelming and Boring
When players are overwhelmed with choice, their desire to learn quickly fades.
Imagine a skill tree overloaded with options from the game start - that’d feel paralyzing. When players repeatedly face the same choices, those decisions become routine and lose their impact. Similarily, giving the player too much control can reduce a players grasp of the tools. Overwhelming choice causes cognitive overload, basically nullifying any decision making that could occur.
Every game has a sweet spot for the number of options it offers - enough to make decisions interesting, but not so many that players can’t process the potential outcomes of a decision.
To keep players engaged, games need variation. New situations must challenge players to rethink their strategies. If every game of Call of Duty played the exact same, it would become more a game of memorization, rather than expression of skill and situation analysis.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, great game design is about giving players meaningful choices through dynamic and varying situations. Ensuring to build on previously learned behaviour with clear, immediate consequences facilities player learning.
When decisions have real impact - players stay engaged and invested. By striking the right balance of variety, feedback, and challenge, designers can create experiences that are both intuitive and endlessly compelling.