There’s a term gamers like to invoke, when it comes to the strengths and particularly the weaknesses of a game: player agency. The more there is of it, the better the game. But there is a lot hidden underneath that bit of jargon. Because we might have more agency over how a game plays than we might assume.

The first and arguable self-evident for player agency is mechanical. It covers the extent to which we can make decisions, translate them into the context of the game’s mechanisms to achieve our desired outcome. The technical term for which is “winning”. This type of agency is granted entirely by the game to be used by its players. In other words the rulebooks allows and forbids specific actions, in order to create play. For example, you may only claim victory if you’ve scored the most points. You may only take those points, if you’ve previously used cards, tokens, tiles, etc in a very specific manner. Player agency in a mechanical sense can be thought of as moving freely in your own front yard. Within the clearly demarcated area, you may act freely as long you know where not to step.

The second and less obvious form of player agency affecting play has to do with a kind of demarcation: framing. It’s about the context into which we place the game and the perspective we adopt to play the game. Simply put, the purpose of play is set by us. We are the ones who have a reason to pick a specific game or even to play at all. It can be our desire to compete with one another. Maybe we are in the mood to plan, puzzle and look for combos. Or maybe we just want to spend a pleasant couple of hours with other people. It’s often assumed that this act of framing is dictated by the game itself. After all, there’s hardly a rulebook that doesn’t speak about the goal of the game, or what it’s about. But these answers only relate to the rules of the game. Once we put a game in the social context of our group, we make decisions about the game, as opposed to the game making decisions about us. As players, our reason for playing a game isn’t bound to the game’s genre, its style or its theme. Some games allow for different approaches. Classic examples include Catan or Carcassonne. Games, which only support one particular way of playing them, tend to lead more experienced groups to adapt to these circumstances. They try to play towards the game’s design, towards gameplay-as-intended. In other groups these games are simply labeled as “not to our tastes” or in particular cases as “bad designs”. The fact that this tension can exist, can can be resolved over time by players, points at the act, that we do have agency outside of the game’s mechanisms.

The last and potentially controversial form of agency has to to with narrative. It’s likely controversial, because most players consider themselves the audience of a game’s story. Players tend to believe that they do not influence the game’s narrative, but merely interpret the events of the game as it develops. Active player agency on a narrative level tends to go unnoticed with these groups. In their understanding, the game’s narrative emerges incidentally and unguided, like a message from the beyond on a Ouija board. This belief tends to be because, people also assume that mechanical restrictions also restrict players narratively. In other words, if the rules do not allow me to do certain things, I have no influence over the narration of my actions.

I can think of two games, which seek to undo this connection. But they come at it from opposite ends. One of the games is The King’s Dilemma and the other is Oath. Both games try to make players aware of their narrative agency. Whether players are able to take this understanding and apply it to other games, remains to be seen. It still appears to be a commonly held belief, that narrative agency must be explicitly granted by the game’s rules, before it may be used.

In The King’s Dilemma the necessity to take charge of the narrative is borne out of empathy. Our mechanical decisions, aimed solely at winning the game, soon have devastating consequences for the fictional kingdom and its people. As the game progresses over multiple sessions, we are free to ignore this fiction in order to score more victory points (also fictional). Some players may at any point choose to side with the game’s other fiction (the kingdom we rule over) and choose goals that are not covered by the game’s mechanisms. We can choose to fight for the fate of the kingdom at the expense of our victory point hunt. In order to understand narrative player agency we must recognise play as a negotiation of what gets narrated with the help of the game’s mechanisms. Narrative is not a byproduct of our interaction, but something we can actively influence with our decisions.

Oath’s approach is the polar opposite in a sense. It treats narrative player agency as the connective tissue between individual sessions, but also as the main engine to drive conflict and play. At first glance, it’s the mechanical goals which put us into conflict and propel us towards interaction. All players have mutually exclusive goals and vye for domination on the game board. But before long, those goals are replaced by the social dynamics between players. They become the actual reason why we interact with each other. Oath is made to be wide open and interpreted. Yet at the same time it provides enough thematic cohesion to disguise its most important play dynamics. As the campaign progresses, we fully take on the roles of warring political factions, whose history, memory and (friendly) feuds have a much bigger impact on the events of a game, than any mechanical goals the rules spell out for us ever could.

Of course, we all want to be the next chancellor. But Oath doesn’t really get going until it becomes purely about getting “Rob” off the throne, or preventing “Eric” from claiming it for himself. It becomes a game of humorous resentments, ambition and the occasional, friendly act of vengeance. The narrative of Oath is not one of the country, its landmarks or even the shifting alliances. It becomes a story of its players. The lived narrative is not a result of the game’s theme, but a history created through play. One which makes use of Oath’s theme and components to tell its story. (The game unfortunately limits itself by focusing predominantly on violent conflicts. It’s an imperialist understanding of history, which only gives value to battles, and not cultural or technological advances, or even the people who thrived during peace times.)

Players in Oath must not only understand that the story happens between them (with only a fraction represented on the game board itself). They must also take charge of where it will go. The elements on the board, how we value them and what history we associate with them, can’t be pre-scripted into the game. Oath’s story can not exist, until we create it in play. When we become its protagonists and tell, re-tell and claim those events for ourselves like a Greek chorus.

To understand narrative player agency in a game, we must first realize that Oath is not fundamentally different to any other board game. It simply screams at its players (figuratively) to take charge of the narrative, which they create. It demands players to finally acknowledge that they are the ones telling the story, not interpreting it.