Procedural Content Generation, Player Agency, and Playfulness in Survival- Crafting Game Astroneer

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Bodi Bettina
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

The explosive and still very much soaring success of Minecraft (Persson 2011) accelerated the proliferation of sandbox games based on the mechanics of exploration, crafting, building, and ultimately, survival. Hit titles Space Engineers (Keen Software House 2013) or Subnautica (Unknown Worlds 2018) afford gameplay that is, in many ways, less constricted than in other avatar-based genres, such as action-adventures or first-person shooters. In fact, notions of freedom and creative play are often associated with such design, which evoke questions about agency. This paper interrogates the implications survival-crafting games’ design has for player agency. As part of a larger project looking at agency in a variety of avatar-based genres, this paper draws on previous scholarship framing player action as an affordance of game design (Juul 2005; Salen and Zimmermann 2004; Sicart 2008), and conceptualizes agency as the possibility space for player action as expressed through avatar action that manifests in multiple dimensions (cf. Calleja 2011).