Paralysing Fear: Player Agency Parameters in Horror Games


Boonen Casper S. Mieritz Daniel
2018 DiGRA Nordic '18: Proceedings of 2018 International DiGRA Nordic Conference

The horror video game genre is dedicated to building suspense and scaring its players. One of the ways in which it achieves this goal is through the manipulation of the player’s agency. With this paper, we seek to examine and identify elements used to manipulate the agency of the player in horror video games, to see how they can be used to evoke horror and dread within the player. To this purpose, a qualitative humanistic approach has been applied, through the analysis of six horror games. Our results indicate several common themes, found in the elements used to manipulate player agency. Based on these themes, we have developed an Agency Parameter Model, illustrating a hierarchical relationship between different categories used to manipulate agency. At the core of the model are three overarching categories: Player Character Parameters, System Parameters, and Player Parameters.

 

Agency Reconsidered


Wardrip-Fruin Noah Mateas Michael Dow Steven Sali Serdar
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

The concept of “agency” in games and other playable media (also referred to as “intention”) has been discussed as a player experience and a structural property of works. We shift focus, considering agency, instead, as a phenomenon involving both player and game, one that occurs when the actions players desire are among those they can take (and vice versa) as supported by an underlying computational model. This shifts attention away from questions such as whether agency is “free will” (it is not) and toward questions such as how works evoke the desires agency satisfies, employ computational models in the service of player action and ongoing dramatic probability, use interfaces and mediation to encourage appropriate audience expectation, shift from initial audience expectation to an understanding of the computational model, and can be shaped with recognition of the inherently improvisational nature of agency. We focus particularly on agency in relation to the fictional worlds of games and other playable media.