I remember when I was forced under an authoritarian regime to forcefully search people’s bodies and separate families as a border inspector. I even remember when I began to detain people for a few extra bucks in order to make sure I had enough money to feed my family and pay rent. Many days I was fighting for survival and just trying to do my job and follow the rules, but morally I felt completely horrible as I succumbed to the corruption of my power and the forces against me. This was my lived experience while playing Papers, Please.
There are many times as a player of a video game where you sit and ask yourself : “Did my choices actually make a difference in the grand, orchestrated scheme of things?” In many games, outcomes are predetermined and even though some change in response to your decisions, game creators craft these outcomes for you. In these situations, you feel as if you have no agency and this false promise of being an individual player with freedom.
Across many of the games we’ve played, there’s a recurring question we face: how much agency did we actually have? Usually, we try to answer this by pointing to mechanics like branching choices, multiple endings, or the presence of a narrator that guides or limits our decisions. But I want to push back on that framework. I argue that agency in games doesn’t actually come from the range of outcomes or choices available to us, but from how we experience and interpret those outcomes as players. In games like Papers, Please, Slay the Princess, and A Short Hike our choices often don’t meaningfully expand what can happen, but they do shape how we understand what is happening. Rather than giving us control over the game, these systems often constrain us in ways that force us to actively construct meaning, whether through interpreting the narrator’s framing, navigating conflicting perspectives, or deciding who or what to trust. These games suggest that agency is not measured by how much control a player has over outcomes, but by how intensely the game makes the player feel responsible for interpreting constrained choices. Papers, Please, Slay the Princess, and A Short Hike each relocate agency from changing the world to making meaning within it: through bureaucratic pressure, narrative manipulation, and wandering attention. This reframing matters because it challenges this assumption that interactivity is defined by freedom of choice. Games derive their unique power from how they shape the player’s experience of meaning under these constraints.
The easiest way to talk about agency in games is to count. For example, count the number of endings, the dialogue options, how many quests branch, how many characters remember what you did, and how many times the game flashes some version of “this action will have consequences” across the screen. This kind of agency isn’t fake or irrelevant. It matters when a game lets us save one character and lose another, reach a different ending, or watch the world visibly rearrange itself around our decisions. Those moments are satisfying because they give us proof that we did something, and the game noticed.
But that way of measuring agency also trains us to look in the wrong place. It makes agency seem like something that can be evaluated from the outside, almost like a feature list, such as five endings, twelve branches, twenty possible consequences. Under that logic, the most “agentic” game would simply be the one with the most options. The more the world changes, the more agency we have. The less it changes, the more likely we are to call the experience limited, scripted, or illusory.
That framework is useful, but it misses something important about what games actually make players feel. A choice can be mechanically small and still feel enormous. A game can give us only a few options and still make us feel implicated in what happens. A player can know, rationally, that the system is limited and prewritten, while still feeling guilt, pressure, trust, suspicion, curiosity or grief inside it. In other words, there is a difference between formal agency and felt agency. Formal agency is what the game mechanically allows us to do. Felt agency is how the game makes us understand the weight and significance of doing it.
This distinction is vital because games function not only as engines of choice, but also as frameworks for interpretation. They don’t just ask players to select between options, but rather they teach players how to read those options. A button prompt can feel like freedom, obligation, temptation, punishment or refusal depending on the world around it. A dialogue choice can feel generous in one game and manipulative in another. Even an action as small as stamping a passport can become morally unbearable if the game has taught me that this stamp means hunger, detention, family separation or survival.
The readings for this course help clarify why that difference matters, but they do not all approach agency from the same angle. In “This Action Will Have Consequences”, Sarah Stang helps explain why players so often expect agency to appear as consequence, as the visible proof that the game noticed and responded to what we did. In their chapter “Reading Games Aesthetically,” Tracy Fullerton and Matthew Farber, drawing on Louise Rosenblatt’s idea of aesthetic reading, push the question inward by asking us to pay attention not only to what changes in the text, but to what the player is living through in relation to it. In Wandering Games, Melissa Kagen then stretches the idea of agency even further by showing that meaning in games does not always come from decision, victory, or consequence. Sometimes it comes from wandering, attention, and pilgrimage. Taken together, these readings suggest that agency is not a single thing games either give or withhold. It is a relationship between rules, interpretation, and experience.
“This Action Will Have Consequences” is useful here because it names one of the dominant fantasies of interactivity, which is the belief that meaningful action should produce meaningful results. The appeal of games often comes from what Stang calls “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices.” That promise is everywhere in how people talk about games. We want our choices to matter, and we often assume they matter most when the game visibly proves it to us through an outcome.
But Stang also complicates this argument in an important way. If, as she writes, videogame interactivity and the sense of control it creates are partly illusory, then felt agency could seem like just another trick games play on us. Player choice is always limited by code, rules, scripts, interfaces, and possibility spaces the designers have already built. No matter how creative or resistant the player tries to be, their performance is still bounded by rules.
That could make agency sound fake, but I think it actually makes agency more interesting. The illusion of total freedom doesn’t mean the player’s experience is meaningless. It means games produce agency through the tension between what the player can actually do and what the player feels responsible for doing. Fullerton and Farber’s aesthetic approach helps explain why this matters, as the meaning of a game isn’t only in the external result of an action, but in what the player lives through while acting. Kagen pushes this even further by showing that some games make meaning through movement and attention rather than through obvious consequence. So instead of asking only whether a choice changed the game, I want to ask what the game’s limits made the player feel, notice, question, or carry.
That’s the mystery these games help answer. Why can a small choice feel more powerful than a dramatic branching ending? Why can a game feel meaningful even when I can’t really change the world? Why can constraint sometimes make agency feel sharper and not weaker? Papers, Please, Slay the Princess, and A Short Hike all answer that question differently, but they begin from the same idea that agency in games is not just the freedom to alter an outcome. It is the experience of making meaning from within a structure that’s already pushing back.
Papers, Please is useful because it takes the illusion of control seriously. It doesn’t pretend the player has endless freedom, but it also doesn’t let the player dismiss their actions as meaningless. Instead, it builds agency inside a narrow, exhausting set of procedures, such as approve, deny, inspect, detain, stamp and repeat.
This matters because, as Stang argues, “videogame interactivity, and the sense of control that it elicits in players, is illusory.” Player input can only make the game respond in ways that have already been coded. In one sense, Papers, Please makes this obvious. The player cannot redesign Arstotzka. They cannot abolish the border. They cannot refuse the entire system and still keep playing in any ordinary sense. Their choices are limited to the small actions the booth allows. Even resistance has to pass through the interface of the job.
But the game’s power comes from the fact that limited choice doesn’t feel like no choice. It feels worse than that. It feels like being given a tiny amount of control in a situation where every available option has already been poisoned. The player’s decisions are bounded by the rulebook, the clock, the citation system, and our minimal budget. The state doesn’t need to give the inspector freedom. It only needs to give them enough responsibility to make obedience feel personal.
Moreover, this is how the game turns bureaucracy into a playable moral structure. The rules aren’t simply background information. They’re the main way the player touches the world. A new regulation appears, and suddenly the player must look at people differently. A missing seal is no longer just an error, but actually becomes grounds for rejection. A discrepancy in weight becomes a reason to search someone’s body. A detention bonus turns suspicion into income. The game teaches the player to translate human beings into administrative problems, and it does so slowly enough that the translation can begin to feel normal.
That is what makes the routine so disturbing. The booth narrows the player’s attention until moral questions arrive disguised as paperwork. Should I help this person? becomes: Are their documents valid? Can I afford the penalty? How much time is left in the day? Will my family eat tonight? The game doesn’t remove morality from the situation. It buries morality inside procedural decisions, then forces the player to dig it out while under pressure.
Stang’s discussion of complicity helps name what’s happening here. It describes complicity in games as “founded on a combination of interreactivity and empathy,” where “the game fosters the sense that players have a responsibility for what happens on-screen.” In Papers, Please, the player knows the system is larger than them, and yet the traveler still stands in front of them. The stamp is still in their hand. The interface keeps insisting that whatever happens next requires their participation.
This is why the game complicates the usual idea that agency depends on visible consequence or on a plethora of decisions. Yes, there are choices in Papers, Please that do produce outcomes, like a person enters or is denied, a family member survives or gets sick, a citation appears or does not, an ending shifts. But those outcomes aren’t the whole point. The more important consequence is internal. The game changes how the player learns to see and feel. We aren’t only deciding who crosses the border, but being trained into the logic of the border itself.
By the end, the horror isn’t simply that the state is cruel. That would be easy enough to recognize from a distance. The horror is that the game makes cruelty feel procedural, efficient, and sometimes even necessary. Papers, Please relocates agency from freedom to complicity. It shows that constrained actions can still carry moral weight, not because the player controls the system, but because the system makes the player enact, experience, and interpret it.
If Papers, Please makes agency feel bureaucratic, Slay the Princess makes it feel unstable. The pressure is no longer a rulebook, a timer, or a family budget. It’s a story that keeps trying to tell the player what kind of story it is.
The game begins with a command so simple it almost feels like a joke, which is that there is a princess in a cabin, and you have to kill her or the world will end. The Narrator presents this as fact. He doesn’t ask the player to investigate. He doesn’t offer context. He simply gives the player a role and expects them to perform it. In a more traditional game, this might be enough. The quest has been assigned, so with the objective clear, the player can move forward. But Slay the Princess immediately makes the objective feel suspicious. Why should I trust him? Why is she trapped? What kind of world depends on killing someone I haven’t even met?
As a result, this is where this game also shifts agency away from action alone and into interpretation. The player is not just deciding whether to kill or save the Princess. The player is deciding how to read the situation. The cabin becomes less like a setting and more like an argument. The Narrator frames the Princess as a threat. The Princess frames herself differently depending on how the player approaches her. The voices in the player’s head interrupt, doubt, encourage or distort their thoughts. Everyone is trying to tell the player what the scene means, but no one can be trusted completely.
On the surface, Slay the Princess looks like a game of obvious narrative agency. It has choices, branches, deaths, returns, and different versions of the Princess. It seems to fit the exact model of agency that depends on visible change. If we choose differently, then the game changes. Distrust her, and she may become dangerous. Attack her, and she may become monstrous. Try to rescue her, and the story bends around that attempt. The game gives the player plenty of proof that their decisions matter.
But the deeper agency isn’t just in the branching. It’s in the way the branches expose the assumptions and sentiments behind the player’s choices. The Princess doesn’t feel like a stable character waiting to be uncovered. She feels like someone partly produced by the frame through which she is approached and viewed. If I treat her like a monster, the game can make her monstrous. If I treat her like a victim, the game can make that reading unstable too. Rather than the player simply choosing between preexisting options, they’re actually participating in the construction of what those options mean in the game and to themselves.
Fullerton and Farber’s discussion of aesthetic reading helps explain why this interpretive agency matters. Drawing on Rosenblatt, they describe aesthetic reading as a mode where attention is centered on what the reader is “living through” in their relationship with the text. That idea fits Slay the Princess almost too well, because the important question isn’t just what happens in the plot. The important question is what the player experiences while trying to understand the plot. The game is asking us to solve the Princess, but it’s also asking us to notice how quickly we accept a story, how easily we distrust a voice, and how much we need someone in the game to be telling the truth.
That also helps explain why some choices in the game feel meaningful even when they are trapped inside repetition. The player returns to the cabin again and again, but the repetition does not simply erase agency. It changes the texture of it. Each return carries memory, suspicion, and interpretation from the last attempt. The player may technically be choosing from a set of scripted options, but those options don’t feel identical once the player has already lived through betrayal, fear, tenderness, or violence. The external structure repeats, but the internal understanding shifts.
Notably, we see how this section is also where the usual objection matters. Someone could argue that Slay the Princess actually proves the opposite of this thesis because it does have traditional agency. It has visible branches, different outcomes, and a story that reacts dramatically to player decisions. While this is true, this overlooks the true significance of why the game feels powerful. If agency were only about branching, then the game’s meaning would live mostly in its flowchart, or in this case, the player’s ability to map every possible path. But Slay the Princess is powerful, because each path makes the player confront the interpretation and consequences that their experience produced.
The game understands that stories aren’t neutral containers for choice. Stories teach players what to fear, what to trust, and what to imagine as possible. In Papers, Please, the system turns people into documents. In Slay the Princess, the story turns a woman in a cabin into a threat, a victim, a god, a monster, a lover, a mistake, or a mirror. The player’s agency lies in how they respond to those frames, but also in how they recognize themselves inside them.
So if Slay the Princess relocates agency from outcome to framing, then the central question is not only, “Did you kill her?” or “Did you save her?” It is, “What kind of story did you believe you were inside when you made that choice?” The game’s most unsettling and powerful idea is that interpretation is not passive, but that one’s “agentic” interpretation actually does something. It shapes what the player sees, what the player chooses, what the Princess can become and what the outcomes say about the player itself.
After Papers, Please and Slay the Princess, A Short Hike almost feels like it belongs in a different essay. It’s not cruel in the same way. It does not trap the player behind a border checkpoint or inside a story that keeps rewriting itself around suspicion and decisions. Its world is warm, small and generous. The stakes seem almost comically soft by comparison, like Claire needs phone reception, and to get it she has to climb to the top of Hawk Peak.
But that contrast is exactly why the game matters. A Short Hike shows that agency under constraint does not always have to feel emotionally complex. Sometimes it feels like attention.
The game gives Claire a clear goal from the beginning, which is to reach the summit, get reception, and wait for a phone call. In another game, everything outside that goal might feel secondary, such as side quests, collectibles, optional dialogue, pleasant distractions on the way to the “real” objective. But A Short Hike quietly weakens that hierarchy. The more I played, the less the summit felt like the only point. I could fish, race, collect shells, find golden feathers, talk to other characters, climb, glide, or wander just because a part of the island looked interesting. None of these detours radically changed the ending, at least not in the conventional sense. But they changed the hike and more than anything the experience itself.
This is where Melissa Kagen’s idea of wandering games becomes especially helpful. In Wandering Games, Kagen describes games that function as “meditation or pilgrimage instead of a conflict,” which gives language to what A Short Hike does so well. The game still has structure and it’s not infinite freedom. The island has edges. Claire has a destination. Golden feathers limit how far she can climb. The mountain still waits in the distance. But within those limits, the game shifts agency away from conquest or consequence and toward attention. The player’s power is not to reshape the world, but to decide how to move through it.
In a unique way, A Short Hike does not make wandering feel like failure. It makes wandering feel like play, and then slowly, like actual meaning. When Kagen writes that “the player is not wandering away from the point; the wandering is the point,” the line feels almost built for this game. Claire’s goal gives the journey shape, but the detours give it texture. A race on the beach, a conversation with an anxious camper, a shell collected for someone else, the sudden lift of gliding from a cliff, all of these moments don’t matter because they transform the plot. Rather, they matter because they change the player’s relationship to progress and the game.
That makes A Short Hike a gentler version of the same argument running through the other games. In Papers, Please, the player’s agency is narrowed by bureaucracy. In Slay the Princess, it is destabilized by narrative framing. In A Short Hike, agency is bounded by a simple destination, but the boundary doesn’t limit the player. It creates the conditions for noticing. The mountain gives the game direction, but the player decides what kind of journey the climb becomes.
As a result, this personal experience is also why the game’s emotional force can sneak up on you. Claire’s hike is not explicitly about grief, and I don’t want to flatten it into only that. But playing it, I felt myself bringing my own grief into the movement. The experience of the climb, finding help, visiting a cemetery, beautifully losing track of the goal, returning to it, and finally reaching the summit gave me a shape for it. The summit gave me a place to set it down for a second, and flying down afterward while taking in the beautiful clouds and atmosphere felt like release. The game had turned wandering into a small act of emotional and spiritual survival.
This is a different kind of agency than the kind we usually know how to praise. It is not the agency of changing the world, defeating the system, or unlocking the “right” ending. It is the agency of deciding what deserves attention along the way. A Short Hike suggests that meaning can emerge not only from dramatic choice, but from the quieter act of inhabiting a path. The player may not control the mountain, the island, or even Claire’s reason for climbing, but they do control how carefully they move through the world before reaching the top and what they feel during this pilgrimage.
Taken together, these games suggest that constraint is not the opposite of agency. It’s often what gives agency its shape. That doesn’t mean constraint is always good, or that limited freedom should be romanticized. Papers, Please is powerful because its constraints are brutal. Slay the Princess is powerful because its constraints are disorienting and revealing. A Short Hike is powerful because its constraints are gentle enough to become almost invisible. But in each case, the player’s agency doesn’t come from escaping the structure completely. It comes from having to make meaning inside it, so the usual language of choice starts to feel too thin.
If we only ask whether a game gives the player freedom, then Papers, Please looks like a game about having very little of it. Slay the Princess looks like a game about having many branches, but only within a predetermined system. A Short Hike looks like a game where not much happens at all. But those descriptions miss the actual experience of playing them. They miss the guilt of the stamp, the suspicion and confusion in the cabin, the awe of wandering toward a summit you keep forgetting to reach.
Each game limits the player differently, and each limit teaches the player a different kind of interpretation. In Papers, Please, the player must interpret responsibility under coercion. The game asks what it means to act morally when every option has been made expensive. In Slay the Princess, the player must interpret trust under manipulation. The game asks what it means to choose when every voice is also a frame trying to shape what you see and your own thinking. In A Short Hike, the player must interpret progress under gentler conditions. The game asks what it means to move toward a goal when the detours may be the most meaningful part.
The readings help name these different experiences, but more importantly, they revise one another. Stang explains why players expect agency to appear as visible consequence, as the satisfying proof that the game responded to us. But her point that player action is always bounded by rules also shows why consequence can’t be the whole story. Fullerton and Farber move the argument from outcome to experience by treating play as something the player lives through, not just something the player completes. Kagen then widens the frame again by showing that agency can appear in forms that barely look like choice at all, such as wandering, detour, attention, and pilgrimage. Together, these perspectives suggest that agency in games isn’t located only in the menu, the ending, the branch, or the mechanic. It’s in the player’s experience of being made responsible, suspicious, attentive, or changed.
This is why agency isn’t the same thing as freedom. Freedom suggests openness, control, the ability to do otherwise without pressure. But games rarely offer that kind of total freedom, and maybe that’s not where their most interesting power lies. Games are built from rules. They are bounded worlds. Even the most open game has edges, systems, incentives, and limits. What matters is not whether those limits disappear, but what those limits make possible for the player to feel and understand.
The stamp, the cabin, and the summit are all different versions of the same question. In Papers, Please, the question is pressed into paper, what will you do when survival and obedience have been made almost indistinguishable? In Slay the Princess, it waits at the bottom of the stairs where you ask, what will you believe when every story is trying to use you? In A Short Hike, it sits at the top of the mountain, after all the wandering, what did the journey become because you were the one moving through it?
That is what these games reveal about agency as a medium specific experience. Games don’t simply show us constrained worlds. They make us act inside them. They make interpretation feel like participation. The player is not outside the artwork, looking in from a safe distance. The player is clicking, doubting, wandering, obeying, resisting, noticing, and continuing. Even when the world has already been shaped around us, we still have to decide how to inhabit it.
So the most interesting games don’t make us ask, “What will I choose?” They seek us to answer something more difficult, “What will I make of the choices I’m given?”
