Games, Agency, and Education- a Response to “How Should Games Teach?”
I was so excited to see Rishi’s post in my feed because he brings up a valuable topic that is rarely discussed in the game studies field, let alone in the greater discourse of pedagogy and oppression. Player agency in games is such an interesting example how subtly things can teach us right/wrong, good/bad, etc. It exists in both the way games frame their choices and consequences, and in how they may construct an illusion of choice. I’m glad he brought up World 1–1 of Super Mario Bros too, since it skillfully illustrates the nuanced way games teach players and influence decision making.
There is more to this than good level design however. To build off of Rishi’s point, player agency in games unveils the greater role of decision making in education and freedom from oppression.
Daniel Muriel and Garry Crawford explore this dynamic in their paper Video Games and Agency in Contemporary Society. It’s a bit of a read, but they dig deep into this idea that how games guide their players — creating dialogue, encouraging exploration, granting agency over their actions — helps liberate people in an otherwise oppressive society. Rishi recognized it too; games have this potential for liberation because they teach players in a humanizing way. Of course as noted with the example of Candy Crush, this ability to effectively educate can be used to manipulate, whether through fabricated feedback or the emergent meaning of certain consequences.
“Similarly, video games show us that, today, agency is, at the same time, part of both emancipatory and alienating practices. Not only is agency linked to freedom, empowerment, and autonomy, but it is also connected to submission, disempowerment, and dependency. Limitations and potentialities are both part of the same uses of agency. Video games and the agency they promote might be part of the current neoliberal rationalities, but they carry the promise of new creative and critical modes of agency.” (Muriel and Crawford)
There will always be restrictions on choice and the opportunity to exploit perceived freedom. However, I am an optimist and want to focus on the positive ways games can be used as a medium of liberation.
Game systems are models for agency in society, and that is very important.
Players make decisions for themselves based on how they want to play. Society isn’t directly affected by player choice. Games exist inside a magic circle, where the fictional world is isolated from the conventions and boundaries of regular society. The magic circle gets a little blurry when you think about developer bias or multiplayer games, but it still has significance in the realm of agency. To an extent, the player gets to act how they truly want to act, without the fear or restrictions of reality. Even the most basic choices like I’m choosing to complete this mission first or I’m choosing to put this character in my party are still ways a player exercises personal decision making.
Games don’t just have a unique way of teaching you right from wrong. Interactive systems designed to open a dialogue with the player are extra effective since players are encouraged to explore possibility and consequence in a safe, relatively low stakes setting. As Muriel and Crawford explain, this approach is “giving choices to individuals and making them responsible for the decisions they make”. Players learn about the game on their own terms, instilling a sense of agency which can translate into the real world. Even when players make bad choices (the ones that lose HP, give the bad ending, or result in a game over), a good game shouldn’t punish the player for trying something new. That is, games don’t have to “prescribe truth” to the player in order to teach them the logic of its system. I’d argue this is also why games are an excellent medium of entertainment and education, as they provide a space to practice liberated decision making.
This all comes with the caveat that video games are limited by the scope of technology. While the addition of variable outcomes and immersion makes games ideal over other storytelling platforms, at the end of the day a computer program can only do so much to account for human ingenuity. Tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons create spaces of play where anything is technically possible, but are also subject to plenty of personal bias. Games are not perfect, but they have so much potential as tools of empowerment. I don’t think we have to gamify education in an attempt to utilize this either. Rather than convincing every school teacher to think like a game designer, I hope more game designers will recognize that they too are educators, and we have the ability to both liberate and manipulate players through choice.
