My Decisions, My Play

Friday’s lecture on Agency and Immersion got me thinking if my actions could really change the discourse of a game, and to what extent. The Sims fits perfectly into this discussion today because it is a game that I believe to have a limited level of agency, in which immersion is mostly diegetic. The Sims, people simulator, is a representation of the everyday life. The routine affect eliminates any possible sense of situated immersion. The actions and decisions required in the game are very familiar to most players, and its conceptual embodiment, in which the character is embodied in the frame, is an example of how the routine affect is strengthened. In this sense, the player has the ability to control more than one Sim at once, and because the characters are not controlled from a first person perspective the player experiences a less personal play. 

The actions of each Sim are reduced to cleaning, eating, sleeping, working, etc. Therefore, the player has limited ability to take responsibility for most responses in the game. Even though The Sims is a representation of the everyday, the game does not provide tools in which the decision making process has anything to do with moral, social, or ideological issues. Agency within the context of The Sims is limited to the ability the player has to expand the original game by using tools – provided by the designers – to only create and customize features. The decisions I make as a player, then, will not change the overall discourse of the game. The Sim’s will still be repetitive, and the routine affect is endless: both in the game world, and outside. Even though videogames are extremely complex systems, I still struggle with the idea that a game designed to follow a pre-determined narrative is capable of responding to particularized actions, and still capable to provide universal endings that, when achieved, feel  so personal and unique. We might all follow the same narrative, play with the same avatar, or even achieve the same goals, but the decisions we make to get there is what make our experience so unique, not just the game itself. At the same time, if the decisions are limited, so is our play. No matter where the narrative is designed to take me, the way I play any game will always reflect who I am, but never entirely, unless I am the actual designer.