Janet Murray "Agency"

Janet Murray is a professional designer in computer interactivity especially for games. One of her main theories is the idea of the agency behind the pleasures that the audience, or as she called it the “interactor”, gets when participating in games. The agency is the power that takes proper actions towards the audience’s options. As Murray states, this agency does not exist similarly in all situations or games because it does not depend on the action of interactivity or participation only, but also depends on the idea of multiple decisions and choices that can be made between the creator and interactor. One of the main forms of agency is spatial navigation, which allows the player to navigate through virtual landscapes. This kind of virtual space adds more pleasurable and aesthetic feeling to the interactor because it is not real so there are no limits and there is more freedom where in real life that could be physically not possible, but virtually is.

Two of the spatial navigation examples are the maze and the rhizome. The maze is based of the Greek myth in which brave Theseus kills the beast inside the maze and gets the treasure located in the center of the maze. The relation between the agency and the maze is that the maze is a path in a virtual space that leads to multiple choices the player should make to get various outcomes. The rhizome is a form of hypertext that can be never ending which continues in the form of a tube that has one path, but multiple decisions. It can be frustrating but at the same time comforting because the participants of the game’s story will not disappear by any chance. Murray gives examples on how hypertext and images in games can add suspense and complexity to the feeling of gaming. Another advantage of the computer navigational space is the pleasure of the journey story and problem solving where the journey and its participants are examples of real world people and the many possible solutions for impossible situations. So basically it is the pleasure of navigation and finding the solutions at the same time. Murray states that games involve in our real lives where they can be pretty dramatic. Games are not just about winning, but also losing because games reflect our real world with its hopelessness and weakness, which adds more excitement and an example for this is the earliest form of gaming, the agon between competitors. Murray explains how the interactor and the environment are the main elements in a game which she called “procedural authorship” in which the interactor controls the rules of the game.