What is a Game? Part Six: Agents of Games

Now, my next statement isn't going to be particularly surprising. An important part of any game is players. But more than that, a game needs agents. There is a slight difference between player and agent. Agents don't necessarily need to have sentience. What a player is should be obvious. Agents, on the other hand, are a bit harder to pin down.


Agents need to be able to do one of two things. Simplified, they either respond to data, produce data or do both. The game itself is often comprised multiple agents. In a video game, every NPC is an agent. Their intelligence, such as it is, is based off of a script, and very simple, but they still take information from their environment and react to it. However, agents don't need to be that complex. In a first person shooter, the bullets and the walls are also agents. The intelligence and actions of the walls are limited to hit detection and stopping things that collide with them. The agency of the bullets is limited to hit detection, stopping on collision and dealing damage to objects they collide with. Even with this nearly invisible decision making, even though we don't normally recognize the agency of these actors, they are still creating interactions.

With a tabletop game, agents fill a similar field. The board, the dice, the cards are all still agents. Their actions and interactions are limited by the rules and goals of the game, but they still change the way the game is played, based on their nature.

Of course, in the case of both video games and tabletop games, the player or players are agents. As with all other agents in a game, their actions are limited by the structure.

Without responding to or producing information, a game object doesn't change the outcome of the game. A deck of cards that is hidden isn't an agent. As long as it isn't providing information, it is not creating options or choices. As soon as a card is revealed, it provides information to another agent, and then the card becomes an agent. As a whole, the deck does not have any agency, as an individual piece of information, it now has agency.

Agency is very closely tied to interaction. Without interactivity, their can be no agents. No decisions are made, no information is produced. However, if an activity is compromised solely of information producing agents, there are no responsive actions. As long as something cares about the information however, it stops being observational, and becomes meaningful interaction. Without that change, it is my belief, that there is no game, as it doesn't matter what occurs- the same results will be returned each time, without chance of deviation.