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Player agency is the defining characteristic of videogames. It's what sets them apart from other mediums, like television and music. When you play a videogame, you have some impact on your own experience, you have the ability to change what happens. This is often reduced to the concept of interactivity, but interactivity doesn't really capture the feeling of control you have when playing a game. You can interact with a book by turning the pages, or a movie by pausing and fast-forwarding, but you don't have any control over the content. Agency does a better job capturing the fact that you are actually an agent in the videogame, helping to shape the final experience that you have. While all videogames are about agency, role-playing games in particular take the concept of agency to extreme levels: not only do you have some impact on your experience of the game, you have an impact on the narrative (the way the story unfolds), the character's abilities (the way your character develops over time), and what your character does when (where you go and how you interact with the world). For the sake of this discussion, I'll call these narrative agency, instrumental agency, and investigative agency. Those terms might seem a little arcane right now, so the first thing I'm going to do is explain what I mean by them in a little more detail.

Narrative agency refers to the player's ability to interact with and to some degree control the way that the game's narrative (story) unfolds. In a linear game, the player has no narrative agency, they are simply herded from level to level, sitting passively through cut-scenes, and sooner or later end up at the climax of the narrative. The player has no freedom over how the protagonist chooses to live their life, no option to pick a side in a conflict between two factions (or avoid conflict entirely), and no ability to develop meaningful relationships with non-player characters (NPCs) that isn't already scripted. Games with no narrative agency are a lot like movies and novels. Role-playing games, by contrast, typically offer the player some degree of control over the shape of the narrative. This control is provided by allowing the player to choose from different options in dialogue trees when interacting with NPCs, the ability to decline and abandon quests or to choose from different possible quest resolutions, and the ability to perform actions which clearly change the course of events (such as killing someone important to the main plot). These actions frequently (though not always) lead to different narrative endings, the ultimate validation for players exercising their narrative agency. Narrative agency is not restricted to RPGs, of course, and can be found in many different types of games. Silent Hill 2, for example, has six possible endings. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books are the clearest example of a 'game' that gives you narrative agency but no other kind of agency.

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