Knob

Agency contract

You might say: player agency, promise of consequence

An agency contract is the set of expectations about which player actions can shape the story and how visibly they matter.

What it does

Sets the boundary between authored focus and player freedom so choices feel intentional rather than arbitrary.

Ask

What kind of control does the game promise, and where will it honor or deliberately deny that promise?

Typical

No story response to local variation to persistent world-state changes; responses may be explicit, clued or hidden.

Trouble

The game promises freedom but funnels every action, or changes outcomes without giving the player a readable cause.

What to look for

1. Player action changing story state
2. An outcome visibly shaped by a choice

Sources

1. Bruno Dias, Introduction: A Discipline, if We Can Define It, How stories respond to the player's actionsOften, we're somewhere between those two extremes, trying to balance questions of player agency against the needs of experiential focus and game scope.

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Agency contract" (narrative-agency) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal