Most of us accept the idea that video games are about power. From highly cerebral simulations like Civilization to run ‘n’ gun blasters such as Call of Duty and Battlefield, the successful player will usually rise in status from a lowly grunt to a celebrated and powerful hero, often leaving thousands of vanquished foes in their wake. This basic structure is certainly not unique to games – it is the essential metanarrative that has informed storytelling for generations, as catalogued by Joseph Campbell in his famed work, the Hero With a Thousand Faces. We like to tell and hear stories about people overcoming obstacles to become glorious heroes. It seems like human nature.

But in video games, I wonder sometimes if something much more subtle and instinctive is going on. Perhaps games aren’t really about power, they’re actually more about agency – the idea that we can have any sort of influence and control over what happens to us, and the world around us.

Here’s an example. Try getting from south-east London to north-west London using public transport. It sounds pretty straightforward – although London is a large city, it is well served by a huge transport infrastructure that employs underground and overground railways, buses and even river boats. What you’ll most likely find, however, is a series of frustrating delays and breakdowns in your plans: trains will arrive late and run slowly; buses will fail to stop for you, or they’ll terminate early; there will often be long waits between connections. A journey that should ostensibly take an hour, may take three times that, causing frustration and anxiety.

The ultimate agency? Civilization V: Gods & Kings. Photograph: AP

This is pretty much what life is like, even if you’re not commuting across one of the world’s busiest capital cities. As a race, humans tend to massively over-estimate the agency we have in our own lives. The illusion of control is a well-documented psychological and sociological phenomenon, while the underlying notion of free will is something philosophers such as Descarte, Kant and Nietzsche have tussled with to extraordinary length. We need to believe we have autonomy – or at least the capacity for autonomy – even if all the evidence points towards our helplessness.



For most of us, control is limited and ephemeral. We have jobs to do, people to care for, rules to follow – and we live in societies that place vast infrastructural limits on what we can do or affect. There are complex cognitive behaviours, from superstitions to compulsive gambling to obsessive compulsive disorders, through which the desire for, or belief in, agency express themselves. Throughout the 70s, UCLA researcher Ellen Langer developed the concept of “The Illusion of Control” studying how people often rely heavily on this unrealistic perceptions of their own autonomy. “The argument I’ve been making for the last 40 years,” she said during a talk in 2013, “is that actually, most of us are mindless virtually all of the time.”

And I think this is actually what video games are about. At a very basic, fundamental level, they are simply about providing a sense of control, rather than necessarily about making us feel like superheroes. Video games merely have to confirm us as sentient agents in order to function.

Look at your games console or your PC. It’s a box with buttons on it, attached to a keyboard with buttons on it, and perhaps a joypad with buttons on it. The buttons are all specifically and carefully designed to be comfortable and accessible – the concepts of the user interface and user interaction are among the most important in the digital age. The idea of “perceived affordances” developed by Donald Norman, a concept in which the user must be able to immediately identify the purpose of an object or icon by its appearance is central to the work of everyone from Google to television remote-control manufacturers. It’s not content that’s king anymore, it’s user agency.

Already then, before we even press “start”, games are providing us with control. If we push these buttons something happens. That’s what we expect. In the wider world, this is so important that systems are often designed with placebo buttons that give the illusion of control. The buttons on pedestrian crossings, the “close door” buttons in elevators – often these don’t actually work at all – in reality, everything is automated – but they’re either designed into the system, or left in place after being made obsolete, because people feel better if they get to press something. They feel like they’re in control.

So game machines are specifically built to present us with symbols of control – buttons, touchpads, interfaces – it’s just that here, the symbols really do work. On top of this, games are vast input/reaction systems – you do something in a game and the world responds. Better yet, almost everything that happens on screen is reliant on the agency of the player. This is base level satisfaction – a deeply ingrained, primal need is being answered. Even if you have control over nothing else in your life, if you switch on a games console and start playing a game, every single element of that experience is designed to simulate agency. It almost doesn’t matter if the narrative is about power, it’s agency that you’ve already won.

Symbolic control: the classic Atari Joystick. Photograph: Alamy

Rob Fulop is one of gaming’s original designers. He worked at Atari during the 70s and early 80s, helping to create seminal titles like Night Driver, Missile Command and Demon Attack. He once wrote something interesting about the compulsive nature of games:

When you play a game 10,000 times, the graphics become invisible. It’s all impulses. It’s not the part of your brain that processes plot, character, story. If you watch a movie, you become the hero – Gilgamesh, Indiana Jones, James Bond, whoever. The kid says, I want to be that. In a game, Mario isn’t a hero. I don’t want to be him; he’s me. Mario is a cursor.

So what he’s saying is that, fundamentally, games aren’t about the power journey of the character, they’re about the instinctive will of the player; they’re about the impulses of agency and control. Too often, when people from outside the industry look at games, all they see are the surface narratives and very obvious visual tropes – they see violence, explosions and conquering heroes. But maybe these are just the ciphers through which a much more pure experience is being offered to, and enjoyed by, the player. That is agency. That is control.

Let’s go back to Ellen Langer for a moment. She found that we are most susceptible to systems that pretend we have control when there are “skill cues” present. If there is choice, competition or just a physical action involved, we think we can “win” agency. In gambling, for example, dice or craps players sometimes instinctively feel that if they roll the dice hard, they’ll get higher numbers, and if they do it gently, they’ll get lower numbers – you may even have unconsciously done this yourself while, say, playing Monopoly and hoping to role a certain number to land on a desirable property. Of course, there really is no skill factor in the throw, but because we have movement, we believe we have choice.

In games, most of the time, we have the ability to move an avatar and that movement is truly connected to choice and skill. If you move well in Pac-Man, or Tetris or Halo, you will succeed. Of course narrative is important, it provides context and emotional weight, but most of the heavy lifting is being done under the hood of the game. It sounds mechanistic, but in some ways, it doesn’t really matter what the player actions achieve in terms of the game’s setting or defined goals, what matters is that games are designed to specifically court and flatter our desire for autonomy. This is not a power fantasy in the sense that most people use that phrase.

Newer consoles such as the Xbox One have moved away from a simpler feeling of autonomy in gaming, towards a hand-holding future of updates and patches. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

And I believe this brings us to one of the most interesting problems facing game designers and console manufacturers in the digital age. Earlier this week, you may have read Albert Burneko’s furious diatribe, The Xbox One Is Garbage And The Future Is Bullshit. After buying the machine, the writer was constantly confounded and frustrated by its interminable updates and set-up procedures. Before he even got to any games, he hated the darn thing. If we understand about the illusion of control, then we can totally get his rage: he bought a machine that he thought would give him agency, but really he was trapped in yet other system that provided only the facade of power. Lots of people laughed at him, but we shouldn’t because his Xbox One experience was basically a commute from south-east to north-east London. And that really is bullshit.

Up until this generation, console manufacturers understood their role as the gatekeepers of the autonomy experience. Switch on a PlayStation 1 or 2, or a Sega Mega Drive or whatever, and the response is instant: a nice jingle, a logo onscreen. Then we’re off. The machine’s wish is the player’s command. But now we’re moving into an age where players often have to be shepherded toward firmware updates, where hard drives are filling up, where games require constant patching. The autonomy that games so effortlessly provided for 40 years is being chipped away.

Games, then, aren’t about power as much as they are about just having one fricking place where the system does what it says it will – where, even if the game content has restrictive rule systems, we exert full interactive control. In our jobs, in our relationships, we know this isn’t true, we know it deep down and it really gets to us. If the trust relationship between agent and game experience breaks down too, that is really serious. Nobody wants to be the powerful ruler of a world they can’t trust or rely on. That way madness lies.