Agency, Encouraging Player Intention  A Preliminary Poetics for
Interactive Drama and Games by Michael Mateas discusses an
interesting concept for video games called agency. Mateas
describes agency as “the feeling of empowerment that comes from
being able to take actions in the world whose effects relate to
the player’s intention”. Basically, that means that the player
is coming up with goals they want to reach (that is, they are
forming intentions), and based on them decide on in-game actions
to take which will move them towards their goal. A more
simplistic way to say it would be that the player can do the
things that they want to do, and have them cause effects related
to what they were expecting.  Sounds great, how do we do that?
If a game gives the player agency, then the act of playing the
game becomes more directed and enjoyable. But, how does a game
make this happen? Mateas answers this by first bringing up two
concepts from Aristotle’s theory of drama: material cause and
formal cause.  Aristotelian