Player as Author: Digital Games and Agency

Candidate: Cindy Poremba
Type: Master of Applied Science, Interactive Art (MASc-IA), School of Interactive Arts and Technology
Date: August 13, 2003
Senior Supervisor: Ron Wakkary
Thesis: Download Thesis Document

Abstract

One of the key properties of the digital game genre is the proliferation of player-produced content and artifacts. The reworking of original game materials is an integral part of game culture that can not be ignored in the study of these games.  This thesis explores player-production as a mode of authorship resulting from the agency of the game player. Agency - as an attributed, contextualized power to affect meaningful change - is a common subject for analysis in interactive media research. This thesis argues that authorship in the digital game environment lies at the intersection of designer/player agencies. At the level of player-created game artifacts, the player's agency extends beyond an instantiation of the designer's agency to the authorship of a new artifact. These artifacts, in turn, become vessels of the player's agency, and play a key role in the social validation of their role as authors.

This work reflects a reality that digital games are malleable, loosely bounded, and socially validated and defined. Rhetorical criticism is used as a methodology for examing player-produced artifacts: demonstrating how the exhange and interpretation of meaning in this environment represents player agency and authorship, and how these meanings are dramatized through player-production. The artifacts reveal specific themes that speak to the construction of agency, including the opposition or extension of the primary author, and the legitimacy, ownership and access players assume as part of the role of player-producer. These player works demonstrate a common underlying structure which both reflects the community at large and the individual social realities of the players: that of player agency via authorship.

This relationship between game designer and player provides a new framework from which to examine the production and exhange of meaning in digital games. This framework suggests further inquiry both inward, into the game experience, and outward, into explorations of mass culture. It also puts forth rhetorical criticism as a methodology in game research, and provides an important documentation of emerging modes of player-production.