Document Type : پژوهشی
Author
Associate Professor, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Abstract
In this study, we examine games through the perspective of human agency. First, we explore the status of individual agency within games and investigate how this form of agency relates to agency in life beyond games. We then articulate the educational insights that follow from this account for educational theorists and practitioners. The first question is addressed through conceptual elaboration, while the second is developed through philosophical inference, particularly through the implicit derivation of educational implications. Drawing on Nguyen’s account of game, we argue that entering a game involves entering another sphere of life in which an additional layer of agency emerges. On the one hand, this layer is relatively independent of a person’s broader agency in everyday life, as a result of the gamer’s immersion in the game and temporary distance from everyday concerns. On the other hand, it remains connected to and guided by this broader agency through its specific relations with the person’s overall way of acting in the world. Furthermore, game can cultivate participatory agency, enhance flexibility in responding to media and rules, and strengthen agentic resilience. These capacities represent significant forms of agency that game may foster in gamers. In the final section, we derive educational implications for designing effective games, including establishing a meaningful connection between the game and the real world; maintaining a balance between effort and chance; aligning game structures with the gamer’s capacities; designing balanced competitive and cooperative contexts; allowing flexibility in the processes and outcomes of games; and fostering resilience and agentic flexibility in confronting challenges.
Synopsis
From antiquity to the present, game has been a persistent feature of human life, although it has received limited theoretical attention. With the growing prominence of games in the twentieth century and their increasing use in educational settings, concepts such as the gamification of education gained currency. This study approaches game through the framework of human agency, or the Islamic approach to action. It seeks, first, to examine the nature of agency in games and its relationship to agency in real life and, second, to derive educational implications for theorists and practitioners. If we consider games from a human agency view, we can trace these components in them.
1. The Dual-Layered Nature of Agency in Game and Reality
Players move between the real world and Huizinga’s “magic circle.” In both spheres, they encounter constraints and exercise agency, although the rules, obstacles, and possibilities differ. Entering a game creates an additional layer of agency that is partly independent from real-life agency but remains connected to it through the player’s continuing awareness, values, and overall direction.
a. The Necessity of Grounding Agency in the Individual’s Real World
Regarding human agency, the player’s agency must remain grounded in real life. Individuals should not become so immersed in games that they lose contact with their lived responsibilities, identity, and moral agency. Therefore, games should not be understood as a wholly separate and self-enclosed magic circle.
b. The Necessity of Engaging with the Imagined Agency Embedded in Game
At the same time, a game must succeed as an engaging imagined world. Players need to enter its fictional space and interact with it meaningfully. Coherent narratives, believable characters, and attractive game worlds—especially those connected to players’ experiences while offering respite from real-life constraints—can support such engagement.
c. The Necessity of Movement Between These Two Layers of Agency
Educational games require an ongoing connection between real-life agency and in-game agency. If this link is lost, players may become excessively absorbed and lose their voluntary and moral center of control. This issue is particularly relevant to cheating: while some forms of deception may be permitted by game rules, deception outside those rules is unethical.
2. The Emergence of Participatory Agency in Games
Games can be understood as participatory and artistic processes in which players express and enact their agency. In multiplayer settings, this agency can take cooperative or competitive forms, creating social-participatory agency. Each enactment of a game produces a unique configuration and experience, bringing the game closer to the irreproducible character of real life.
3. The Resistance of the Game Medium and Players’ Agential Flexibility
Games are realized through particular media, such as boards, cards, tokens, controllers, or digital interfaces. Each medium has its own affordances, techniques, and forms of resistance that players must learn to navigate. This resistance develops agential flexibility: the capacity to adapt, change direction, and respond effectively to changing conditions.
Game rules, tools, and obstacles also require flexibility and agility. Players must explore alternative paths and strategies to overcome challenges, thereby enriching their agency.
4. Game Obstacles and Rules as Means of Strengthening Agential Resilience
Games may also strengthen agential resilience, understood as the capacity to remain actively engaged despite difficulty, failure, or resistance. Resilient players do not abandon the game or become passive when challenged. The resilience developed by the in-game agent may contribute, in turn, to the strengthening of resilience in real life.
Conclusion
Based on these dimensions of game and human agency, several implications may be drawn for educational game design and use.
a. Designing Games with a Hinge-Like Connection to the Real World
Games should have a hinge-like connection to real life. They should provide more freedom than everyday life, allowing players to experience liberation, while remaining sufficiently connected to reality so that in-game agency is not detached from the player’s whole agency.
Thus, games should be understood as a semi-magic circle, rather than a fully enclosed magic circle. Their time, events, narratives, and avatars should create both distance from and encounters with real life. This preserves engagement without producing excessive immersion or disconnection.
b. Designing Games with a Balanced Logic of Victory Based on Effort and Chance
Good games should not focus exclusively on winning. Players should enjoy the process of the game and avoid falling into repeated cycles of defeat. Chance-based mechanisms—such as dice, blind card draws, or randomly assigned characters—can prevent stronger players from winning all the time and give weaker players opportunities to succeed.
However, games should not depend entirely on chance, since this may make individual effort seem meaningless. Educational games should balance chance with effort, skill, and persistence.
c. Designing or Employing Rules, Structures, and Materials in Accordance with Players’ Capacities
Rules, structures, and materials should be appropriate to players’ developmental capacities. Age classifications should reflect the degree of difficulty, flexibility, and skill required by a game. If games are too difficult for younger players, repeated failure may undermine their confidence in their own agency.
d. Designing Balanced Opportunities for Cooperative and Competitive Agency
Games should include balanced opportunities for both competition and cooperation. Such opportunities strengthen social and participatory forms of agency and prevent games from becoming purely achievement-oriented.
e. Ensuring Flexibility and Openness in Game Processes and Endings
Games can strengthen players’ sense of efficacy by allowing them to influence the course and outcome of the narrative. Individuals who experience limited agency in real life may feel capable of shaping events within a game.
To foster this experience, games should provide an appropriate degree of openness, allowing players to complete unfinished narratives and shape endings through their actions. However, the degree of flexibility should be adjusted to players’ cognitive capacities, as younger players may require more guidance and structure.
f. Designing and Implementing Situations That Strengthen Agential Flexibility and Resilience
Game rules, obstacles, and materials should create meaningful challenges that require players to make sustained, coherent, and adaptive efforts. Such situations should demand both flexibility and agility, as well as persistence and determination.
In this way, games can strengthen agential flexibility—the ability to adapt to changing circumstances—and agential resilience—the ability to remain active and engaged in the face of difficulty.
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