Agency: The Player’s Choice
Players can spot a fake choice immediately. When a game offers a superficial dialogue option that leads to the exact same outcome, the illusion of the world shatters. To make players feel truly immersed, their actions must leave permanent scars on the game’s underlying math. Players feel immersed when they believe their choices matter. Creating genuine agency requires careful choice architecture, which Josh Sawyer explains was achieved in Fallout: New Vegas by tracking variables to manage reputation systems and faction disguises.1 Narrative design is a system akin to combat, where quest structures and game logic are just as important as the dialogue written by writers, as argued by Horneman.2
In my opinion, a major problem with games that break immersion is their lack of story adaptability. Rather than building the story around the player, they want to pull the player through the story. They want the player to choose but have a single goal they want to get you to so they limit what the player can actually do. Instead of static scripts, Ken Levine proposes building a narrative engine using Narrative Legos, breaking characters down into systemic variables like Passions, Hatreds, and Needs that can recombine endlessly.3
Now there is a downside to this. Players in RPGs rarely do exactly what you want them to do. So how do you prevent their immersion from breaking simply by doing something way earlier than you planned on them doing it? This requires defensive logic. Defensive logic is creating fallback options for a story. Jon Ingold notes this is crucial in games like Sorcery! for coding fallback options that prevent the narrative from breaking no matter what weird state the player is in.4 Finally, a recent Post45 analysis of Disco Elysium suggests that true narrative agency might simply be the illusion of infinite choice, where the player is changing the meaning of the text rather than changing the actual world.5