Player Experience of Limited Agency : A reflective study on player agency and how players can still enjoy games that lack choice

This thesis explores how video games can be designed to evoke an experience of lack of freedom. While many modern games focus on expanding interactivity, this study investigates how restricting movement, choice, and control might evoke themes of helplessness, abandonment, and disempowerment during gameplay. This topic is relevant to narrative game designers and scholars interested in procedural rhetoric and affective storytelling. We developed a 15-minute vignette game in which the player controls a stationary robot tasked with repetitive labour in an isolated disassembly factory. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Procedural Rhetoric and Player Agency, the game was iteratively designed and then evaluated through two playtests with a total of 13 game design students. Data was collected via observations and semi-structured interviews, later analysed using Driscoll’s reflective model. Findings show that while players recognized the intended themes of restriction and isolation, many still found our experience meditative or relaxing. This suggests that limitations in interactivity can communicate thematic meaning but do not necessarily result in a negative experience. The study contributes to design research by reframing constrained agency as a viable and nuanced tool for narrative expression in games, potentially without compromising player fun.