Adapted from remarks delivered at Nordic Larp Talks in Oslo on March 12, 2025.
If you ask game designers and makers of “immersive” experiences why their work has become so popular recently, their answers will fall into a few buckets. Sensory spectacle has always been attractive, fuelled by seemingly constant improvements in technology. There’s the allure of entering a flow state, where the outside world and all its distractions fade away. And many games and experiences offer deep social interaction, which can feel absent in our individualised, atomised society.
But one of the most popular arguments for why games and immersive experiences have become so popular recently is the idea that “agency” feels missing in modern life. Our obligations are so strict, our resources so limited, and our choices so few that playing Animal Crossing or visiting Sleep No More feels liberating. We can craft our own world, choose our own friends, and wander to any room we like to rifle through any cupboard or drawer.
This is a tricky argument. If we’re lacking agency in modern life today, does that mean we had more agency fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, five hundred years ago? Even the harshest critic of modernity would have to admit that the average person has more choice in their life in terms of education, occupation, relationships, travel, religion, and entertainment—for better and for worse.
The more apt comparison is not time but media. Proponents of interactive and immersive art rarely miss an opportunity to contrast their work with “passive” media. The entire notion of immersive theater lies in opposition to “traditional” theater. One audience quietly faces forward, applauding politely at act breaks. The other audience is liberated: they are adventurers who can express their personality through their agency. The same goes for books, TV, movies, and paintings versus interactive fiction, video games, and installation and environmental art.
Left unanswered in this debate is just how much agency actually exists in these more interactive and immersive experiences. Escape rooms, open world games, and even platformers are replete with buttons to press and puzzles to solve, but the agency they offer is often highly structured.
Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues that this structuring — or crystallisation — of agency is definitionally distinctive of games as an art form. Indeed, the entire point of games is that they are not as free as life. Many of the most popular immersive experiences, whether immersive theatre or Netflix’s The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience, are similarly limited in the agency that they offer. In the latter, you can choose what gown to wear and how you dance but you can’t become the queen. As Felix Barrett, artistic director of Punchdrunk, recently told me in regard to Sleep No More, “Actually, there isn’t really real agency. You’re basically a floating camera . . . you don’t really have much control, but you can just choose where you stand to watch.”
The concept of agency itself is worth teasing apart. I believe that a strong appeal of games and immersive experiences lies not in the promise of unlimited agency—nor even in differently structured agency—but in sovereignty.
Sovereignty is an old-fashioned word, usually associated with nation-states and monarchs. Put very simply, a sovereign has absolute authority. They can do whatever they want within their own domain without being questioned or restricted by anyone else. The notion of sovereignty gradually evolved to the point where, around the turn of the twentieth century, economists invented the idea of the sovereign consumer. A sovereign consumer is independent of external domination in the domain of purchasing: they can choose whatever they want to buy. Their purchasing choices are therefore taken to be rational and utility-maximising, and are consequently unquestionable. If someone decides they never want to eat vegetables, this is because they’ve made a rational decision that their life will be better without vegetables. As such, no authority can restrict their decision: neither medical, political, religious, nor otherwise. For economists whom we would now term neoliberal, the sovereign consumer was just what free-market democracies needed: they personified an essentially individualist but competitive society.
Of course, this is all fiction. People are not perfectly rational. They are continually led astray by advertising and propaganda. Their choices are constrained to whatever the market produces, and if they lack resources and power, they have even fewer choices. But the idea of the sovereign consumer still lives on. If anything, this fiction has only become stronger throughout the last century with political activism itself becoming refracted through consumer choices and boycotts.
The sovereign consumer is allied to the idea of sovereign agency, which argues that because our actions are self-generated and a product of our conscious will, whatever happens to us is at least partly under our control. This is an attractive proposition, argues political philosopher Sharon R. Krause. We like the kind of control it promises. This proposition means that we can always rise above our circumstances.
This proposition also sounds a lot like video games, specifically single-player role-playing games. Players enter a little universe where everything that happens to them is theoretically under their control. No one else exists except as things to dominate. The fact that video games deliver a fantasy of sovereignty does not mean that they always let players win. However, it is always within a player’s hands whether they succeed or not. It is not up to anyone else.
Sovereignty becomes trickier in co-operative multiplayer games. Negotiation and compromise is essential here, whether in an escape room, Dungeons & Dragons, or World of Warcraft. As Hannah Arendt noted in The Human Condition, “Sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to the very condition of plurality. No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth.”
What does agency look like in a world of non-sovereign individuals? It is distributed. We can try performing an action, starting a protest, venturing on a quest, or designing a game, but if no one else takes up those projects with us, our agency becomes deeply limited. There is also always the threat that we might be actively opposed in these endeavors.
We are responsible for other people’s freedom of agency, and they are responsible for ours. Single-player video games — and multiplayer games masquerading as single-player with the aid of disguised bots — can guarantee that our actions are always recognised and always lead to success. However, multiplayer games and experiences with true freedom of agency cannot guarantee this, because humans can always ignore and oppress each other. It is therefore understandable when people opt instead for fantasies of sovereignty over the uncertainty and contingency of social life, choosing places of unrestricted action where no one can say that they are playing the game wrong.
It would be simplistic to say that spending time in solo sovereign fantasies inevitably leads to sovereigntist ideas of politics, but bringing the same attitudes and expectations to social spaces may alter our understanding of agency and sovereignty for the worse. Artists creating games and immersive experiences must build spaces where players can practice being courageous in the midst of uncertainty, supporting one another when there can be little expectation of success.
This is not necessarily as thankless a task as it seems. Designers of multiplayer games and real-world immersive experiences are finding that their players increasingly desire social experiences. Currently, these games often lack the conceptual framework required to foster prosocial behaviour — teaching people to play nicely with one another while still giving them meaningful agency. Some designers prefer to jettison social interaction entirely rather than risk players’ sovereignty, or else replace humans with bots. Others, such as Daniel Cook, are creating design principles for prosocial multiplayer games.
Of all the interactive and immersive arts, non-digital role-playing games have seen the most intense thinking and experimentation on these questions. Unlike in video games, “anything can be attempted” in tabletop RPGs as Jon Peterson puts it, because the game world is literally co-created by the players and the referee (aka DM/GM). When anything can be attempted, gameplay can be deeply unpredictable.
The real-world, embodied nature of Nordic Larp offers even more opportunities and challenges for social gameplay. Its “play to lift” philosophy, also known as “play to lose,” asks participants to support one another in creating a more beautiful or dramatic outcome, rather than seeking to individually dominate and win, leading to the foregrounding of issues such as sex, grief, trauma, work, and even genocide. Nordic Larp has pioneered safety and calibration mechanics that have spread to tabletop role-playing games, giving players the confidence to explore difficult subjects. Crucially, the experience of players in Nordic Larp have bled through into the real world, teaching them skills for real-world organising.
Agency only takes us so far in our understanding of what people do in games and immersive experiences. As games become the lens through which people understand and interpret the world, and as they occupy more of our time and transform our relationships, we need to examine the fantasy that players are really being given. In so many cases, this is the fantasy of sovereign agency. But there is an alternative.
This essay was first published in Das Videospiel, an international journal of narrative design, part of The Evergreen Review. My thanks to Miracle Jones for their editing. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
For an example of Nordic Larp tackling difficult subjects, read my piece on the Immersion Larp Festival, which featured a larp inspired by life under siege in Gaza.