A Methodological Framework for Using Games to Study Enacted Agency and Perspective

Abstract

The study of phenomenal consciousness faces a methodological difficulty: experience is lived from a first-person perspective, while systematic inquiry often relies on publicly accessible materials such as reports and actions. How can these third person accessible materials inform the study of experience? In this thesis, I propose a methodological framework for approaching this problem by narrowing the target of inquiry to enacted agency: what it is like to take up, inhabit, resist, or reinterpret a practical standpoint not originally one’s own. Drawing on C. Thi Nguyen’s account of games as the art form whose medium is agency (2020), I argue that games can provide a structured basis for inquiry into enacted agency. Games organize goals, rules, actions, obstacles, feedback, and standards of success into a structure from which players act. I distinguish the agency intended by a designer, the agency-structure made available by the game, and a player’s enactment of that structure. The designed agency-structure can remain relatively stable across players without determining how each player enacts it. Researchers cannot directly observe what an enactment is like, but they can examine third person accessible materials (e.g. reports, choices, hesitations, refusals, and actions) as possible footprints bearing on how the structure was taken up. Such footprints can support, weaken, or constrain interpretations of enacted experience, but those interpretations remain defeasible because skill, attention, culture, fatigue, and prior experience may also shape the footprints. Finally, I offer a preliminary exploration of the ethics of structuring participants’ agency. Focusing on Respect for Persons, I suggest that participants should retain a practical ability to pause or stop, and that interpretations of their experience should remain proportionate to the evidence and responsive to their challenges.