"Naked and on Fire": Examining Player Agency Experiences in Narrative-Focused Gameplay

Player agency is central to interactive narrative and games. While previous work focuses on analyzing player perception of agency through various lenses and phenomena, like meaningful choice and expectations, it is largely theoretical. Few user studies within games explore how players reason about and judge their own agency within interactive narratives. We present an interview study where participants rated their agency experiences within narrative-focused games and described their reasoning. The analysis suggests that agency perception depends on multiple factors beyond meaningful choice, such as social investment and genre-conventions. Participants described varying preferences and value judgements for different factors, indicating that individual differences have a deep impact on agency perception in narrative-focused gameplay. We discuss the implications of these cognitive variables on design, how they can be leveraged with other factors, and how our findings can help future work enhance and measure player agency, within interactive narrative and beyond.