Memory, Reverie Machine: towards a dance of agency in interactive storytelling

Agency is a crucial concept that links an individual to the material world and society around. Different approaches lend themselves to distinctive social and political practices. The “free will” view emphasizes an individual’s uncompromised liberty; feminist theorists locate agency in one’s resistance of the hegemonic patriarchal status quo; whereas some read Foucault’s impersonal discourses [3, 4] as the proof of the absence of individual agency.[1] The wide range of negotiation and struggle between an individual and her socialization practice constitutes an important component of her lived experiences. In many interactive narrative pieces, however, agency is often narrowly understood as a user’s freedom to either perform actions or alter the mechanics of narration at will, often followed by an implicit assumption of “the more agency the better.”[6] We focus on the computational engagement of dynamic agency, through our text-based computational narrative project Memory, Reverie Machine (MRM), to call for more nuanced understanding of agency, both as critical commentary on our post-conflict society and as a novel expressive storytelling mechanism afforded by digital media.