Agency-Narrativity Mapping Framework : Reading the Gap Between Actual and Perceived Agency in Videogame Episodes
Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis develops and applies the Agency-Narrativity Mapping framework (ANM), anepisode-level analytic framework that tracks how videogames produce narrativity throughthe mediation of player agency. ANM analyses four semiotic resources: UI feedback,textual framing, spatial layout, temporal design, and renders the gap between actualagency (what the rules permit) and perceived agency (what the player feels they haveauthored) across four agency dimensions (mechanical, protagonist, operational,authorial). The framework is applied to two bounded episodes from games with stronglycontrasting design configurations: the player's first examination of the hanged man inDisco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019) and the tutorial mission "Death of a Showman" inHitman: Blood Money (IO Interactive, 2006). Three participants completed bothplaythroughs, with screen recordings, Likert-scale instruments, and micro-narrativeresponses supplying the empirical material. Drawing on multimodal social semiotics,intermedial theory, and game-studies accounts of agency, the analyses find that theagency gap runs in inverted directions in the two cases: Disco Elysium’s textual framinginflates perceived authorial agency above the mechanical horizon (Worthen's narrativesuperposition), while Hitman: Blood Money’s UI feedback and traversal-gated spatiallayout produce perceived constraint below the mechanical affordance. The comparativediscussion demonstrates that ANM holds across games with fundamentally differentdesign philosophies, and that the agency gap operates as a structured network of tensionsand alignments. The thesis closes by arguing that agency in a videogame episode is afluid, multi-layered field surfaced through multimodal-intermedial configurations, ofwhich ANM specifies a tractable portion.
Source: DiVA (Linnaeus University)
Author: Miniotas, Neilas
Language: English
Topic: Digital Games and Media
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7166256872