Agency informing techniques: communicating player agency in interactive narratives

Within interactive narrative research, agency is largely considered in terms of a player's autonomy in a game, defined as theoretical agency. Rather than in terms of whether or not the player feels they have agency, their perceived agency. An effective interactive narrative needs to provide a player a level of agency that satisfies their desires and must do that without compromising its own structure. Researchers frequently turn to techniques for increasing theoretical agency to accomplish this. This paper proposes an approach to categorize and explore techniques in which a player's level of perceived agency is affected without requiring more or less theoretical agency.