Keeping Sisyphus Happy: Agency and Imagination
The other day, I was discussing the nature of games with my friend David, and we came to a popular question: is Candy Land a game?
Obviously, most people define it as such. It comes in a box, has pieces and cards and a board. But it’s also a common refrain in the board game community that Candy Land is less of a game and more of an existential exercise. There’s a whole (brilliant) Existential Comics entry on the topic, featuring Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.
As the comic explains, Candy Land is transparently a game without agency for the players. Since movement is decided by a deck of cards that has been set in advance and turn order is preset, not only do players not actually make any choices, but the future is verifiably fixed. As fictional Camus says, “it offers no illusion of chance.” A player in the target audience (children) might not realize this at first, but eventually, most people will come to the conclusion that their actions in the game don’t matter. And at that point, whether one wants to classify it as a game or not (which I’m not going to definitively answer today), most people stop finding Candy Land fun.
It would be easy to conclude that the reason people stop finding Candy Land fun is that they don’t enjoy games when they have no agency and end the interrogation there. I don’t think that assessment is wrong, but I do think it’s incomplete. So today, we’re going to get into questions of agency, imagination, and certainty, and what in particular makes Candy Land so reviled by people outside its target audience.
The Importance of the Imagined
I can’t prove the ancient Greeks weren’t playing D&D.
Courtesy the Met Open Access Collection.
So why isn’t this a simple open-and-shut case of “this game has no agency, and therefore isn’t fun?”
Well, for starters, as Existential Comics makes clear, for our friend fictional Camus, the preset deck merely makes the inevitability transparent. We can’t look at the deck of our life and divine the outcome, but Camus’ brand of existentialism dictates that we’re moving along a path of inevitability all the same. We’re not as likely to end up in a swamp made of melting candy, but I did go to Star Wars Celebration in Orlando during the summer once, so I know it’s not impossible.
Setting aside the worryingly big questions about determinism, free will, and the possible coexistence of the two, though, every time you pick up the dice in a game of chance, you’re subject to the whims of fortune. You might have the agency to pick from multiple options (for example, the ability to choose between a high-probability shot and a lower-probability shot in a miniatures game like Warhammer 40,000 or X-Wing), and a better choice might be more likely to work out in your favor, but you could still roll badly. You could do everything right and watch your preparations roll down the hill like Sisyphus’ boulder. And if you play these sorts of games enough, you will see yourself take actions that end up being futile time and time again.
Arguably, the dice took away your agency in these moments (or at least, made your choice retrospectively irrelevant, since your “good” decision still led to the same outcome as the “bad” decision – so there was no reward/punishment for choosing correctly/incorrectly). But games with post-choice randomness are popular (and indeed, I’ve discussed the importance of post-choice randomness in the past). So obviously, many people are willing to accept a game sometimes negating the meaningfulness of their choices as long as they felt satisfied with those choices in the moment. When the choice was made, it looked like it could still matter. In retrospect, the choice was in fact illusory, but at the time, it felt real.
But I actually think there’s an even clearer example of something that has exactly the same amount of agency as Candy Land, but has an undeniable pull (badum-tshhh) for a lot of people: slot machines. And while I personally don’t find slot machines much fun, I do enjoy opening packs of Magic: The Gathering cards, which is basically the same thing from a psychological standpoint. Like Candy Land, there’s only one choice in these scenarios: “play” or “don’t.” After that, there’s no agency. There are superstitions people have (personally, I like to look at the cards one at a time, checking the rare last), but there’s no agency, just discovery. Again setting aside whether or not these are games, they are activities that can for many people elicit some level of fun.
In both of the above scenarios (dice rolls and random pulls), in the moment before you make the key choice, you imagine possible outcomes. That’s where the fun exists. Once the dice are cast, you have to live with the outcomes. Once the pack is open, you can never go back to the moment when it contained infinite possibility. But there is a thrill at the verge between uncertainty and outcome.
Candy Land is, in theory, the same deal. You could look at the deck, but you’re not supposed to. It’s supposed to be a surprise, in which you go from a state of uncertainty to certainty. In theory, that should contain some excitement. So why does Candy Land get such a bad rap?
Don’t Bullshit Me
Fortunately, these days, this sort of “kick up” usually happens on the internet.
Kick Up at the Hazard Table (Thomas Rowlandson, 1787). Courtesy the Met Open Access Collection.
I’ll get to the point: Candy Land really sucks for adults because it doesn’t respect your time. A slot machine takes your money, but a pull is mercifully over quickly. The payoff is commensurate to the period of anticipation. But if you understand why the outcome isn’t based on any decision-making, Candy Land is slow and repetitive for most people. It makes you watch the boulder roll down the hill over and over and over again. It even has a skip-a-turn mechanic, which can really feel like licorice in the wound. While young children are often entertained by the enjoyment of seeing a (highly simplistic) story unfold and the actual playing of the game can provide a challenge, most adults just aren’t engaged enough by these elements to make the game enjoyable to play.
What does this teach us about choices, agency, and player satisfaction? I’d say there are a few things to consider here:
The more your game is determined by randomness, the shorter each play cycle should be. Example: Blackjack has a pretty simple set of inputs for the player. They can continue (hit) or stop, and reasonably often, the cards dealt mean the “right” call doesn’t pay off. But the game plays quickly, and you don’t have to linger on any one time your choice was irrelevant for long.
Give people incentives not to make choices that are likely to end up being irrelevant. Example: In Warhammer 40,000, you end up taking “futile shots” fairly often. These are attacks you know to have a very low probability of success, and they usually happen when one of your pieces has no high quality shot available due to positioning or other considerations. And you can waste a lot of time considering which “futile shot” is the least futile, but they’re all likely to end in “you missed.” However, the most recent edition of the game has added a number of battlefield actions that one can take in lieu of attacking, which often contribute to the final score. This helps players remove irrelevant choices from their games by giving them something to do other than spend time considering which bad target is the best bad target and then missing the attack roll anyway.
People attach “ownership” to randomness and conflate that with agency, and changing the way that is presented can feel like a loss of agency even when there was never any to start. Example: In 4th Edition D&D, the game did away with the previous edition’s mechanic of saving throws. Suddenly, instead of rolling a twenty-sided die to resist a harmful effect of some kind, characters simply had a static value the harmful effect rolled against. In neither case does the defender have meaningful agency, but because players were accustomed to rolling their own saves (rather than having their defenses rolled against), many players felt as if their agency had been taken away. They used to “have a chance” to respond to being hit with a spell (by rolling a die, which is not actual agency but can feel like it), and now they didn’t and it seemed “unfair.” Unsurprisingly, 5th Edition reverted to the prior model of saving throw, which was generally well-received. Sisyphus was never going to keep that boulder on the hilltop in any edition, but at least when he was rolling his own Dexterity save it felt like he had a shot.
If Candy Land had dice, it would still be awful to play as an adult, but we wouldn’t have a great comic with Camus fighting Sartre. Example: I don’t really see anyone out there dunking on Chutes and Ladders, even though it doesn’t have any player agency, either.