According to Alec Charles (2009), videogames offer a “fictive agency”: they purport to be places where players have free will, but they are not actually such places at all. This is because every choice available to videogame players is determined by code, and the code is written in advance by
developers. The game world is thus limited, or determined. Players can react to this determined world, but they cannot act in it. Charles calls this “functional reactivity”: players respond to the determination of the game in order to serve the game’s determinations. So gameplay is not self-determination (i.e., agency), but faux-determination, a facsimile of agency. Charles finds this problematic because games present themselves as places where players have real agency. Illusory
self-determination—players assuming they have total freedom of choice when in fact their choices are restricted—sneakily robs players of their real-life self-determination. Players are “subsumed to the game's constructed subject.” They are duped into believing that “their participation represents a form of activity, a mode of agency, [when] they are, in effect (and in consequence), mere puppets of the text”. In seeing their game-agency as true agency, players lose their ability to really challenge the world of the game. They have no room for interpretation or meaning-creation. By pretending to give players some freedom of choice, videogames actually prevent players from having real autonomy.
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