I enjoyed Murray’s take on the importance and use of agency in games and how that makes them more interactive. A game that popped into my mind when reading is Final Fantasy XIV. FFXIV is an MMORPG that offers players various forms of Agency. One of which is after the game’s first DLC. There is a land called Ishgard that goes through restoration by the end of the DLC. Instead of the game being linear and fixing it up within patches the game developers created an area where players go to with their crafting and gathering classes in order to donate items and objects to fix up the city. There are multiple servers in the game and each one’s pacing of the development of Ishgard depends on the player base’s contributions to the area making the players feel like they had a lot of agency in restoring the area.
Another game that I think offers a player a lot of agency is Valheim. Valheim is an open-world sandbox adventure game where the player is free to do anything they want to do. The players choose what kind of game they want to play. Players can choose to turn the game into a building simulator (https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/lz4upv/cheats_wip_valheim_is_not_a_citybuilder_so/) focus on creating a house and base, gardening and cooking, beast taming and breeding, exploring and adventuring into tombs and dungeons, role-playing and turning the game into a PVP battle arena, etc. the possibilities are endless, the player’s imagination is the limit
These examples are of things that allow players to feel like they truly constructed their own world by strongly feeling their own presence and how that impacts their environment. You can view the difference in immersion when being compared to older more linear games like an extreme example, Super Mario Brothers where the player has no choice at all they just go forth on a linear one-way path.