Like much of the Internet, I’ve been playing two different games a lot lately. Last week, I picked up Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 a few days before it was supposed to release (my local neighborhood game store, who I just found and will happily frequent from now on — goodbye, Gamestop! — was selling it early), and played through the singleplayer portion of it in just a few days. About a week before that, I got Dragon Age: Origins and I am still playing through it (it’s much, much longer) on my PC. And both of these games have me thinking about self and the concept of agency, and how it’s used in modern video games.

Modern Warfare 2 is a first-person shooter game — you play as a modern day (or slightly futuristic — the central war in the story is between the United States and Russia, using current to theoretical technology) soldier, and all of the action is done in first-person view. You look through the screen and it’s as if you’re there, shooting all sorts of weapons at all sorts of foes, in all sorts of environments all over the world. There are lots of guns and sound effects and explosions, and the story is fast-paced and far reaching, like an episode of 24 with four or five Jack Bauers to go around. It’s a sequel to one of the best-selling games of all time, and so in many ways, it’s like an action movie sequel. I compared it to Terminator 2 on Twitter (bigger, better, and badder than the first), but it’s really an action movie sequel where you are the hero. Or heroes, as the case may be — you play a few different characters throughout the game, and while the view is always first-person (as if you’re looking through someone’s eyes, or inhabiting their brain), the situation bounces around quite a bit. One sequence you’re playing a British SAS type invading a winter fortress, the next you’re an American Private fighting an invading force.

Dragon Age: Origins, on the other hand, is a role-playing game. If Modern Warfare 2 is an action movie (and I just spent a paragraph telling you that it is), then Dragon Age is a Lord of the Rings-style fantasy novel — you choose to create a character of your own very early on, adjusting your avatar down to the finest details (how big and where does your nose sit, what race and caste do you come from), and then you raise that character up through a very long and very tangled classic fantasy story of elves and dwarves and evil magic and knightly good. While the action in Modern Warfare is understandably chaotic, the action is Dragon Age is pause-able at any time. Bioware, the company that designed Dragon Age, has a long background in creating Dungeons and Dragons settings, and so the combat in Dragon Age is fairly cerebral. Running in and shooting everything will likely get you killed. When you come upon a raving band of bad guys, you need to press the space bar, pause, and consider just what to do with your character and your companions next. Even outside of combat, Dragon Age is an endeavor of intelligence — almost everyone you meet in the game has a problem to be solved, and there are usually many different ways to solve them, limited only by your imagination (and whatever dialogue choices you are presented with).

And so both of these games have me thinking about agency. Agency is “the capacity of an agent to act in a world.” It’s the ability and effect you have over the choices you make — it’s a word and concept that comes up often in philosophy, usually when philosophers are asking themselves if we really control our actions or if we’re just a product of the world around us. Do you really like ice cream or are you just conditioned by the world around you to think that ice cream is good? As you can see from that link, it gets complicated (“The agent F’d with the intention of G’ing”), but the central question is: are we in control of what we do or are we limited by the world around us? Do we make choices because we want to make them or just because they’re the choices that we’re designed to make? (We’re stepping into The Matrix territory as well, but I’ll keep this limited to video games.)

In Dragon Age: Origins, you have what certainly seems like a great amount of agency. One early scenario in the game had me choosing whether or not to save a sick boy and prevent a greater danger. If I killed the boy, I’d prevent the danger, but then I’d have to kill a child. A little more research in-game had me finding out that there was a way to save the boy, if I sacrificed his mother instead. She was willing, but I was not — why should anyone innocent have to die? The game offered me up both of those conclusions (and they were actually both valid conclusions and would have had lasting effects on the game world), but I kept pressing — there had to be another way. Finally I was told that if I went and found a great mage’s help, he might be able to save the boy without losing the mother. I eventually found the mage, and though he sent me on another whole series of quests (including a few more tangled situations like this one), I eventually got his problem solved, sent him back to the boy and his mother, and he was able to save them both. That was my choice, and the brilliance of a huge role-playing game like Dragon Age is that I was able to make that decision. Even offered other scenarios by the game, I had the chance to push through, to find a third solution, and choose the one I wanted.

Just because I chose the solution where everyone lived doesn’t mean it was the “right” one for the game, either — you can play characters that are good or evil in Dragon Age (or in between), and as I said, either one of the three choices are actually valid in the game’s code. But I wasn’t limited to my choice, and as a result, I felt that I was really charging my own path, that I was choosing what I wanted to do rather than just what the game offered me.

Of course I wasn’t — I was still choosing from the limited options offered by the game. Maybe I could have brought the boy to the mage to save time, or maybe read a book and tried to cast a spell myself. Those weren’t presented to me. But still, even though I was limited by the world, I didn’t feel it. I felt as though I’d chosen to do my own thing. Simulated agency, we might call it.

In Modern Warfare 2, there’s a very famous level which offers up another moral choice of a kind. (This is a spoiler, though most people who want to play the game have already played it, and/or heard about what happens.) In one of the levels, one of the US soldier characters that you play is sent undercover with a group of Russian terrorists, and the level begins with you and a group of a few other terrorists walking with AK-47s out into a crowded airport. Everything is calm at first — no one notices that you and your “compatriots” (remember, you’re undercover with Russian bad guys who want to start a war between the US and Russia) are armed. But suddenly the guys you walked off the elevator with turn their guns towards a line of people trying to get through a baggage check, and open fire, point blank, on a group of unarmed civilians.

The airport turns into chaos. Screaming erupts everywhere, and the realistically-rendered civilians start panicking and falling over each other while the guys you’re with coldly and carefully shoot them down. You’re still playing the game — you are holding a gun in front of you, and you can move and do what you want. What do you do?

I knew the level was coming (I’d heard about it on the game blogs, and the game actually has a warning at the beginning that something like this will happen — you can skip the scene if you plan to be offended by it, as if anyone plans to be offended by something), and I was still a little shocked — the game’s audio and excellently designed and rendered visuals put me squarely in the persona of a guy with a gun in an airport being attacked by terrorists. Just to see what the game let me do, I did what I hoped I would in the same situation — I opened fire on the terrorists.

I killed one quickly, and the game ended. “You must not let your friends die!” the game told me (I don’t remember that verbatim, but it was something like that). Which was true — I wasn’t just me in an airport, I was a guy undercover in an airport, and while I personally would never agree to go on a mission that allowed the slaughter of civilians that appeared on the screen before me, I should still play the role. I’m acting in the game, I should play by its rules.

But I still couldn’t bring myself to shoot, even a pixelized representation of an unarmed civilian. It didn’t feel right, and I didn’t want such an image on my tv screen. So instead, I just followed my terrorist “companions” through the crowd, occasionally pointing my rifle menacingly (just in case they might start to suspect me), and secretly hating them for what they made me do for my virtual country.

Later in the level, a SWAT team appears, and at that point they actually started firing on us. I determined then that my need to live was more important than my morals (both in game and, though I’ve never been pressed but as I suspect, in real life), and fired on the SWAT team.

Unfortunately (and here’s the real spoiler), it was all in vain — at the end of the level, a cutscene has the leader of the terrorists shoot me dead, and it’s revealed that the Russians shot up the Russian airport because they want to blame the whole thing on me. I’m left, now a dead American soldier, alone in the middle of the massacre, and Russia, shocked that an American would kill so many people at their airport (despite the fact that I didn’t actually shoot anyone), goes to war with the US. In the end, the game probably should have let me shoot a terrorist. The other terrorists would have killed me and the same scenario would have gone down. But that’s not the way the game is programmed.

So. One the one side, Dragon Age. Where agency seems like a real thing (though it’s not), and it seems like almost any choice is open to the player, and almost any choice can be right. On the other side, Modern Warfare 2, where there’s really only one option, and it’s the “wrong” one. I like them both (besides that level, Modern Warfare 2 is a ton of unencumbered fun to play), but which is the way to go? Dragon Age, like a great novel, has you doing a lot of thinking outside the game: What will your character be next, what will happen with that woman that you met and her son, what was the “right” thing to do in that situation? But the airport level in Modern Warfare also had me thinking. There was a tradeoff there — I couldn’t choose what to do, and as a result, I got the cutscene ending and learned what was really happening in that airport. If I had shot a terrorist, and they had shot me and left me for dead right away, would the scene have been as powerful? Modern Warfare 2, for a number of reasons (I’m leaving out much of the genre differences between these two games — they both come from very long genre histories), trades the grayness of Dragon Age for an action movie payoff. Jack Bauer doesn’t have time to go with a third choice the way you have the chance to in Dragon Age, and Modern Warfare’s designers have removed your agency to tell their own story, not necessarily yours.

There’s another moment in Modern Warfare that had me thinking about choice and action that I’ll share with you. And actually, I’ll use an example from the first Modern Warfare game, just so it’s not as much of a spoiler, though there are similar situations in the second game. At the very end of the game, you’re lying on the ground, almost dead, with the final enemy walking toward you triumphant. Someone offscreen slides you a pistol with just a few rounds left in it, and in slow motion, John Woo-style action, you’ve got just a few seconds to lift the gun, aim it, and pull the trigger to finish off the bad guy and save the day.

This is a situation where you have no choice at all — the enemy is almost exactly in your sights, so you only have to move the stick to aim just a little bit and pull the controller’s trigger. If you wait too long, the game simply ends and offers you a “retry” option. In a game like Dragon Age, the enemy might engage you in conversation and ask you to join his side, giving you a chance to have great power at the cost of joining someone you don’t agree with. Or, you might even have the option to join him then, only to find a more peaceful solution later. That’s agency — the option to do what you want, limited though the “world” you’re in may be. But in Modern Warfare, you have no choice — it’s pull the trigger on the bad guy, or game over.

I toiled with the airport level, I really did. I saw the screaming people and the terrorists gunning them down, and I really tried to think of a way out of it, tried to figure out a solution, no matter how long it took or how hard it was, where no one had to die. That mage I found to save that kid in Dragon Age sent me on a long, long quest — I had to play a long time (like hours) through a lot of tough levels to get the mage’s help to choose the third solution and save both that kid and his mom, keeping anyone innocent from dying, but I did it. And if there was a way to do that in the airport level, I would have done it.

In the last scenario, though, where I was faced with a bad guy and holding a gun pointed right at him, with no agency at all, I didn’t think twice. I pulled the trigger, and won the game.