In recent years, the idea of player control, or agency, has become central and explicit in certain video games and genres, affecting many debates concerning the study or definitions of video games. In spite of this, the notion of agency in video games has been rarely explicitly explored or defined in relation to its sociological and political dimensions. Hence, drawing on actor-network theory, (neo-)Foucauldian governmentality studies, and empirical data gathered over a three-year period, this paper expands to our understanding of video game player agency and moreover, argues that video games provide an important example and perspective to consider the contemporary nature and political basis of agency.

Video gaming is often understood and narrated as an ‘experience’, and we would suggest that this is particularly notable with sports-themed video games. However, we would argue that how the game experience is curated and consumed, and how this relates to wider social process and forces, is rarely given any detailed consideration within the existing game research literature. Hence, this article explores how game experiences can be understood and articulated around four key themes. First, we begin with the argument that video games connect with, but also lead, a wider social trend: understanding social reality as a set of designed experiences. The real is progressively becoming a repository of technologically mediated experiences, and the logic of video games is anticipating this process. Second, we suggest video games are translations of phenomenological worlds: When successful, key aspects of the meaning of things remain similar even as one moves between spaces, domains, mediums and platforms. Developers often seek to bring others’ experiences into a game environment, such as translating the geography and mechanisms of sporting locations and competitions into a game environment. Third, following this translation of meaning across domains, gamers often narrate their encounters with video games as they would with any other experience, such as winning the Champions League in Football Manager becomes recounted by gamers like any other achievement. Fourth, video games are interactive and explicit bodily experiences because they must be enacted in order to exist.

Resumen El artículo parte de la hipótesis de que aquellas personas jóvenes que tienen un mayor grado de responsabilidad en la organización de sus actividades de ocio presentan mayores niveles de satisfacción con la práctica, favoreciendo que estas sean actividades relevantes en sus vidas. Los objetivos de este trabajo son: (a) identificar las prácticas de ocio más significativas que tienen lugar

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RESUMENEste artículo busca abordar la noción de agencia dentro del contexto del liberalismo avanzado a través del estudio de los videojuegos. El texto se apoya en los resultados de una investigación empírica más amplia que toma como premisa fundamental la existencia de una creciente cultura del videojuego en las sociedades contemporáneas. Desde un punto de vista teórico que bebe de los estudios sobre gubernamentalidad neo-foucaultianos, la teoría del actor-red, y los game studies, y utilizando una metodología cualitativa, el artículo considera que los videojuegos ayudan a visualizar, al mismo tiempo que fomentan, las transformaciones que en la noción de agencia operan a nivel ontológico, político y social: por un lado, un giro hacia el post-humanismo, las articulaciones entre elementos diferentes, la relacionalidad mediada y prostética; por otro, se observa la reproducción de las racionalidades neoliberales dominantes mientras se intuye, al mismo tiempo, su apertura hacia nuevas formas actanciales.Palabras clave: Agencia, videojuegos, libertad, teoría del actor-red, liberalismo avanzado. ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to approach the notion of agency within Advanced Liberalism through the study of video games. The text is grounded in the findings of a research project that stems from