You step into the boots of a lone courier crossing a post-collapse wasteland. The sun burns white through nuclear dust. Your Pip-Boy crackles. The ruins stretch before you—silent, waiting.

The wasteland doesn’t just give you choices. It sculpts who you become. You aren’t told what to care about. You start to care—because the world demands it. You value food because it’s scarce. You weigh loyalty against survival. You fear kindness because kindness can get you killed.

As philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues, within the book - Games: Agency As Art, games are not simply narratives or mechanics—they are artworks of agency. Fallout sculpts a particular kind of agency: one that is cautious, calculating, resilient. It is a curated experience of being—a playable identity. The design lies not in what you see, but in how the systems guide who you are allowed to become.

This is sculpted angecy — a temporary selfhood engineered through game design. Fallout doesn’t just let you roleplay a survivor. It builds systems that make you become one. The designer sculpted the player into a survivor, engineering deliberately the experience of survival. You are not just a player; you are a participant in a system that demands your attention, your memory, and your intention. You are not just playing a game; you are becoming a part of it.

In this sculpted agency, your choices aren’t just moral—they’re mechanical. The systems ask you to internalize their logic. You begin thinking like a survivor, not because of a cinematic cutscene, but because the rules of interaction, scarcity, and danger have restructured your way of acting. The design doesn’t simulate survival—it constructs a playable philosophy of survival.

The game designer is not merely just synthesizing a story —they are an architect of temporary selves - given by the law of play. It create goals, constraints, feedback, and affordances, to emerge the agency for you to inhabit. The Fallout experience is not just the wasteland. It is the *you* that the game builds in response to it.

Sulpting agency is a deeper form of experience engineering. Instead of just managing external experiences like excitement or tension, you’re shaping how the player functions as a person in the moment. It is the transcendence of experience. It is the act of becoming. It is the act of play.

It is to design the systems and mechanics which shape the structure of action and identity within the player—within the bounds of the magic circle—for a short time. Be it the bleak shelters of This War of Mine, where war is not power but exhaustion, and every decision—stealing food, letting a stranger in—etches emotional trauma into the player’s temporary identity; or the lawless playground of Grand Theft Auto V, where systemic satire and consequence-free violence turn the player into an avatar of chaos and excess; or the irradiated Mojave of Fallout: New Vegas, where survival is moral calculus and every alliance shapes who you become; or the relentless arenas of DOOM, where the game sculpts you into pure momentum and rage, stripping hesitation and sculpting a self made entirely of action—each of these games forges an identity through play. They are not just games, but designed selves —crafted from goals, constraints, and affordances.

To create sculpted agency, the game designer must move beyond surface-level aesthetics and into the realm of experiential architecture. It is not enough to offer choices or simulate freedom—what matters is how the system shapes who the player becomes while inside it. This means designing goals that pull the player into a particular kind of striving, crafting constraints that challenge and refine their behavior, and building feedback loops that reinforce a temporary but powerful identity. The designer’s task is to build not just a world, but a worldview—one the player adopts for a short time, one that sculpts how they think, act, value, and feel. In doing so, games transcend entertainment: they become playable philosophies, temporary selves, and curated experiences of being.

In this light, the designer becomes a sculptor of experience, carving out not just a game, but a playable philosophy. They are not just creating a game; they are creating a self for the player to immerse in. The player is not just playing; they are becoming. This is the transcendence of experience.

Exercises

1. [🟢 Easy] Sculpted Selfhood
Recall a time when a game made you feel like a different version of yourself. Not through a story beat or cinematic, but through systems. Did the scarcity of resources, a moral tradeoff, or the rhythm of combat reshape how you acted or thought? What *kind* of self did the game sculpt?

2. [🟢 Easy] Fallout’s Ethics Engine
In Fallout: New Vegas, survival decisions often double as moral choices. Reflect on a decision you made in a Fallout game—or similar—where the systems made the “right” choice unclear. What shaped your decision: morality, mechanics, scarcity, or fear?

3. [🔵 Medium] Becoming Through Mechanics
Choose a mechanic from a game that made you *feel like someone new* (e.g., DOOM’s momentum, GTA’s lawless freedom, survival crafting in DayZ). Describe how the mechanic gradually changed your sense of self. What kind of mindset or values did it cultivate in you?

4. [🔵 Medium] The Art of Constraint
Pick a game that limits the player in a significant way (e.g., permadeath, weight-based inventory, scarcity of saves). How do those constraints function not as punishment, but as design tools that sculpt a different kind of agency? What kind of behavior or identity emerges?

5. [🔴 Hard] Design a Sculpted Identity
Imagine a game system that intentionally reshapes the player into a particular kind of person—a pacifist strategist, a paranoid wanderer, a hopeful diplomat. What systems, constraints, and feedback loops would you use to sculpt that identity? Be specific.

6. [🔴 Hard] Reconstruct the Self
Think of a game that gives players power quickly (like DOOM or GTA), versus one that forces players to earn agency slowly (like This War of Mine or early Fallout). What kinds of selves are these games engineering? Compare how power or powerlessness sculpts different forms of player identity.