Agentia is a work of navigable, generative poetry, examining the unfolding of the world through the encounters of animals, plants, and even stones. It is part walking-simulator, part-hypertext – an example of digital writing, rather than a game.
This piece requires a keyboard and mouse to navigate, and is also best enjoyed using headphones. Please note it is designed for use with a conventional widescreen display, and is currently not compatible with mobile or tablet displays below a certain size – this may change in the future.
The piece can be accessed using this link here.
This piece is also available on itch.io.
Agentia has been profiled on the gaming news site Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Introduction
Each entity featured in Agentia experiences, senses, or simply witnesses the world in ways very different to that of the human mind and body. Rather than suggest their being can be expressed directly through language, Agentia (Medieval Latin for agency, ability, to act, perform, broadly construed) uses found language excerpted from related works of literature, creating a collage of registers (often strange and enigmatic), that can hint at such more-than-human stories – including, inevitably, their entangled relations with our own.
The specific process of making Agentia involved algorithmically extracting short phrases from a range of (mainly) vintage titles and arranging these manually into an interlinked body of words. Each scene presented uses texts that explore or invoke the plant, animal, or object being depicted.
Agentia adopts a minimalist approach to storytelling. When incarnated as an animal, readers can wander the landscape freely, seeking out interesting features, and perhaps diving further into their perceptual, conceptual, or cultural associations. At times, additional stories can surface from the very act of journeying, or even standing still. Ambient sound is used to complete the scene.
Plants and stones, of course, do not move through the world in the same way. Readers are invited to be still with them, reading vignettes from time and space as they flow by, and so consider a distinctly non-human mode of being.
The piece concludes after a certain number of stories are told, after which you will be reincarnated. Readers are gently encouraged to explore slowly and resist excavating every possibility – there are no goals to reach, and no rewards other than the texts yielded.