" We started our inquiry into the aesthetics of games with various accounts that tried to subsume games under more familiar forms of art - fictions, conceptual art, and the like. But, I've argued, some of the most important kin to game design are actually urban planners, and government designers. All these are attempts to cope and corral the agency of users, to achieve certain effects. Games are an artistic cousin to cities and governments. They are systems of rules and constraints for active agents. But game designers have a trick up their sleeves that the designers of cities and governments do not. They can substantially design the nature of agents who will act within them. The medium of agency is active, then, in two directions. It creates a distinctive recalcitrance - the recalcitrance of agential distance. And it offers a a distinctive sort of solution - the manipulation of agency. "

― , Games: Agency as Art