Each time you load up Agentia, you're reborn as a different creature. “Creature” is perhaps too narrow a word – the game's “playable characters” range from geese, microscopic life, and triceratops to menhirs and tiny rocky islands. Each forms the heart of a diamond of delicately rendered, isometric grid terrain with a baby mobile canopy of clouds and sun. It looks like a drawing from an old botany or geography textbook, but the inviting emptiness around the visible area also reminds me vaguely of some old RPGs I played on the Macintosh.
There are no dungeons or horrific creatures to contend with, though. You're here to explore or be explored, either using the arrow keys to traverse the landscape (the angled perspective is a bit cumbersome) or staying put to witness other creatures like birds and sailboats passing by. There's a musical score set against a constant stream of animal and mineral noise. As you and the world move through each other, encounters generate or replace lines of poetry at the bottom of the view, with underlined text you can click to expand or sometimes reduce the possibilities of a sentence – to be a bit more specific, it feels like you're asking someone to repeat themselves.
The game’s tilesets are based on an urban game isometric asset pack created by palesystems, while the main theme is George Georgia’s Solemn Solstice. The verbal elements have been algorithmically extracted from a series of “old” texts, mostly in the public domain, and then edited by hand. These sources include astronomy manuals, mountaineering expedition narratives, and works of philosophy such as A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The second volume is similarly flexible and loosely connected, demanding to be navigated.
“Each being in Agentia experiences, senses, or simply witnesses the world in ways very different from those of the human mind and body,” the project's website explains. “Rather than suggesting that their existence can be directly expressed through language, Agentia (from Medieval Latin, agency, ability, to act, to perform, to interpret in a broad sense) uses language found in relevant works of literature, creating a collage of (often strange and enigmatic) registers that can point to such transhuman stories—including, inevitably, their intertwined relationships with our own.
“Of course, plants and rocks do not move through the world in the same way,” he continues. “Readers are invited to remain still with them, to read the short stories as they flow through time and space, and thus to contemplate a distinctly non-human mode of existence.”
I’ve been enjoying Agentia, which you can play for free in your browser. It’s created a small space in my head, and I’m not sure what to put there yet. Its creator, Richard A. Carter, is a UK-based academic who “investigates the material and ecological dimensions of technical artifacts, activities, and environments.” I know him a little bit through Xitter, and I always enjoy learning about his experiments. His other works include Signals, a book of algebraic poems written in a mathematical language designed for aliens, and Dark Mode, “a take on the roguelike/adventure game genre, stripped down to its most basic elements: a maze, various ‘encounters,’ and numerical statistics.”