How do the open sources say player agency trades off against authored structure, and what concrete design diagnostics do they give?

Mateas (2000) argues story and agency are not intrinsically opposed: agency arises when material affordances (actions available) are balanced with formal affordances (what the plot makes worth doing); imbalance reduces agency, illustrated with puzzle adventures (too many material options), Quake (balanced) and a hypothetical plot-heavy shooter (plot without new actions). Roberts and Isbell state autonomy and authorial control are in tension; Riedl and Stern describe a coherence-versus-agency trade-off and a story director that adapts the plot; Facade's authors say they traded global for local agency under fixed authoring effort. Curator qualifications: Mateas 2000: 'A player will experience agency when there is a balance between the material and formal constraints'; 'the game must strike a balance between the material and formal constraints'; no sentence found stating story and agency are not in conflict. Wardrip-Fruin et al.: 'Mateas's approach also makes it clear that story and agency are not in conflict. Rather, they are closely tied.' Roberts & Isbell: autonomy and authorial control 'known to be in tension' (C3R-0016). Attribution: the explicit 'not in conflict' claim is Wardrip-Fruin et al.'s interpretation of Mateas, not a sentence found in Mateas (2000); reword 'Mateas argues story and agency are not intrinsically opposed' to 'Mateas proposes a balance model; Wardrip-Fruin et al. read it as showing story and agency are not in conflict'. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/Resources/aigames.org/2000/MMateas00.pdf",
      "note": "Mateas 2000 PDF; Wardrip-Fruin et al. 2009"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.cs.uky.edu/~sgware/reading/papers/roberts2008survey.pdf",
      "note": "Mateas 2000 PDF; Wardrip-Fruin et al. 2009"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.cs.uky.edu/~sgware/reading/papers/wardripfruin2009agency.pdf",
      "note": "Mateas 2000 PDF; Wardrip-Fruin et al. 2009"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/pubs/tidse06a.pdf",
      "note": "Mateas 2000 PDF; Wardrip-Fruin et al. 2009"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://cdn.aaai.org/ojs/18722/18722-52-22361-1-10-20210928.pdf",
      "note": "Mateas 2000 PDF; Wardrip-Fruin et al. 2009"
    }
  ]
}