Agential Distance and Personal Agency

· personal-growth, agents, product-design

The Concept: Agential Distance

From jzhao's essay: agential distance is "the gap that the game designer explicitly leaves for the player to occupy."

Minecraft feels like home because it provides substantial space for player creativity. The game becomes the player's own creation. Objects feel like "home" when they "involve you in their own completion."

This applies to tools: Notion's blank page vs. a templated form sit at different points on the agential distance spectrum. High agential distance = room for fingerprints.

The Personal Realization

Reading this crystallized something about my own journey:

The shift: I now believe I can survive in the "computer's world." Not master it, not thrive — survive. That's enough. I can wander in, figure things out, get unstuck. The territory isn't scary anymore.

Two insights:

  1. Environments over tracks — We don't need to follow prescribed paths or rules. Many environments limit people. The real move is finding (or building) environments with high agential distance — ones that leave room for you to complete them.

  2. AI as capability unlock — Claude Code lowered activation energy so dramatically that a new world opened. It's not "AI helps me code" — it's "AI opened a window to a world I couldn't access before." With some fundamental knowledge, I can learn and build anything I want.

What This Means

This is identity-level, not skill-level. The belief matters more than the skill — "I can do this" unlocks learning. Skills follow conviction.

I'm not claiming to be an engineer. But I'm no longer locked out. I can read the terrain, navigate it, build on it. That's agency.

Connection to Core Interests

This directly maps to what I care about: empowering people and access — removing barriers between people and what they need. I'm living my own thesis.

What This Is Not

  • Not "I learned to code" — it's "I crossed a threshold"
  • Not about mastery — it's about survivability and belief
  • Not about AI doing things for me — it's about AI enabling me to do things myself

Related

  • [[me.md]] — identity shift captured
  • Core interest: empowering non-technical people to build

References