Does the Audience have Agency?

In thinking about Facade and more generally the issues that came up in class today, I have been struggling with what it means to define the game as a place where the players have agency. I think that the idea of having agency, or a certain defined way of interacting with the text, movie, play, etc. is an important distinction to make when defining what it is that comprises the separate spheres (if I may) of what is called the "Game" and what is not the "Game".

In thinking about agency as a way within which we can divorce the world of the game from the other, I become interested in exactly what it means then, to interact in a passive way. I can see that this needs explication; the very abstractness of the concept causes it to be almost indescribable linguistically, so I will have to rely on the examples given in class today. In developing the idea that agency is what separates the game from the other, the example was given of a play, where there is a fourth dimension, or curtain that separates the audience from the actors. The actors are supposed to play out their roles with the commonly held "understanding" that there is no audience, and that they are simply playing out a narrative that is concrete in the way that it will be depicted. There exists, to be sure, room for the actors to embellish upon their designated role, however the narrative itself cannot be strayed from. The audience, therefore, being believed to be separate from the ocurrence of the narrative, views the happenings on stage as dis-empowered beings, having no agency to create or change the plot in any way. The result of this "disempowerment" is that they are not really a part of the occurrences on stage and therefore stage play can be defined as the "other", or not a game.

Something within this idea just doesn't register completely within me. I can say it out loud, and write it in a way that makes sense to my logic, that is, I am firmly convinced that the idea is sound and correct, but something within me, perhaps stubborness begs to differ. I begin to look for ways in which these people could be interacting, or changing the occurrences on stage; that they are empowered with some sense of agency just because they are there, they are viewing these occurrences. So I want to investigate the idea, perhaps to confound it further in my own mind, or (more likely) to confuse myself further.

I want to think about the idea of viewership as not being divorced from agency per se, in two ways: the first is that the audience, by virtue of their attendence of a play, forces the players (actors) to "do the story right". What I mean by this is that the expectation of the audience at a play, forces the actors to be "true" to the expectations of that audience, and in this way, the audience is given agency. The second is that the audience of any action has a peritextual investment in that action, especially as it pertains to a play or game. In that way, again, the audience is inherently an actor, they have some sort of agency.

I wonder if either of these ideas hold any academic weight. They seem (because they are) purely speculative, and I hope to think more and write more about these ideas as we learn more in class.