Is narrative agency a contradiction?

I'm interested in the idea of "agency," as discussed at length in what we've been assigned to read so far in (you know, I'm really getting sick of trying to italicize things and bringing up my Favorites menu) First Person. I couldn't help but think of our experience with afternoon and other hypertexts when I read Michael Mateas' explanation of agency: "Agency is the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the world whose effects relate to the player's intention. This is not mere inferface activity. If there are many buttons and knobs for the player to twiddle, but all this twiddling has little effect on the experience, there is no agency. Furthermore, the effect must relate to the player intention" (21). I know Mateas is talking about games, but some of our complaints about hypertext and electronic fiction so far seem to stem from our lack of agency in determining the course of the text. The counterargument until now has been that this lack of agency is somehow artistically productive, that it demands more out of us, or makes us aware of the medium to which we are responding. But the first two segments of (I don't want my Favorites menu!) First Person suggest that our desire for agency in these works may simply be poorly founded. Assuming that the ambitions of Michael Joyce, et al are narrative, deprivation of reader agency may be essential; Ken Perlin says that this is exactly what the novel does. So Joyce and company are maybe just teasing us with the promise of agency, the result of which is not a feeling of empowerment but a feeling of frustration, which feeds into the narrative thrust.

According to the writers in First Person, agency is significantly more relevant to ludic works than narrative ones. Maybe it will quiet down certain naysayers to know that there is nothing fundamental about hypertext that requires its authors to trick their hapless readers into confusing encounters with unexpected pages. That's just how it all got started.