24 · What “Bring Back Your Agency” Actually Means

Maida’s tagline is “Bring back your agency.”

Every word of this is doing work. People sometimes read it as marketing copy and bounce off. But it’s the most honest description of the product I could write, and the words are precise.

Here’s what each one means.

“Agency”

Agency is the capacity to make choices that originate from you, rather than being shaped by external systems. It’s the difference between picking a game because you wanted to and picking a game because the algorithm steered you there.

In gaming specifically, agency includes:

• Choosing what to play, deliberately
• Knowing why you wanted a game when you bought it
• Stopping when you want to stop, not when the game says you should
• Having a relationship to your library that’s yours, not platform-mediated

Most modern gaming software erodes agency. Steam recommends. Discord pressures. Achievements gamify. Subscriptions monetize. Each of these can be useful, but together they shape the user’s relationship to gaming away from “what I want” and toward “what the system wants me to want.”

The agency erosion is gradual. You don’t notice it. You just notice you don’t enjoy gaming the way you used to.

“Your”

The agency in question is yours, specifically. Not generic agency. Not the abstract idea of choice. Your agency, in the sense of: you, the person reading this, can make decisions that are yours.

This matters because the alternatives often address agency in the abstract while taking it away in practice. “We give you control” while burying the control under twelve menus. “You decide” while the algorithm has pre-selected three options. The systemic version of agency is hollow. The personal version, the one that’s yours, requires actual autonomy.

The “your” is a reminder that this is not philosophy. This is about you, tonight, sitting down to play, deciding for yourself what’s worth your time.

“Back”

Agency was something you had. Then it was taken, gradually, by a series of systems that made things easier. The recommendation engine took it, in exchange for not having to choose. The notification took it, in exchange for not having to remember. The achievement took it, in exchange for the small reward.

“Back” implies that there was a before. There was. You had agency over your gaming once. Most adults remember a version of themselves that just played games, without the optimization layer, without the social pressure, without the guilt of unfinished things.

That version is recoverable. Not perfectly, but partially. The systems that took agency can be opted out of, one by one. The defaults can be changed.

“Bring back” is not utopian. It’s targeted. There’s a specific thing you used to have, and you can have it again, with effort.

“Bring”

The verb is active. It’s not “find” or “discover” or “rediscover.” It’s “bring.” Something that was taken, you’re carrying back. The action is yours. The tool helps, but the bringing is what you do.

Maida doesn’t restore your agency for you. It makes restoring easier. The work of choosing, deciding, paying attention to your own preferences—this work is still yours. The tool removes some friction; the agency you bring back is your own.

Why this matters as a tagline

The tagline tells you what Maida is for. It’s not for picking games faster. It’s not for managing your backlog. It’s not for showing you what you already have. It’s for restoring a specific relationship between you and your gaming that has been worn down by other systems.

If that’s not the relationship you want, Maida is not the tool. There are excellent recommendation systems and library managers. Steam’s discover queue is well-built. Playnite is comprehensive. Use those if they fit you.

If “bring back your agency” describes something you’ve actually felt the loss of, then Maida is built for you. The whole product is downstream of those four words.

One more thing

I write the tagline first because the product flows from it. Every feature decision in Maida is checked against this tagline. Does this feature support the user’s agency? Or does it absorb the agency into the system?

That check is what produces the strange decisions: no library view, no recommendation engine, no completion tracking, no telemetry beyond three anonymous fields. Each of these would have been easier to ship with. Each of them would have eroded the thing the tagline is trying to protect.

Maida is here. It’s a small tool. The tagline is the whole point.