Introduction: In the last two decades, digital games with their interactive narratives have created new patterns of agency and audience experience. On the other hand, Islamic mysticism, through the concept of sulūk (spiritual wayfaring), presents an ancient model of gradual movement and existential transformation of the wayfarer (sālik) on the path to truth. The question of the possibility of a dialogue between these two domains is one of the emerging issues in interdisciplinary studies.
Objectives and Questions: The main objective is to analyze the relationship between agency in interactive narratives of digital games and mystical sulūk, and to explain their structural homology at the level of the logic of action, movement, and existential transformation. The central question concerns how the mechanisms of agency in interactive narratives of digital games can be analyzed alongside the logic of mystical sulūk within a shared framework.
Method: This study was conducted using an analytical-interpretive method and library research in both domains. Fundamental concepts were examined through a comparative reading: the mechanisms of agency were extracted and then compared and analyzed with the logic of mystical sulūk.
Findings: The findings indicate that agency in digital games is a process of becoming within structural constraints, realized through trials, consequences of failure, and gradual discovery. In contrast, mystical sulūk is also based on the logic of gradual movement, overcoming obstacles, continuous spiritual struggle (mujāhada), and the transformation of levels of perception. Concepts such as choice, failure, repetition, discovery, presence (ḥuḍūr), and annihilation (fanā’) play a fundamental role in both domains in shaping subjectivity and producing meaning.
Results: A structural homology can be explicated between agency and sulūk. Digital games can be understood as structures based on a sulūk-like experience, in which awareness and meaning are not a priori but are attained through movement, trial, and gradual discovery. Consequently, the relationship between agency and sulūk can be explained in terms of a shared logic of transformation along a path, a logic in which, through action within a structure, the human being attains new horizons of understanding and awareness.