Open-World Games

Open-World is a term used for a lot of games. It can be used to describe games as different as the Grand Theft Auto series and the Legend of Zelda series. An open-world, in the context of gaming, refers to a game space which is expansive and does not have a sequence of levels which the player must beat. Usually there are quests, but the player is rarely required to do them. If they were so inclined, the player could simply run from one end of the giant map to the other. Of course such interaction is possible to some extent in all video games, but open-world games seem to encourage this. Their main goal is to a create a large space to enjoy at the player's leisure. So what, then, is their point? Why would someone give up so much authorial control? How can the developer say anything if the player has all of the control?

I was playing Skyrim on the first or second night it was out. I was at a good friend's house (he has a blog of his own here) and we were having a manly night of pizza, soda and large-TV-video-game-playing time. Most of the night was spent either on a quest for a (mediocre) sword or just kind of wandering around. At one point, around three in the morning, I was very tired and, as I trudged over a snowy mountain pass, a great sky opened before me. The night was cloudless with an orange moon seemingly threatening to gobble up the sky. The most amazing thing, though, was the aurora borealis. Great streaks of light and color snaked through the inky black and I felt something like awe. This is a video game. This is a program made up of an untold number of lines of code which is projecting pictures onto a television screen. It was still unbelievably beautiful and made me really begin to wonder just what it was that this game was trying to accomplish. Why would a person put so much time into something so detailed? It was beautiful, but what purpose did it serve? Well, as I may have mentioned before, Skyrim isn't about combat or magic or smithing or any of the other myriad actions one can take within the game. Skyrim is about exploration and, from a development standpoint, creating a world. This is the most important aspect of an open-world game. The world is the reason for the game. It seems likely that Rockstar thought of creating a world which reflected a gritty crime drama when they made Grand Theft Auto 3 before they came up with any kind of story. The world is the most important thing. The game play, on the other hand, needs only to emphasize the freedom of the world itself.

What is it that you can do in Grand Theft Auto 4? Well, you can kill anyone you see in the city. You can hire a prostitute. You can steal vehicles. You can play darts and other bar games. You can play video games to create video game inception. There are plenty of other things, but the point is that you can do a lot. This is all that's required of these games because the player simply needs to be able to do what they want, when they want. In fact, one of my biggest problems with Grand Theft Auto 4 is that there's too much story. A Scorcese-esque crime story can't fit into a game this schizophrenic. The point is to emphasize the interactivity which is at the heart of games themselves. They allow the player to do whatever they want any time that they want, though for different effects. Grand Theft Auto's open-world scheme is to allow players to feel a sense of power, allowing them to feel as if they own whichever city in which the game takes place. Elder Scrolls games, especially Skyrim, emphasize exploration and a sense of wonder, encouraging players to search every nook and cranny for great loot and easter eggs. 

The popularity of open-world games has lead to some weird speculation. I've heard from a few people who have suggested that virtual reality is the next step. We will one day have actual entire worlds to explore and be able to do literally anything within them. I don't think this is true. It seems to me that there will be a point where a player has too much they can do. At some point, when you can do anything, it ceases to be a game and starts to be an exercise in tedium. Imagine a game that is just like Skyrim, only it's  almost two million square miles, like the Earth. In it, you can pick your skills and everything, just like an RPG, but you can do anything you want. You can shoot down airplanes, you can become President, you can marry a dog or whatever it is you want to do. You can manipulate the tiniest blades of grass and make yourself a bracelet if you wanted to. That game would be a chore to play if, for no other reason, it would be just like real life. Everything would be so spread out and disconnected that it would be hard to figure out everything you can do. Even if you set it in a fantastic realm, eventually there are going to be so many little tasks possible that the player is going to be bored out of their minds. This is extreme, of course, but what if a game was the actual size of the US? It would still be too large. Just like every other kind of game or even every other kind of media, open-world games are made possible by their limitations. If everything was truly 100% open, you would never find anything and you would be so caught up in tedium that you would quit. Instead, you have a large game world which allows you to do a lot of stuff, but doesn't bog you down in minutia (although smithing in Skyrim cuts it close.) This makes everything fun and rewarding. 

So open world games can use their large area to create a sense of power or of awe, inspire mayhem or intrepid exploration. Though they can never be entirely open at the risk of losing all focus, they still allow players to be lost in a world which has been lovingly built by skilled artists. As graphics improve, so will the quality of these deep, rewarding games. As long as the world is well thought out and the game play is satisfyingly unrestrained, this genre will continue to impress.