My fascination towards video games increased after witnessing the degree of freedom provided to the player in an open-world game called Grand Theft Auto Vice City. I had dabbled with video games before with games like Roadrash, Lion King, Hercules, and Dave 2D, just off the top of my head. However, a game that offers virtually limitless freedom was a concept I had yet to become familiar with. A 10-year-old’s inability to comprehend the immense possibilities of exploration sprung a desire in him, allowing him to dive into worlds ranging from incompetently designed to skilfully executed. A virtual world where you can go anywhere you like and try to exploit the mechanics as much as you need; this is why my attention is naturally drawn more towards games within the open-world genre. I used to own a physical copy of GTA San Andreas for PC, which included a map and a guidebook. Similar to Vice City, which was inspired by Miami, the map of San Andreas included three distinct areas inspired by real-life cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas called Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas, respectively. The guidebook had sections dedicated to radio stations, railway and air services, where to shop, travel tips, the economy of the location, and whatnot to miss. With the guidebook by my side, I would explore the map and read about the bustling cities, their nightlife and famous restaurants. This is how the Las Vegas-inspired city was described in the guidebook:
Viva Las Venturas!
Conceived by a Los Santos mobster in the 40’s and immortalized in numerous Vinewood films this famous San Andreas city is the world’s gambling oasis. Home to bright neon lights, busy casinos, enormous hotels, wedding chapels, sinful nightlife, Belvis impersonators and the famous Strip, Las Venturas is the largest adult playground in the world. Every year, over 40 million people travel to Las Venturas from all over the world to partake in all the activities that the city has to offer. In Las Venturas, everything is done and overdone to a spectacular scale. The Las Venturas Boulevard, otherwise known as the “Strip,” is lined with magnificent and grandiose structures. From a bronze tint pyramid that rises hundreds of meters high, to a full-scale pirate ship, you will begin to question whether Las Venturas is reality or fantasy.
Vivid descriptions like these and undeniably talented developers who breathe life into this virtual world created a perfect illusion that even when my PC was shut off, the state of San Andreas lived on. I am confident that the recently built sphere in Vegas would have made its way into the guidebook with satirical details that will take a gibe at how technology blinds us to create something that adds little significance to the city and praises its beauty and construction and the first thing I would do after unlocking this area of the map would be to rush and take a gander at this point of interest. I would spend hours driving through the map, listening to the K-DST radio, just to stumble upon something interesting, something new and unique, and experience a newfound sense of discovery. The decision to explore these areas was just an act of gratifying my curiosity, which was motivated intrinsically. The true essence of an open-world game lies within these intrinsic motivations: the urge to explore every corner, the curiosity to see what’s on that mountaintop, and the excitement to discover what this world entails.
The most crucial aspect of a game is the interactivity that the player has with it; if there is zero playability, it completely fails to be a game. The definition of gameplay ranges from being a series of choices to a cognitive learning experience via actions performed by the player while interacting with the game’s mechanics and the emotions and motivations generated within the player while performing said actions. Nuances here start to get complicated because playability also inhabits philosophy and individual player experiences, and the topic of the Game-Feel delves into how the inputs and responses to those inputs influence your experience with the game. It does not matter the amount of graphical fidelity poured into a virtual world or the magnitude of immersion within it; if it isn’t fun, why bother? Fun is the consequence of the brain’s reward mechanism being exploited by video games where the player is constantly learning. Trying to overcome a challenge to reach a goal is the act of learning, hence the presence of difficulty curves in video games. As soon as the challenge wears down, the act of learning pauses, and the game stops being fun. Another facet added while translating all these into an open-world game is player autonomy. Exploration is intrinsically tied to the design of open-world games, and player autonomy fuels that motivation for exploration, which brings out the essence mentioned above. The player is in control, empowered to explore and discover at their own pace and in their way, hence the title.
I had wished more games adopted the open-world concept, and today, we have a market saturated with that genre; it turns out that this genre became a haven for the developers to hinge on, or the natural evolution of every series leads to them becoming an open-world game eventually (Zelda, Soulsborne, Pokemon and Halo). The saturation was a result of how Ubisoft started designing their open-world games. Developers need to extend a degree of trust that the players’ curiosity will guide them in exploring our world. However, the idea of filling up the maps with map markers after unlocking them by climbing up a high-altitude viewpoint has inevitably started to favour the quantity over quality approach, resulting in vast spaces of the map filled with mediocre and repetitive content, rendering the game stale to the point that the high altitude viewpoints are now derogatorily termed “Ubisoft Towers”. Guerrilla Games’ Horizon series (another fantastic concept, mechanical dinosaurs roaming the world, ruined by this mechanic), Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man series, The Witcher 3, Ghost of Tsuhima and Ubisoft’s own Far Cry and Watch Dogs series are plagued by this approach; you can also say the UBIsoft’s design has become UBIqutious. I am a big fan of Ubisoft games but have become increasingly disheartened by their recent titles. Their focus has shifted towards incorporating unnecessary content and aggressively pushing monetization strategies, leaving little room for the core gaming experience. As a result, I find it challenging to maintain enthusiasm for any of their upcoming releases. But some games stand tall above the mediocrity of the current saturation, and I was fortunate enough to experience them. How the vastly different approaches in these games’ world design, game mechanics and narrative affect the overall exploration is tempting to scrutinise here, and that is what I hope to do in the future.
“No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers.” – Roger Ebert.
Video games are a microcosm of human experience; a deeper layer of audience engagement with media unveiled some barriers to the definition of art. Video games as an art form is a long-standing debate where even Hideo Kojima (Creator of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding) asserts the words said by the most revered movie critic of all time and at the same time filmmakers like Steven Speilberg and George Lucas being avid gamers talk about plots, narratives and storytelling in video games. It’s not easy to classify any form of player agency as art, but as an amalgamation of expressive artistic elements like acting, story, visuals, and music, video games are the peak of human imagination. There have been games which realised the struggles of depression and anxiety by utilising game design and storytelling (Celeste) or putting you in the mind of someone suffering from Psychosis in HellBlade Senua’s sacrifice. A game (Bioshock) that set out to criticise Randian Objectivism sparked a conversation about the aesthetic distance between storytelling and player agency, progressing the concepts of ludology and narratology(checkout Ludonarrative Dissonance). Outer Wilds questions our existence in the ever-growing universe through time loops and quantum physics employed as game mechanics in an accurate representation of a solar system. Red Dead Redemption 2 sees a man deciphering his own morality and questioning his loyalty to someone who goes to extreme lengths to challenge civilization, which is clipping off his freedom in the most realistic recreation of the American Frontier in a video game. The Witcher series questions your morality at every step of the way. Art subtly challenges you, compelling you to contemplate its depth while appreciating its beauty. Video games have reformed my appreciation of art; in paintings, books and movies, you are a passive observer of someone’s imagination and creativity; in video games, you participate in one; and; I have found tranquillity, bliss, complacency, catharsis and, more importantly, solace after playing Bloodborne. (Basking in the blood of Lovecraftian beasts in Bloodborne bewitched me; it is a masterpiece and the very height of human imagination going feral).
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