“open world” in games mostly refers to shams. In every instance I’ve seen, the choice is between “whatever forwards the plot” (no choice) and “something random” (false choice). The “something random” gives the player too little information about the choices for them to really be choices in the bayesian sense. You usually only get a vague outline of a distant object and when you arrive it’s usually not what you were expecting. What information you do get is too shallow by the standards of any good game; there’s no way to get really skilled at wielding it.
(And the reason genuine choice is rarely present is you end up needing to make multiple interleaved games, which is a huge design challenge that multiplies the points of failure, complicates marketing, and is very expensive if providing one experience for all will do the job just as well.)
This shamness could absolutely be transferred to educational documents. University felt this way to me; you can pay to stay on the path, or you can stray, and straying is generally fruitless, in part due to the efforts of the maintainers of the path, which unjustly reinforces the path.
“open world” in games mostly refers to shams. In every instance I’ve seen, the choice is between “whatever forwards the plot” (no choice) and “something random” (false choice).
Agreed on Escape Velocity. Minecraft was my more recent go-to example for “actual open world”. But I think I agree with the upthread point that open world games often aren’t as open as you’d like.
But I think I agree with the upthread point that open world games often aren’t as open as you’d like.
For sure. (An example of the phenomenon: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, which has procedurally generated ‘sidequests’ which reward resources but have absolutely no relationship to the plot whatsoever, and also a single, almost perfectly linear set of plot missions. It’s a great game, and it’s certainly “open world” in the sense that you can (mostly) go wherever you like, whenever you like, but nevertheless it’s a plot railroad, period.)
But whenever someone makes a generalization and says that they’ve never seen counterexamples, and I know that there are counterexamples, then I think it’s critically important to (a) recall and make salient their existence (lest we mentally elide the generalization into a universalization), and (b) consider what features of the counterexamples allow them to be such—and what the pattern of those features tells us about the general trend.
Looking at this.. I think I can definitely imagine a good open world game. It’d feel a little bit like a metroidvania- fun and engaging traversal, a world that you get to know, that encourages you to revisit old locations frequently- but not in any strict order, and more self-organised. I just haven’t seen that yet.
It’s worth noting that the phrase “open world” doesn’t occur in the article, heheh.
This name seems unnecessarily intrinsically prejudicial. Perhaps ‘legible’ vs ‘illegible’ would be better, or use McLuhan’s ‘hot’ vs ‘cool’ mediums.
Or linear vs open-world, as in video games.
“open world” in games mostly refers to shams. In every instance I’ve seen, the choice is between “whatever forwards the plot” (no choice) and “something random” (false choice). The “something random” gives the player too little information about the choices for them to really be choices in the bayesian sense. You usually only get a vague outline of a distant object and when you arrive it’s usually not what you were expecting. What information you do get is too shallow by the standards of any good game; there’s no way to get really skilled at wielding it.
(And the reason genuine choice is rarely present is you end up needing to make multiple interleaved games, which is a huge design challenge that multiplies the points of failure, complicates marketing, and is very expensive if providing one experience for all will do the job just as well.)
This shamness could absolutely be transferred to educational documents. University felt this way to me; you can pay to stay on the path, or you can stray, and straying is generally fruitless, in part due to the efforts of the maintainers of the path, which unjustly reinforces the path.
Escape Velocity
Agreed on Escape Velocity. Minecraft was my more recent go-to example for “actual open world”. But I think I agree with the upthread point that open world games often aren’t as open as you’d like.
For sure. (An example of the phenomenon: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, which has procedurally generated ‘sidequests’ which reward resources but have absolutely no relationship to the plot whatsoever, and also a single, almost perfectly linear set of plot missions. It’s a great game, and it’s certainly “open world” in the sense that you can (mostly) go wherever you like, whenever you like, but nevertheless it’s a plot railroad, period.)
But whenever someone makes a generalization and says that they’ve never seen counterexamples, and I know that there are counterexamples, then I think it’s critically important to (a) recall and make salient their existence (lest we mentally elide the generalization into a universalization), and (b) consider what features of the counterexamples allow them to be such—and what the pattern of those features tells us about the general trend.
Looking at this.. I think I can definitely imagine a good open world game. It’d feel a little bit like a metroidvania- fun and engaging traversal, a world that you get to know, that encourages you to revisit old locations frequently- but not in any strict order, and more self-organised. I just haven’t seen that yet.
It’s worth noting that the phrase “open world” doesn’t occur in the article, heheh.
Maybe serial-access vs random-access, as in computer memory.
How about sequential vs random-access?
It seems to me that a graph-theoretic perspective would be fruitful to take, here…
Yeah.… I thought about this problem while writing, but didn’t think of an alternative I liked.