BIT LIT

No Limits?
The lie of open-world gaming

The story has been told so much that it's commonplace: the advent of the third dimension saved video games from disappearing. The market was floundering, and something innovative needed to happen. So, systems got more powerful, developers got gutsier, and gaming began a surge that still continues today. Super Mario 64 is largely cited as the game that set the precedent, the one that all the others would aspire to be. Every game that comes out owes a small piece of gratitude to it.

The novelty lied in the fact that this was the first fully three-dimensional, open-world game. One in which the path was not so linear, where a player could accomplish goals without even realizing it due to the multiple locations available at once. Sure, locations could only be unlocked with a certain number of stars, but there was nothing telling you what order to play levels in. There was no path restriction, such as in side-scrollers or vertical shmups, and the user was in control of what was going to happen as they saw fit. The third-dimension opened up this idea drastically.

Jump to 2001, when mega-hit Grand Theft Auto III is released, and the phrase "sandbox game" is inserted into the lexicon. A sandbox game is a game that allows full real-world roaming; unlike Super Mario 64, which relied on a hub world of Peach's castle to provide gateways to other worlds, Grand Theft Auto III had all of its action in one location: Liberty City. Said to provide users with true interaction, one could circle the game's entire setting without ever leaving the main world. The main world can't even be called a "main world," because it is the only world.

These two types of games illustrate the main point: three-dimensional game worlds are not truly three-dimensional. Yes, there are three dimensions illustrated and roamed through, but the problem lies in the fact that games have limits. There is no way to create a true 3d world.

Take into account swimming in Banjo-Kazooie, also released for the Nintendo 64, on the level Treasure Trove Cove. The level is an island in the seemingly endless ocean, but the area of navigable water ends just a few yards beyond the island. This is due to the fact that software and hardware limitations can't allow for endless data repetition. This is not just an issue of outdated technology. Every medium has limits.

The problem with the fallacy of true worlds in digital form doesn't lie in the technology; at this point, there simply isn't a way to eliminate invisible walls in games. There have to be boundaries, methods which pull the player back into what they're supposed to be doing, rather than just wandering around. The problem lies in the fact that these games are advertised and sold under the premise of full worlds. Agencies want a player to feel as if this world could really exist; but if that were so, we should be able to start walking one direction and possibly end up in a different world, just like in real life, no matter how long we walked. This is impossible, and as a game, it would be a terrible decision.

Even a game such as Katamari Damacy, one in which you actually roll up the world, you're still operating on a sphere, in space. You have bounds. This is as close as one gets to a true, fully-realized world, because it has no beginning and no end. 99 percent of games today have walls, putting the player in a box. And there is nothing wrong with that. Games need bounds. But when a game company says a game has no limits, they really mean it has no limits within the game's own limits.