I’ve always loved open world games.
The early Ultima RPGs were the first games I remember playing that gave me the thrill of feeling like I could go anywhere and do anything. Over the years, I’d feel the same way playing Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, the original Elite, Grand Theft Auto, and many more fantastic titles.
For a decade or more in the middle of my career, it seemed like triple-A game studios were focusing on increasingly linear experiences – “funhouse rides,” especially in the shooter genre, that were as far from an open world design as you could get.
I liked those games too, for what they were, but they’re not the games I remember most fondly.
In recent years, consumers have fully embraced the open world model of game design, to the point where linear experiences are actually the oddity. Major players like Ubisoft have business models entirely built around tentpole open world franchises.
In fact, these days, the open world genre is getting pretty stale. How many more “visit a hundred points of interest on the map” games can the market support, even if the settings or mechanics are amazing?
As an indie developer, I’d be crazy to try and build a modern open world game. I’m better off sticking to achievable products – strategy, systems-based titles in niches where I can deliver a high-quality product with limited resources.
That said, I still play a lot of open world games and I have enormous respect for the work and creativity that goes into making a great one. Open world games inspire me and I’m always looking for ways to incorporate emergent elements or mechanics into my products.
But two of the most inspiring open world experiences I’ve had in the last five years didn’t happen in a video game. They were tourist attractions I visited with my family in the real world.
A Very Un-Disney Disney Attraction
As the parent of a nine-year-old, I fully understand why Disney has been so successful for so long. From movies to parks, there’s no question that the company produces high-quality polished content that’s nearly universal in its appeal.
At the same time, rough edges and anything resembling controversial content is sanded away. The experiences are controlled to deliver jolts of delight at precisely metered intervals.
Nowhere is the “Disney experience” more in evidence than at the famous theme parks themselves. Any parent who’s taken their child on the pilgrimage to the park knows what I’m talking about – you spend hours waiting in line, stopping every few hours to eat mediocre overpriced food, in exchange for five-minute bursts of perfectly-optimized linear content.
But oh, what content it is! On our visit to the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, my son knew exactly what he wanted to do first: race toward the back of the park so he could go on the Haunted Mansion ride six or seven times in a row. The Disney magicians got him, just like they’ve gotten several generations of visitors. They are great at what they do.
But after Haunted Mansion, my son’s second-best experience in the park was a less-popular spot tucked in between Frontierland and Adventureland – the most “un-Disney” of Disney park attractions. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it place, accessible only via a short raft ride – Tom Sawyer Island.
After spending an hour or so on Tom Sawyer Island, I recognized what it was, mechanically – a live Skyrim-style open world RPG for preteens. The attraction is an artificial island featuring several trails, a cave system, an abandoned mine, an old mill, a frontier fort (complete with very non-politically-correct mounted rifles to shoot at the passing riverboat), a pirate-themed play space at the top, and all kinds of secret spots.
Unlike most Disney park experiences, the island is something kids explore at their own pace, frequently leaving slower parents in the dust. There’s a feeling that, like the island in the book that inspired the attraction, it’s a mysterious and slightly unsafe place.
The artificial cave and mine shaft are smartly designed stand-outs, each making use of simple haunted house tricks – odd perspectives, spooky wind noises, moody lighting, and tilted floors. In both the cave and the mineshaft, you travel a single winding path, with one entrance and exit, but the feeling is of exploring something much bigger. Mechanically, the cave and mine shaft are direct analogues to Skyrim’s caves and dungeons – linear moments slotted into a larger open world experience.
My son spent over two hours on Tom Sawyer’s Island, searching for every last secret (he would definitely have gotten all the achievements, if there were any). He wanted to get “lost,” and he did, several times, but he always found himself again.
The sheer delight on his face as he emerged from the abandoned mine and realized – oh yes, THIS path connects to THIS spot, and if I go up THERE, I can get to THERE – was a feeling I recognized immediately. I always feel the same way when I open up a particularly clever shortcut in Dark Souls or emerge from a Skyrim dungeon on top of a mountain.
What the Heck is a Meow Wolf?
In 2008, a group of Santa Fe artists, feeling shut out of the town’s thriving but exclusive gallery scene, formed a collective and started making stuff together. Several years later, the collective convinced Santa Fe resident George RR Martin (yeah, THAT Martin) to buy them an old bowling alley just outside of town as a permanent home. They tore out the insides of the bowling alley, built a massive exhibit, and in March of 2016, Meow Wolf’s House of the Eternal Return was born.
It’s next to impossible to explain the House of the Eternal Return. It’s part interactive story, part playground, part disturbing haunted house, and part art gallery (where you can touch everything). When you first step into the space, you’re in the front yard of a typical family home. But something tragic happened to this family. Within the home are gateways to broken pieces of the multiverse.
I’d hate to describe too much; the surprises are half the fun. Every person’s journey through the house will be different. You can sit quietly in the kitchen and bedrooms of the home, reading newspaper articles and old postcards, trying to piece together the story of the family that lived there. You can travel to distant worlds, snow-covered planets and undersea gardens. Or you can just stagger around with a slack-jawed expression on your face like I did, amazed that something like this experience even exists.
At one point, I was standing in a treetop above an Asian-themed alley filled with tiny storefronts that seemed like something out of a cyberpunk novel, trying to figure out how to get down to it – and like that tall mountain in the distance in every great open world game, I eventually got there.
We spent several hours inside the exhibit, and could have easily doubled that time. By the end, we could find our way around the place, but the moments of wonder we experienced while exploring surpass anything I’ve experienced in any video game.
Meow Wolf has been enormously successful – the creators are due to open several other exhibits soon in different cities – but in many ways it’s the anti-Disney. While a coherent narrative thread does run through the House of Eternal Return, individual artistic expression rules the day. There’s no sense of an invisible corporate hand sanding off the rough edges. The fragments of the multiverse you’ll explore on your journey are startling in their contrasting styles.
The World is Open
I went back with my son to Tom Sawyer Island last year. It was still great, a pleasant retreat from the overwhelming crowds in the rest of the park.
But there had been changes since our last visit. The frontier fort was shut down for an overhaul. There were signs warning of alligators near the water, reminders of a grim incident at the park the year before. As with any open world experience, once we’d explored all the nooks and crannies, the magic was diminished. We’d gotten all the achievements.
At some point, I have no doubt that the executives running Disney will tear Tom Sawyer Island down and use that prime park real estate for a grand new thrill ride promoting their latest expensive intellectual property.
Still, I’m looking forward to the future. There’s genuine synergy between classic open world design and self-directed, self-paced real world experiences. Someone will soon turn that synergy into something really special.
The creativity on display in Meow Wolf’s House of the Eternal Return is an evolutionary leap forward over the delightful, but simplistic, Tom Sawyer Island. The growing popularity of escape rooms demonstrates that an entire generation is ready for “game-ified” experiences beyond traditional linear amusement park rides and haunted houses.
And products like Pokémon Go have demonstrated that augmented reality will someday transform our entire world into an open world amusement park.
I can’t wait to explore it.
As technology advances, the line between entertainment and reality get blurrier every year. So does the line between art and experience. You may have played a modern open world game that feels like an echo of real life, but have you had real life experiences that remind you of an open world game? Discuss in the comments!