A Soft and Open World

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I bought a used PlayStation 4 in the winter of 2019, which would prove to be incredibly good timing. I had been away from video games for about fifteen years at that point, and so was predictably confused and frustrated and awful at every game I played for a while. I somehow got through The Witcher 3 without ever really figuring out how to use signs, the little magical spells that Geralt can cast, and stumbled up against the stealth sequences in The Last of Us. These games were so much more vast and mechanically complicated than what I remembered playing as a child, and my hands and mind struggled to learn the new ropes. 

As I clumsily played my way through the big canonical RPGs of the last couple decades during lockdown, I discovered that I am far more interested in the power of an immersive and interesting fictional world than I am in a compelling linear narrative. As a lifelong fan of high fantasy, I have followed the Hero’s Journey enough times for its story beats and character arcs to lose all their flavor. This is why I often half-joke to friends that my favorite novels are the ones in which nothing happens. The ones in which the beginning is indistinguishable from the middle, which is indistinguishable from the end. This kind of narrative design most resembles the texture of real life, I think. There’s no great narrative arc; not for most of us, anyway. There’s just a progression of days, filled with various people and things and places. We move about and interact, we create and destroy, we experience beauty and horror in varying degrees. In games, at least, we have a little more control over that beauty to horror ratio.

When the guy I was dating at the time loaned me his Switch, I started on Breath of the Wild. Most Zelda games are storyboarded in lockstep with The Hero’s Journey, and this is no exception—but the delight we all found in BoTW (and, later, in its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom) has nothing to do with that story. Instead, it is the delight of an open world: a world that asks of its protagonist not a straight line, but a meandering one. A world that requires not blunt force solutions, but curiosity and nonlinear thinking. A world in which catching fireflies to brighten a nostalgic old woman’s day carries as much narrative weight as slaying a dragon.

The story, as anyone who’s played BoTW and ToTK knows, barely matters. They are not about the dramatic cut scenes, about finding out what happens next—they are about moving through a huge and stunning world, full of surreal beauty and surprises. The princess can wait, you find yourself thinking, less than an hour in. I want to see what’s on top of that mountain. The game is designed to encourage this kind of exploration, this un-rushed meandering—there’s no quest to-do list blinking in the corner of your screen, reminding you to keep on task. Some people choose to turn off the HUD entirely, forgoing the utility of the mini map and the quest marker compass for the more immersive experience of seeing the world as Link sees it, without an interpretive layer between you and him. Or, another way to put it—between the you out here and the you in there.

So I turn off the HUD and move through the world of Hyrule. I have never felt more graceful than when playing as Link, soaring through the air after a Skyview Tower has flung me up. There is something about that animation—watching the peak of the ascent, when Link’s body burns out its velocity and his limbs fan out, and, for just a beat, he’s weightless, untouched by the inexorable power of gravity—that makes me feel also weightless, calm, unburdened. There, high up in the sky, that perfect piano soundtrack goes silent and allows me to look out serenely over the world, laid out below me in twinkling miniature. I don’t think any other games have given me more moments of sheer delight.

For most narrative games, the easiest comparison in the literary world is a novel—a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and with movement possible in only one direction: forward. But the best literary analog for an open world game like BoTW or ToTK is not a novel—it’s a map. It’s there right in the name of the genre: a game that is open rather than predetermined, about the world rather than the plot. 

Though it’s by no means the first of its kind, the designers of BoTW realized that what they were doing was sort of newfangled in the sheer scope of its world’s openness, so they make sure to hold your hand through the first hour or so: The Great Plateau is the little starting area that resembles old-fashioned level design. It has clear boundaries and a couple objectives, and it leads you through a more-or-less linear progression of learning how the controls work, as well as the backstory and inciting incident for Link’s current adventure. It’s giving you the framework with which to approach the rest of the game. Then—and anyone you talk to about these games will describe it the same way—suddenly, the world opens up. 

“You are here,” is the starting point of any map. The next step, which lasts forever, is “now, go anywhere.” 

As a child I was diagnosed with ADHD. I had an awful time on the meds I was prescribed—I stopped sleeping, stopped eating, I became a pale and trembling ghost. With some retrospect I realize that this all was probably because I was given a wildly too-high dose for my little nine-year-old body, but I cannot tell you why the psychiatrist assigned to me at the time did not also come to this conclusion, and in a more timely manner. 

My memory from that time smears through paperwork, doctors’ offices, and adults talking about me and my future—my fate—in somber voices, as if I wasn’t there. I remember there were lots of tests, of the lab work variety, the multiple-choice variety, and the ‘cognitive-and-motor-skills’ variety. There were specialists in fields I didn’t and still don’t understand, telling my parents that—despite my obvious disability—I could still have a normal life, if they were proactive! “Being proactive” usually meant paying for some more esoteric tests, or buying a special set of workbooks, or else a referral to another specialist with other questionable credentials. This might all sound like wild overkill for a disorder which is now considered as commonplace as seasonal allergies, but, well, it was a different time. Specifically, it was the year 2000, and the pharmaceutical industry had just found a new golden goose in the form of distracted kids and their concerned, upwardly mobile parents.

My parents took my diagnosis very seriously, yes—I remember my mother crying when she found out. I did not understand most of it. I remember feeling that I’d done something very wrong, but that nobody would tell me exactly what it was I had done. What was made clear to me was that I was sick, and that my sickness was going to make my life more difficult than other kids’ lives. I would have to monitor myself closely, lest the symptoms of this sickness lead me astray from the critical path. It had never even occurred to me before that there was a critical path, one I was supposed to be on, one that would lead me to a good and correct life. If somebody had told me about this path, I must not have been paying attention. 

After being medicated for a little over a year, I had a violent meltdown in a public park, sobbing and screaming and coming completely unglued. I refused to keep taking the meds, and promised my parents that I would do anything, make any concessions, if only I could have my mind and body back. It was shortly after this that I stopped playing video games. I recognized them as a liability, a childish indulgence. A distraction from the critical path. 

“If you’re expecting a narrative experience like the step-by-step sequence of something you’d find in Windwaker [a previous Zelda game], you probably are going to be disappointed by the experience that BoTW gives you,” says Writing with Andrew, in his YouTube essay “The Poetry of Breath of the Wild,” 

“Because it not only doesn’t deliver a structured narrative, it can’t. Because it leaves things open and gives a player freedom to do whatever they want, however they want, a structured narrative is impossible. So yeah, put simply in those terms, BoTW does have a bad story. And critics will acknowledge that the game design decision to create an open world—which translates into a lot of freedom and enjoyable gameplay—comes at the necessary cost of story. ‘It is a lot of fun to play,’ they’ll say. ‘It’s just a shame the story has to suffer as a result.’ ”

It’s true—some people did criticize the story in BoTW when it came out, despite its now-undeniable status as one of the greatest games ever made. And I understand their critique: The story is objectively uninteresting and bad. Trite, inflexible, old-fashioned. But, as Andrew points out, criticizing the game for this reason is “like philosophers calling rhetoric ‘bad philosophy.’” It’s not wrong. It’s just missing the point. 

Appreciating narrative games in the very non-narrative way that Andrew writes about could very easily be considered “playing the game wrong.” Any Austin, another YouTube guy I’ve spent a lot of time with over the years, is a vocal proponent of this kind of “playing wrong”: he has a whole series of videos titled “Odd and unremarkable places in [whatever video game]” that feature footage of him playing different games and visiting strange locations in their digital landscapes that the developers seemingly put little or no thought into, giving some half-scripted spiel about its beauty or oddness or incongruity. He’s followed all the power lines and substations in Grand Theft Auto 5 to see if they actually connect back to a power plant. He’s mapped out the rivers in Skyrim to see if they logically flow into and out of other bodies of water. He’s aggregated employment statistics for Delfino Plaza in Super Mario Sunshine by surveying all the inhabitants, to see if it’s an actually conceivably functional economy. 

The most cynical interpretation of these tongue-in-cheek videos would be that he’s pedantically nitpicking: searching out and highlighting whatever flaws or gaps in believability he can find in these game-worlds, all of which took years of tireless work from many, many people. But, despite his constructed deadpan-ness and the intentionally dry approach he takes to these games, the flavor of these videos is of delight. His main request of the viewer is simply to find things to enjoy within the worlds of these games that were not put there explicitly for the purpose of propelling the plot forward. To take a step off of the critical path—what you’re supposed to be doing—even if just for a moment. To look long enough and patiently enough that you begin to see the fingerprints of the artist within the artwork.

If he has anything like a guiding philosophy, I think it’s contained within this line at the very end of his video “The Details Racing Games Want You To Ignore”:

“The next time you beat a racing game, once you’ve gotten all the gold medals and you’ve unlocked all the cars and the parts and you’ve had your fun with the online multiplayer—before you put it down, stop. Look around. Drive backwards on the track. You might just find something neat, odd, amusing, or beautiful to look at. And it might just give you that childlike love of video games that you’ve been chasing ever since you got a full-time job and now you’re stressed out all the time….. (Sigh) y’know. What’re you gonna do.”

The most crystalline moment of that childlike love of video games I can remember, from that time before I was medicated, is this: In the second Spyro game, the lakes and rivers in the landscape were no longer the flat, unmoving textures that insta-kill you, like they were in the first game. This water had physics, it moved. And you could swim in it—not just on the surface, but you could dive down into it, find caves and tunnels hidden underwater. Something about watching my little low-poly dragon avatar dive into a crystal clear lake in the Summer Forest, the first home world of the game—it gave me the same feeling that my real-world body felt, diving into a pool on a hot summer day. My sun-heated skin instantly cooling in the water. To this day, recalling that sense memory hits my mind as a linked pair: The memory of the feeling in the game, and the memory of the feeling in my real body.

Even after I’d cleared out the enemies and found all the secrets and collected all the collectibles in that home world in Spyro, I spent so much time there—just swimming. Meandering. Looking around.

Back in 2014 when I lived in Oakland, I joined a local reading group focused on écriture féminine—“feminine writing.” That very phrase, the basis of the group, was intended as a provocation: is there such a thing as feminine writing? If so, what is it? Is it something designed in opposition to “masculine writing”? I was twenty-two years old and I had no idea about any of these things. I had, once upon a time, dreamed of writing novels. But in the intervening years I had dropped out of high school, then college, and suffered a crisis of confidence. It felt like I’d been given a chance and I had blown it, like I wasn’t the main character of the story anymore. The path that I thought I was firmly on had disappeared beneath my feet. 

In that group we read Renee Gladman, Elena Ferrante, Theresa Ha Kyung-Cha, Marcelle Sauvageot—all these writers whose stories wandered, unsettled, defamiliarized, circled back, made strange gestures, passed each other like ships in the night with flags of unknowable nations fluttering from the mast. Their writing seemed more fascinated with the landscape than with bushwhacking a path through it. By and large, the characters in their stories did not have magical powers that made them special, nor did they have singular goals that their lives were constructed around. They were not hardboiled detectives solving a mystery, nor grimdark antiheroes with violent pasts, nor naive Mary Sues who passively let things happen to them. They lived in worlds that confused and startled them; that asked of them things they could not or would not do. They were meandering. But, often, they were meandering not for want of direction, not because they felt lost. Rather, they were doing it because what lay glinting off in the forest, tangled in the undergrowth, seemed so much more interesting than what was on that critical path. 

There is such a thing as narrative movement that isn’t a straight line, going forward. There is more than conquest, more than Luke Skywalker out there in the stars. Or, as Octavia Butler said, “There is nothing new under the sun. But there are new suns.”

When was the first time you thought to play the game wrong? When did slaying dragons and rescuing princesses lose their appeal, and when did you become more interested in where does that NPC go when she vanishes over the horizon? When did you first follow her—at a respectful distance, of course—from the market in the city where she sold her produce, back to the farmstead outside the stone walls, where her husband and daughter waited for her with the dinner table set, the oxen lowing in their stalls? And why did this little domestic scene, these digital, fictional people, make you feel such an intense pang of tenderness? Was it because you knew that someone—no, multiple someones, lots of someones—wrote this all, drew the characters and coded their movements, rendered their expressions and the movement of their hair and clothes? Not because of any quest line attached to this family, any achievement you win by going to their home. Just so that you could stumble upon it, maybe, on your fourth or fifth play through, and watch these low res people quietly eat their low res food together. Just so that you could look to the mother and the daughter and notice a family resemblance, a similarity in their hair and in the shape of their faces, and think, I can’t believe somebody included that little detail. I can’t believe they did that.

Any Austin, rambling about some beautiful and utterly pointless place in Breath of the Wild, says, “It’s kind of a good parallel to that feeling in real life where it’s like you’re working at a job, y’know, and you’re doing all the tasks, and you’re doing a good job, and you feel like whatever. And then every once in a while you go outside at night and you look up and you see a star and you’re like, ‘oh, my god. What am I even doing?’”

In 2023 I got a PS5 and the Dungeons & Dragons-modeled game Baldur’s Gate 3. There’s no intended strategy for BG3; no single right (nor wrong) way to go through the game. This is maddeningly confusing for my Hero’s Journey-soaked brain sometimes—I keep wanting to pick the best option, the most direct path, but every option comes with its own rewards and consequences. You can walk the path of the hero or the path of the nasty little freak, or any of the myriad permutations between the two. And it’s not always clear which is which—a choice that seems cruel now may prove to be the most merciful one later on. Whichever choice you make, the game will not judge you. It will inevitably make you a hypocrite, though.

“But what am I supposed to do?” I keep asking the game.

The game grins conspiratorially, kicks its feet up on the coffee table, and says, “Whatever you want, kid. Knock yourself out.”

A friend of mine bounced off of Breath of the Wild because of his frustration at a similar quality—the directionlessness, the lack of signposts telling him where to go, what to do. There aren’t endless branching dialogue trees like there are in BG3, but there’s also no obvious path from point A to point B, from ground situation to denouement; there’s just a game world to explore and light up the dark corners of, whenever and however you choose. Obviously, I understand his feeling of frustration, as do the critics of that game. We live in a real world that is complex and resistant to our attempts at understanding and interpreting it—cannot our fictional worlds, the ones we hang out in for fun, provide us with clear goals and clear paths to achieving them? Is this not a part of the appeal of such games?

It is, of course; it’s nice to move around in a world that is constructed so that you know exactly who the villain is, and how to stop their evil machinations. A world that precisely defines for you what success looks like—which is, in real life, a notoriously difficult and always-evolving metric. That world is comforting, coherent, unresisting. Its quests hover in the UI, in the corner of the screen: a to-do list of items to sequentially check off. 

But I do not play video games in order to check items off of a to-do list, and I become quickly burned out on games that ask me to do so. Stardew Valley is perhaps the ultimate example of this—a game that is largely composed of tasks, running from place to place, collecting the right items to construct this particular thing, which will make this other task more efficient, etc. I do understand the appeal—anxiety and excitement are just twin siblings wearing different clothes, after all, and games like this promise the tasty micro-feeling of accomplishment without the expenditure of any real effort. Still, when I’ve played games like this and found myself temporarily hooked into them (I admit it!), the experience eventually begins to resemble more and more the slack jawed loop of doomscrolling rather than the experience of being an agentic actor in a dynamic world. I feel not like the author of my own destiny, but like I’ve been manipulated into compulsive behavior, which is not my idea of fun. The cultural discourse about ‘gamifying’ different experiences in real life is ongoing, and a subject taken up by much cleverer writers than I—but I think, too, there is an equal and opposite reaction happening within game design: we’re making them more like work. If there is anything more imaginatively bankrupt than this, more of a crime against our child selves, I don’t know what it is.

Much more interesting to me are the games whose rules are made to be broken. In ToTK, Link’s magical engineering powers practically beg players to create unholy contraptions, and create unholy contraptions they have: On YouTube, you’ll find clips of players building X-Wings, airships, catapults, gundams, and torture devices that would get them sent to the Hague if they were real. Some of these builds are done with the intention of beating the intended game more efficiently, but it’s my belief that anybody who uses the word efficiently when they’re playing a video game has forgotten the reason that video games exist. There is no use value, for instance, to the “giant wooden man who shoots flames out of his dick and then explodes” build. He doesn’t help you find Princess Zelda or defeat Gannon. He just shoots flames out of his dick and then explodes. And that’s enough for me.

In other words, many people playing these games have concluded that the story or main quest is not the fun part. I’d go so far as to say it’s the primary barrier to fun—it’s the proscriptive and pedantic part. If you try to cleave to it religiously, as my frustrated friend did, then you’re going to have a bad time. But if you can unlearn everything you know about narrative movement and the critical path, about heroes and princesses, about crystal shards and big bads, then there’s a whole game waiting for you on the other side. One that you haven’t played a hundred times before.

Currently, I’m starting a new game in Baldur’s Gate 3 for the third time, even though I haven’t finished my other two playthroughs. I can’t really explain why. Except to say that in both prior games I kept getting cold feet every time I approached what felt like the closing of a narrative chapter, an ending. It’s a similar reaction to one I’ve had while approaching the last few pages of a book I’m engrossed in reading: wanting so much to extend the experience of reading it that I—perhaps paradoxically—set the book aside for a while. I don’t want it to be over, I don’t want to leave the world of it. I want to remain inside of it, for as long as I can manage.

In a huge, sprawling game like BG3, you can stay inside of it almost indefinitely. There’s so much narrative, so many branching paths, so much possible movement that is lateral more than it is directed towards the finish line. You can fuck around with side quests forever. 

And if you’ve played any of these high fantasy RPGs, then you know that the side quests are usually more interesting (or at least better written) than the main storyline anyway. Any main quest is inevitably a collect all the crystals and defeat the big bad situation. It’s a requisite of the genre, a line item to check off. Not something that you’re even remotely invested in as a player. All the human interest stories are in the side quests—that’s where you discover the betrayal, and love, and buried secrets. The mainline story is what holds the whole thing together, but that’s all it is—an empty framework      that supports all the quests and character growth and allegiances you make or break.

It is also the engine that moves you forward through the game, with gates slamming shut behind you as you go. Perhaps that’s why I save all of those mainline quests until the very last moment I can possibly do them—I want to fit in as much game as possible before being lurched further along the track, past some invisible point of no return. There are so many decisions to make, so many branching paths, that each time I choose something I feel a little pang of anxiety over the path not taken. 

This is why, I think, when I’m presented with a decision or multiple dialogue options in the game, I typically go for the most noncommittal, middle-of-the-road response. At first I thought this was sheer cowardice on my part—not wanting to rock the boat, say something extreme, even in the context of a digital world full of fake people. My social programming runs deep! This may be a part of it, but I think the impulse behind it is actually that of attempting to keep my options open—I don’t want to say anything so out of pocket that it alienates whatever NPC I’m talking to and cuts off a potential branch on the path ahead of me, deletes a side quest from the timeline. Because yes, if you make one of these fake people angry enough, they won’t fuck with you anymore. Maybe there was a whole little written sequence where they’d invite you over for tea, give you a tour of the garden, tell you about the novel that they’re working on. Or maybe—more likely—you’d fight them to the death and steal all their shit, which is also fun and cool. But you’ll never know now. Every time you open a door in this game, you can hear, in the distance, three other doors slamming shut. I almost wish I could play it with the main storyline cored out of it—just the side quests, the character development stuff and the exploration. No forward movement, no saving the world nor conquering it. Just wandering around it.

In this new game I’m playing as a boringly hot elf lady. The vanilla experience. I’m mostly taking the ‘good guy’ route; the path of the hero, with a little bit of stealth and pickpocketing thrown in, as a treat. I am shocked, already, at how much game I’ve discovered that remained untouched in my last two playthroughs. At just how expansive this world is.

On this run I decided to romance Shadowheart, the half-elf cleric in the party. She is unswerving in her faith and confident to a fault. She is a zealot for a dark cult. She has great hair. Knowing a thing or two about storytelling, I’ve been following her quest line along with the certainty that, at some point, she’s going to get a wake-up call, a long-due comeuppance. She will find her whole life to be a lie, and then, of course, I will be there to comfort her, and turn her, slowly but surely, to the light.

Last night, pursuing Shadowheart’s quest, we completed the trials of her dark goddess, which involved a lot of blood sacrifices. At the unlocked inner sanctum of this empty temple we found, as reward, the coolest set of armor the game has yet thrown at me. She put it on. I took photos on my phone to send to my friend Mitch, who’s also been playing it. 

“Look at my insanely powerful goth gf”

“Fuck. Yes. Pretty sure I’m gonna go with Shadowheart too.”

“Yes!! Surely we can fix her”

“Lol”     

I’m not sure, anymore, what the story is. I’m not sure if she’ll get the redemption arc that I’ve so confidently predicted—I guess that’s up to me, isn’t it? I’m the one holding the controller, after all, and I’m sure that redemption arc is at least one of the thousand options written into the endless tome of this game. But I don’t think that narrative closure, one way or the other, matters to me anymore. That must be why I keep starting new games and not finishing them. I don’t need to know the ends; I’m busy enjoying the means. It’s just nice to spend time here, with her. “I’ve found myself smiling a lot more lately,” she says when I approach her. “I think that might be your fault.”

What a nice thing to say.

And so I shoulder my dungeon-diver backpack, lift the torch up a little higher (even though we don’t really need it; we both have dark vision), and I follow my goth gf deeper into the catacombs. I did, of course, bring a revivify spell with me, in case the branching path we go down gets her killed. Maybe this is tampering with the narrative too much, maybe I ought to accept what the game gives me more readily. But I’m not ready for her story to end; for any of it to end. I want to stay in this world. I want to stay here, wandering around, just a little bit longer.