That’s only partially true of Nethack anyway — Nethack has “everything but the kitchen sink” in that it wraps tons of cascading interactions between an ever-expanding set of monsters, objects and so on around the most simplistic structure imaginable — go down, and down, and down until you get the amulet, then go up, and up, and up. But it’s those cascading interactions that make the game nigh-impossible to win, and that mean that if you tried to use a modern rendering engine to make the game it would take several DVD-ROMs worth of space.

A game needs to be a *coherent* world as well as an interactive one, and GTA does a good job of balancing the *feeling* of being able to wander around with a world that has certain well-defined limits on what you can and can’t do. It is a game where it *feels* like you can do anything, and where you are pushed in various ways to mentally define “anything” as “committing petty crimes, beating people up, and cruising around the city listening to music”. In that sense it’s no different from a film that invests the audience with a feeling of freedom, possibility and uncertainty even though the film, by its nature, obviously has a predefined and unchanging plot.

I agree that Myst was dull. It might even have signalled the beginning of video games’ truly “decadent” phase where hardware advances allowed them to improve graphics to an amazing degree, while impoverishing the gameplay experience itself.

Wax, I disagree with you on two points in your view of GTA. First, you’re arguing for a purist’s sense of open-ended, which I also deeply hanker for in games, and I’d agree that GTA is not what I think of as *truly* open-ended. In some ways, the branching plots of Deus Ex, for example, came closer to that–there were a few points in that game where you could do things that put the game’s plot into a very different track. Not many, not nearly so many as I would like, but that’s closer to what I’m thinking of when I’m thinking of truly open-ended. Or Oblivion has elements of this–you can be a thief, you can be an upstanding warrior, and so on. However, it’s non-trivial that GTA lets you wander around killing time, and supplies plenty of little bells and whistles to fill up that wandering. I can think of a few RPGs where you could similarly wander, but where there was absolutely nothing to do while wandering. GTA offers quite a lot of “time-killing” activities. Your sense of open-endedness has to do with plot; what I’m talking about here is an open-ended of space or topography. The contrast would be with many first-person shooters where you are absolutely in a thrill-park ride and completely unable to get off the rails.

Second, my point is, “What do many people like about GTA?”, and my suggestion is, “It’s not necessarily the content, but the structure and topography of gameplay, that what they like is the game mechanics, not the game’s meaning.” You and I could suggest that the gamers who like GTA for that reason are deceived, that they’re perceiving openness where none exists, but the point is still that this is what many players do in fact perceive about the game.

Grand Theft Auto is the opposite: it’s an environmental game with very few constraints on your movement through the spaces that the game models.

No, damn it. This is the most commonly-made claim about the GTA3 games but it’s not true in any meaningful way – or rather, it’s only literally true. You can move through the space, yeah. But that’s it.

GTA3 and its sequels are nominally open-ended, trivially so. There’s no meaningful freedom in the games. For one thing, there’s only one real metric for advancement – doing the missions. The powerups and secret packages and whatnot just hang off the edge of the world. There are no characters to speak of, so you learn nothing about the world; the depth of the world is zero. Its ‘breadth’ is theoretically interesting, but consider the constraints placed on your action as a player: you can run around or drive around. The player’s interaction with the world is impoverished to a shocking degree. When you finish the game (the plot is on rails) you’ll have done everything of substance that there is to do in the game.

And no, you don’t have to beat up prostitutes, because that action is in every way except the purely financial and the merely humourous irrelevant. It’s just a mechanism for getting money and getting your jollies, and the game makes no effort to connect it to anything else. Sure it might set the cops on you, but so do the in-story actions.

The point is, GTA3 and its sequels let you do exactly two things: play the plot, or wander around killing time. The claims for the ‘open-endedness’ of the series mark the worst case of game-‘critic’ overstatement in recent years (the Myst example is also a good one – dullest ‘classic’ game ever, was my reaction at the time).

A truly open-ended game is Nethack – in which your wandering and non-‘plot’ activity is woven into the fabric of the game/story. Of course you’re basically powering up the entire time to prepare for tougher enemies – it’s not a great story – but your wandering does deepen your interaction with the world. The fullness of the game’s meaningful experience requires wandering. The GTA3 games don’t offer any of that. Morally speaking they’re basically porn; but gameplaywise they’re way, way simpler than people make them out to be. Artfully-constructed false feelings of openness. But that’s it.

You’re spot on overall in this article though, Tim. As usual.

To take the Planescape Torment example, I happen to entirely agree with your assertion that this game is so well written, so well made that it is entirely deserving of a place in mainstream culture. But let’s take my mother. I could speak to her all day long of Planescape’s engaging narrative, its moral ambiguity and amazingly well realised characters. But she lacks the cultural connections to be able to appreciate any of it. Despite being an intelligent woman well versed in many artistic forms, and despite the undoubted virtue of Planescape, there are too many barriers to entry for her to truly appreciate what a masterpiece it is. That is another difficulty that games face as a medium – most games require the player to have at least a moderate degree of gaming experience to understand any control metaphors, gaming conventions etc.

Speaking both as a non-gamer and as a liteary (and occasionally film) critic, this makes sense to me. It’s the style of play that matters, and you can’t capture that with the rhetorical strategies appropriate either to written fiction or to film. When you play a game you have responsibility for a character of characters in that game. Their fate depends on your actions. That’s different from reading a novel or watching a movie. No matter how much you may identify with one or more characters, no matter how much you may want this or that fate for them, your desires have no effect on the outcome. In the game, that’s not so. And it’s not just a matter of your desire, but your skill and experience. You’re in the imaginary world in a different way.

I remember when Myst first came out, all the hype it got about being the first “art worthy” game, mostly, as I recall, on the basis of the appearance of its world. So, it’s a pretty world. That’s nice. But how’d it play? I surely don’t know. But how it looks is only one aspect of that.

Another way to go might be review essays, a comparison of several games in the same approximate genre. That was one thing that the NY Times column on games, especially when JC Herz wrote it, did very well.

I mean Sin Episodes isn’t reallly noteworthy aside from the fact that it is episodic in nature, but that doesn’t mean that a reviewer can’t take it to task for its horrible depiction of women or examine the corporate-controlled society that it puts forward.