Open-ended games: Grand Theft Auto Series

Rockstar’s Grand theft Auto is one of the most popular open-ended games ever created selling over 65 million copies worldwide and it spawned a franchise that is still going very strong today, the original GTA was a groundbreaking game despite having fairly primitive graphics even by the standards of the time, I believe Tomb Raider 3 came out that year and graphically that game looked years ahead of GTA but I’ve always felt that the importance of cutting edge graphics was overstated anyway and if the gameplay or control system is flawed then it doesn’t matter how good the graphics are and Grand Theft Auto just reconfirmed my belief that you don’t need good graphics to have a good game although it is a nice bonus if it has good graphics too. There is no build up or introductory story to Grand Theft Auto, you are just left in the middle of a street, you are told that there is work available at the nearby phones which would give you missions to do but you don’t have to these if you don’t want to, you have only one goal which is a score but how you choose to achieve this score is up to you, you can choose to play the game linearly if you are so inclined and just complete all the missions or you can explore the three cities, Liberty city, Vice city and San Andreas which are based on New York, Miami and San Francisco respectively, steal vehicles which range from heavy fuel tankers and buses to incredibly fast sports cars and sell them off at the docks or go on random killing spree’s and see how long you can evade the police before eventually either getting killed, arrested or getting your vehicle re sprayed.

It was these elements of free roaming play that really appealed to me, it was the first real open-ended game I had played and what topped it off is that it was very funny and was a lot of fun at the time to play. The games violence against law enforcement officers caused a lot of controversy at the time and the game was blamed for everything from juvenile delinquency to a drop in the gross national product, all ridiculous in my opinion and all those who protested against the game were quite foolish and naive as it only served to give the game more free publicity which I think was a major contributing factor as to why it went on to sell over one million copies of the game, I’m still amazed that some people haven’t learned that protesting against games or movies nearly always backfires and anyway I think only someone with an already unstable mind could latch onto the game and consider it as viable way to live their lives. The sequels’ to this game were just as open-ended as the original.

Essay

For this essay I've decided to discuss open-ended games and write about such topics as what makes them appealing and to whom do they appeal, how they have evolved, how open-ended games have helped computer gaming to become more of a social rather than solitary activity, so what exactly is an open-ended game, what qualifies a game as being an open-ended game? One definition is it is a game that presents the player with nonlinear gameplay and presents the player with challenges that can be completed in a number of different sequences. In contrast to a more linear game which will confront the player with a fixed sequence of challenges to be overcome whilst an open-ended game will allow for greater player freedom. Some games have both open-ended and linear elements and some offer a sandbox that allows players to explore the game environment independently from the game's main objectives e.g. Startopia.

Games like the Elder Scrolls Morrowind and Oblivion are pretty much the definition of an open-ended game, Morrowind probably being the most open-ended game ever made or at least the most open-ended game I have ever played more open ended design in terms of exploration and questing, you can develop a good or bad reputation, death is permanent in the terms of you won't just automatically resurrect, you have to reload from a previous save. Some may complain that Morrowind was just too open-ended and it was a very long time before you even got into the main storyline of the game although this was the appeal of the game to others who often argue that that Morrowind has a longer lifespan than Oblivion due to being more open-ended but, I think that for a lot of people Morrowind isn't as much fun because there isn't the direction that you expect in video games. A lot of people don't truly like open-ended games, they want some kind of linear-story to follow and get frustrated with games that don't offer that story. I preferred Oblivion myself as it got into the main storyline straight away but it never forced you to do quests and allowed you to ignore them if you wanted to and just explore other aspects of the game so for me it got the balance right, the game also has good longevity due to its construction set which allows modding.

Game Spaces

Game spaces, how do they contribute to our experience of play? In this topic we discussed how game space plays an important role in setting the atmosphere of a game, whether to create a claustrophobic atmosphere like in the classic game Doom which used enclosed spaces(party due to technological limitations at the time) and red lighting to achieve a sense of claustrophobia and danger or to create an open ended game like Oblivion or GTA 4

GTA is an example of a game which is an open ended game which also contains empty spaces, the characters of GTA are the most noticable empty spaces in the game which lacks talking NPC's, this is probably a deliberate design decision as it avoids breaking the immersion of the experience and it also probably makes it easier to run people over or bash their heads in with a lead pipe if you dehumanise the NPC characters. There is a danger of a gamespace being too big however, I prefered GTA Vice City to San Andreas myself partly because I thought the settingings of 80's Miami was more interesting and I also prefered the mobbish theme to the ghetto theme of San Andeas and even though it had a smaller game space I thought that it had got the game space about right, San Andreas just felt a bit too big.

MMORPG games

So whats the attraction? There is obviously a big attraction for these types of games as Blizzard, I believe it is estimated to have 10 million active worldwide and is estimated to make around $1.3bn a year. I've only played it a bit myself, played it for a few months a couple of years ago before quitting because I started to get bored and wasn't really playing it often enough to justify paying a suscription fee but in my short time playing the game I could see some of the reasons why some people get so immersed in these games, the ability to develope and improve your character is addictive and gives people a sense of achievement every time they advance to a higher level. The abilty to have professions, join guilds, go on raids, do quests are all appealing and give the players many different options on how to spend their time, you don't have to do quests if you don't want to and you can still level up throughtout the game without doing any quests(albeit at a slower rate) but its biggest attraction has got to be the online community, doing quests is more fun in a group than on your own and joining guilds gives players a sense of belonging to something important

Games as Pastimes in Suits’s Utopia

In M. Andrew Holowchak article, he discusses Suit's idea of Utopia. Suits believes the playing games is the ideal of human existence, that once technology has reached a point where there is no need to work since machines are capable of carrying out every tedious task and psychotherapy and the social sciences have made such advances that all possible interpersonal problems have been solved. People no longer need affection, approval, attention, and admiration. Things like Art and scientific research and even love, friendship, sex will disappear too.
Even such activities such as reading would be classified as a game since the technology would exist to simply instantaneously absorb the information contained in the book so reading the book would be attempting to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

Personally I agree with Kretchmar, if we reach a point where everything that can be done has already been done then we are left with two options either to play games or suffer the effects of immense boredom, giving the two options playing games would be the obvious choice but by doing this we are playing games for a very meaningful reason, to relieve boredom therefore playing games provides a vital function and cannot truly be classified as a game since it is not overcoming unnecessary obstacles, these obstacles are quite necessary if we wish to avoid the effects of boredom.

Games and Their Institutions

We had a dicussion in class recently about the rules of games , here is the link to the Bernard Suits article which covers the topic in depth. Suits argues that a game like chess cannot have a prelusory goal, i.e. that chess "can't be described before or independently of, any game of which it may be, or come to be, or come to be, a part." i.e. it can't be achieved outside of a game of chess.

It is an intersesting topic as I like other people would of though that for a game like chess it would be pretty obvious that it had a prelusory goal and that all the rules of chess were easily defined. However there are other rules which need to be defined besides the obvious rules like
"the object of the game to immobilize an opponent's king" but according to Suits you cannot say in an effort to dissasociate checkmate from chess that checkmate consists of objects of a certain description pinning a king in accordance with the rules of chess because you could just place these pieces to pin the king to achieve checkmate so it isn't possible to define a prelusory goal for chess without introducing more means limiting rules, therefore the definition of a prelusory goal is too narrow for a game of chess as it is for many other games.

Talks

We had an interesting discussion with a couple of guys, Gary and John.
In the first class, John who works in a boardgame shop in town talked about how the attitude towards computer games has changed over the years, e.g. In 80's movie's it was only the geeky kid who played computer games whilst today it is no longer really considered something only geeks play and has even overtaken the movie industry in terms on annual profit.
He also talked about different ways of getting into the games industry such as roles for the artistically inclined or marketing.

In the second class we had John, a PhD student give us a talk about the future of computer games. This was also an interesting topic, he talked about how he believed that in the near future we won't need machines with physical memory to store the games we play instead all we will need to play them is an Internet connection. He also predicted consoles would be gone or on the way out in five years time which I think is pretty unlikely, if you walk into any game store it is obvious that far more shelve space is assigned to console games than PC games these days, maybe one day there will be no need for consoles but I can't see them going away within the next five years but it was an interesting discussion nonetheless.