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.