Open WorldIncoming LinksMarch 1st, 2021In adventure games, there's the notion of the Open World, which I wrote about a few days ago in 📝 The Charm of Open-World Games. 📰 Roam Free: A History of Open-World GamingOpen World video games bear the impossible promise—offering compelling, enjoyable open-endedness and Freedom within the constraints of what is, by necessity of the medium, an extremely limited set of possible actions. These games provide a list of (predominantly violent) verbs that's minuscule in comparison to the options you would face in identical real-life situations. Yet, we can't get enough of them.As this busy, mission and event-dense style of open world grows more dominant as a design modality, it'll be increasingly important for games like Crackdown, Elite Dangerous, and the Just Cause series to remind us of the true promise of the Open World: that we could be free, to do whatever we want, at any time, in any way, and to play with our virtual worlds in the same imaginative, limitless way a child plays with the real one.