I don’t know if you’ve ever used one of those run tracking apps, but then left it going by accident for a really long time in your pocket and only discovered it days later after it’s recorded hours and hours of your aimless wombling around? It can be quietly illuminating. A lot of us, I suspect, live daily lives that unfold in quite a limited space. Covid has only drawn things in closer, of course, but I know that I live a lot of my life these days in my house, and then in an outdoor space bounded by two parks, a local Tesco, and the sea.
Maybe that’s just me. But anyway, it certainly helps explain why I love a huge open-world game so much. All that space! All that horizon! Steep, a favourite over here between the car parks, the Tesco and the sea, gives me an entire mountain range. I never tire of going from a peak and pulling straight out to the map. Look at that! A panoramic experience. I could never see it all, surely! I love this stuff.
But it also maybe explains an opposite trend I’ve noticed only recently. That on the other end of things I am equally drawn to games that are very small. Sometimes very, very small. A Short Hike is an open-world game, but the world is deeply snug. You can fly around it in a few minutes. Toem isn’t an open-world, but its linked spaces are hardly expansive. You can get from any A to any B in a matter of seconds. Why am I so drawn in? Why have I spent longer in A Short Hike and Toem than I have in many other, larger games? Are small games – games with small worlds – on the rise? I hope so. I hope the trend continues.
I can still remember the first time I played A Short Hike. I maybe sat at the PC for three hours or so, completing the main storyline and getting an idea of the place. Going back over that territory as the months passed allowed me to switch from exploration to something more like understanding: I started to get a sense of what places were, what they were doing in their specific spots and how the world broke up organically into natural territories. This is possible in all open-world games, of course – one of the fascinating things about GTA 5 is how the city seems to get smaller the more you play it, the more you understand it – but it’s a particular richness of the snug open-worlder.