 Hey, come here. I want to show you something. Something I've been thinking about for the last couple of days. Something that was once an amazing triumph that promised to completely alter our lives. Something that directly relates to several of the biggest releases of this year even though at first you will have no idea how. It's this. This little thing right here was a symbol of things to come and I'm reminded of this little thing because my uncle died last week. Don't worry. We weren't very close as his narcissism made it impossible for him to ever get close to anybody, but that little trinket will always be tied to him in my memory. Back in the mid-1980s, the first cheap commercial holograms started appearing on pogs and baseball cards and other plastic crap. My uncle was the American president of scopes and lenses for Nikon and one Thanksgiving in his grotesquely Nassau County home of mirrored walls and white carpets. He pulled me and my father over and showed us a holographic camera and some prints. These are the future, he said to my dad, before telling him he'd invested most of his savings to become a partner in a company that made the film. Then he asked my dad to invest all of his money. My father looked at the prints and said, Jim, these look like shit. Nothing about this is better than regular photographs. It isn't better than the thing it's supposed to replace. It's just new. Maybe in 30 years, but right now you've wasted all your money. My uncle cursed him in Italian and stormed off, but my dad was right. My uncle was imagining the possibilities of what fully realistic 3D photographs could mean for photography. He wasn't looking at what he had. He was looking at what he might have in 30 years. He was looking at what he dreams holographic photography could be. Incidentally, fully 3D holographic images remain either underwhelming or grotesquely expensive to this very day. My father kept his money and my uncle invested in scheme after scheme and died nearly penniless. I tell that story because in the last two months I've played a few games that got me thinking about the differences between what we imagined open-world games would be and what we actually got. After playing Spider-Man and Fallout 76, AC Odyssey, Red Dead Redemption 2 and further back Far Cry 5, something occurred to me. I think it's fair to assume that all of these games were made by people around my age. People who grew up playing the Atari 2600 when they were very young before moving on to a Commodore 64 and consoles and eventually PCs. People who played Zelda when it first came out and were blown away by the freedom of what seemed a huge and impossibly open world. People who grew up fighting the bosses in the first Contra game and dreaming of the day when that would be a real 3D monster. We dreamed of the open-world game and the possibilities that our video games one day be real, fully interactive worlds. And on one hand, we seem to have that now. The horse in Red Dead 2 takes a shit and has testicles that shrink based upon the temperature. In Fallout 76, we have to actually eat and sleep and drink and we can get sick. In Spider-Man, we're zipping about a map that is the closest thing I have ever seen in video games to actually reproducing Manhattan in all its impossible and imposing glory. Asi Odyssey, there are endless streams of NPCs walking around and seeming to live actual lives and it all looks so damn real. I've heard all the complaints about the way Fallout 76 looks, but I'll be honest, that looks A-OK to me. It runs like garbage and the game sucks, but I mean, I played hundreds of hours of Pong and Asteroids. This looks like the video game equivalent of the Statue of David. So, if we finally seem to achieve everything people of my generation could have ever hoped for in games, why did none of these games feel great to me? Why do they all kind of bore me to one degree or another or feel hollow in one way or another? Why did I spend most of my time with Red Dead 2 trying to convince myself that I actually liked it more than I did? Why did not one of these open-world masterpieces give me a tenth of the joy I got from replaying Hollow Knight? Well, to figure that out, we're going to need to take a journey back through game design, the 1980s, our expectations, and the failings of realism, after the logo, y'all. I've joked before about my age, but let's get a bit more specific, shall we? In the early 1980s, my dad brought home an Atari 2600. At the time, this machine was quite expensive. When I was a young kid, my father worked at a small grocery store barely making enough to support his children. He was Sicilian, so it was unthinkable that his wife would actually work for herself. I mean, what would his Sicilian friends think? Eventually, my mother, through sheer misery, agitated and threatened enough for my father to relent, but that was years down the line. One day, an agent called my mom and tried to sell her life insurance, and she told the guy, listen, we're poor. We live in a trailer illegally parked in my mother's backyard, and my husband is an assistant manager at a grocery store. For whatever reason, the guy told my mom to have my father come in for an interview, and six years later, my dad was an extremely successful salesman, and we went from dirt poor to solidly middle class. Sadly, his rise to upper middle class didn't conclude until I'd moved out, but that's another story. Either way, at the time the Atari 2600 released, my father was in a position to buy one, and that machine was played religiously by my brother and I. I played, mastered, and abandoned every notable title. I actually played the infamous E.T. game upon release, and the rumors are true, it was a steaming pile of shit. The only game ever that left me utterly confused. Even looking back now, I have no idea what was going on. Why am I falling into this pit over and over? I played and loved the granddaddy of the Adventure RPG. It was called, um, Adventure. It was a simpler time. From Pong to Space Invaders to Pitfall, I was there at the birth of the home gaming era. I had a Commodore 64, and I played all the great games available on that platform, most memorably this little one here. Bruce Lee, Nintendo, Intellivision, Colecovision, Sega Genesis, eventually PC. I probably played every notable video game released between 1980 and 1993. Finally unable to live with an overbearing and aggressive father and a mother who knew how to pick her battles, I moved out of my house the moment I graduated high school in 1993, and fell into deep grinding and persistent poverty for the next 15 years or so. As such, while I was there for the heady early days of video games, I managed to miss the era of explosive technological growth. When I moved out of my house, games looked like this. And when I got back into gaming, they looked like this. Aside from occasionally going to my brother's house in Queens and playing his PlayStation 1, or to the guy who played drums in my band and abusing him in gold, and I had no video games available to me for years. In 2000, I moved to Florida to escape issues in New York City. Amazingly, it turned out I just brought those issues south. But I met my wife and we slowly, very slowly built a life. From 2000 until 2013, I played World of Warcraft as a full blown addiction, Half-Life 1, the first Call of Duty, the first Medal of Honor and GTA Vice City. And that is it. In 2013, my little family became a middle-class unit. And I bought an Xbox 360 on Craigslist used as a gift for my kids so they'd get to play games like I did. It worked out differently, though, as I played it more than anyone else in the house. So why did I go through all this personal history? Because it's important to understand what I'm going to say coming up. Early in my life, video games were a real and visceral escape from a home life that was utterly oppressive. It's nice that my dad got a job good enough to buy video games because if he hadn't, I doubt I'd have made it to 18. Those early games were like escaping into different worlds. They accomplished the same thing that music and books did for me as a kid. But they were also, even at the time, somehow always disappointing. They weren't real enough ever. I'm pretty sure that people like me were always looking forward to the day where games would be wholly engrossing real worlds to permanently escape into. The success of the novel Ready Player One, or no, I had not seen the movie, is proof that kids of the 80s nearly fetishized this idealized future where video games would be realistic replacements for our frightening or at least really boring lives. All through the 1980s, games were getting more complex. Controls, mechanics, narratives, we got full blown dialogue in games. My first baseball game was this. And then right before I moved out of my house, I played a game called Tony LaRusa Baseball that let me and three of my friends draft teams from every player in baseball history and compete in season after season that kept stats. The levels got bigger, better looking and more realistic. But all that time, what we never got was anything approaching a real open world of dynamic choices, a way to go wherever we want and do whatever we want. That old Todd Howard meme, the See Those Mountains, you can go there. It's a joke today, but that was literally cracked to people who are the same age as me and Todd Howard. I promise you, I actually said to friends, dude, wouldn't it be fucking amazing if we could actually go to those mountains? Wouldn't it be amazing if there was like actually weather and day and night and shit and total freedom to go wherever you want? That is precisely what people of my generation desperately wanted in games. And for a good spell, that's exactly what World of Warcraft provided me when it first released. It was like everything I'd ever imagined it would be. I could travel anywhere in a huge world. I could ride a horse. I could cook food or mine gold. I could trade stuff with other players, but it didn't take long for the illusion to wear thin and the limits of the hologram to become a parent again. It still didn't look real enough. And there wasn't enough of the old school skill based action that made games so engrossing to me as a kid. Anyway, when I finally got that 360, I had six years of games to play. And it seemed to be the six years during which game developers had fulfilled every dream of my childhood. My response to these games was about what you would expect to be showed a movie on an iPhone to someone from the 30s. AC Black Flag made me go, Holy fuck, you can fight on boats. Holy shit, you can eavesdrop. Holy shit, the clothes change in the cut scenes. My response to Halo 4, my first Halo game, was, Holy shit, you can play other people online and it looks as good as the campaign does. Holy shit, the regular game looks like a cut scene and the cut scenes look like a fucking movie. And this will be completely impossible for any of you who were even only seven or eight years younger than me to appreciate. But my response to Mass Effect was stunned amazement. It's like a point and click adventure game, except it also has like real shooting and movement and stuff. Fallout 3 seemed to be the combination of every dream the nine year old plenty ever had. I can just kill this guy if I want. I can steal all the shit in his house. I can just go the other direction. I can go inside that building and there's more people in there. I think this gives me a unique take on gaming in its current state. I'm like the unfrozen caveman. At first, every shiny thing was the most amazing thing I'd ever fucking dreamed of. But I happen to have come back to games at a kind of troubling time, frankly, because everything I thought I had wanted has been achieved. Let's get back to Fallout 76 and its graphics for a minute. Let me really reiterate this. I played probably a hundred hours of this. Am I really to admit that this doesn't look good enough? How much effort do you think went into making this game look like this and be the biggest fucking map that we could possibly compel ourselves to make without vomiting all over our keyboards? I intend to argue too much effort. It looks good enough. Let's just quickly lay out some things I need to get to. Remember how I said that a real breathing world is what people like me were dreaming of in the 1980s? I stand by that. But reality is big and choices need to be made. As a 13 year old, I didn't put any deep thought into what exactly would constitute the realism of the world I wanted to play. Was it photorealism? Yeah, that was part of it. Was it large maps? Yeah, that was a dream, too. Was it horse testicle physics that dynamically react to weather conditions by shrinking and expanding depending on temperature? No, no, I don't ever recall wanting that. And in fact, if more than one man hour of work was devoted to horse testicle physics, I would argue that games have officially jumped the shark. In case you didn't know and think I'm joking, Red Dead Redemption 2 features horses with testicles that shrink in cold water. I've seen this lauded as a commitment to realism, and it certainly is a commitment to realism. But should it really be lauded? Here's the dirty little secret I didn't realize when growing up. Reality is so fucking boring. Should we really be striving for total reality in our game worlds? Do I need a waiting for my Kareg to spit out my coffee simulator and agonizing over whether to set the toasted or three or four on bagel setting simulator? I am quite positive that game developers grew up wanting realism just like I did. And I'm sure that many gamers have convinced themselves they want realism, too. But again, reality is huge, like incomprehensibly, impossibly huge. I think we can all agree that it's unlikely we will ever create a true reality simulation in our lifetimes. I think it's probably actually impossible, but I'm not a materialist. So you a mileage may vary. But if we admit that we certainly aren't producing a matrix or ready player one like simulation anytime soon, we need to ask ourselves some questions. What parts of realism are the most important? What are the most important pieces that make a game feel real? What gets at the core of the experience that we were looking for all those years ago? What's the singular expression of that desire? What do we need most? And the answer, of course, is freedom. But freedom of movement isn't the only kind of freedom. And in fact, I don't think it's even the most important one. The appeal of the open world is probably deeply tied to the fact that as kids, the thing you lack most is freedom. And because that's what we most crave, that's the buzzword in games that are now being made by people who grew up at the same time I did. Far Cry 5 gave me a rough approximation of the freedom of movement I am afforded in my everyday life. And you know what? That game bored the shit out of me. I have total freedom of movement in my current life. I've got a car, money, and access to gas. I could get in my car right now and drive wherever the fuck I want. But you know what? I don't. I drive to work and I drive home. And if I absolutely fucking must, I could be nags of my kids into driving three miles to the grocery store, but only grudgingly. Because the older you get, the more you realize that everywhere is basically the same. There's a different looking tree over there. That's cool. And maybe here there's some water and that's cool. Oh, over there there's a store where they sell those good Mexican sodas. That's pretty cool. But it's rarely more than just kind of cool. And a good percentage of the time is just kind of inconvenient. I don't use my freedom of movement because all of my stuff is in one place. All the people I care about, all the stories I want to write and read and live, all the people I need to see and love, they're all at my home. Fallout 76 gives you total freedom of movement on a tremendous map. But because there's no story, and yes, there are holidays. I got you. Thank you. Anyway, because there's no story, there's no particular reason to go anywhere. So what does that freedom of movement boil down to? There's a tree over there that looks different than the tree from an hour ago. That's pretty cool. That gas station is kind of different than the broken down diner from before. And that's pretty cool. Oh, that ghoul is glitching through a door. That's kind of funny. Freedom, pure freedom, is boring as fuck. I grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school for a bit. And I ended up being consistently in trouble, not just because of my behavior, but because I was disruptive ideologically. One day, a nun was explaining heaven to us, and she described it as all of our wants and needs being fulfilled and nothing bad ever happening. And we'd experienced true freedom from want. And I remember that line distinctly, true freedom from want. She said that we'd bask in the light of the Lord and sing his praises forever. And I listened to this and got caught up in it for a moment and this amazing vision of my future where I'd want for nothing. And then I raised my hand and after she sighed and called on me, I said, really, wouldn't that be incredibly boring though? Like, if I have everything I want and I have to just sing all day to God, that sounds kind of really boring. She made a pretty good argument about how it only seemed boring because I was so caught up in the world I couldn't comprehend what true peace would be like. And looking back, I give her some credit because that seems like a pretty good argument, but the thing is, I still can't comprehend true peace and freedom. I need goals and direction. I need conflict and moral ambiguity and consequences for my actions because I'm not done learning who I really am yet. When you give me full freedom of movement and nothing particularly important to do, all you give me is the video game version of spending eternity singing to God. It sounds good in theory, but in practice, it might end up being really dull. Scenery only impresses for as long as it's new. It's not enough, not even close. And these games that keep giving me bigger and bigger worlds of higher and higher resolution, they get less and less satisfying. In a way, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the last game like this I will ever need to play. I spent a significant amount of time just turning my horse in little circles, looking at Arthur's shirt actually rippling. I marveled at how a dead deer's head bobbed up and down in time to my galloping. I was stunned that carrying a dead deer made my clothes bloody and then totally shocked when I tried to test if walking in the water would wash it off. Not only did it wash it off, I could see the blood in the water. I watched sunset after sunset filter through clouds and mists and trees and you know what I discovered? I realized that this is it. This was as good as a game has to ever look. No game ever needs to look better than this. Better than this will be real life and real life has the added advantage of containing real people and real risk and real love and sex and death and taxes. Red Dead 2 looks as good as any game ever needs to look and any second spent trying to make a game look better will have been a wasted second. And I did get a lot of mileage and joy out of experiencing just how good that game looks, but not as much as I get from how fucking amazing the sky looks when Orion is hanging just over the roof of my house on a frosty December night. And Far Cry and Red Dead and Fallout 76 and especially Spider-Man did give me total freedom of movement across a huge open map, but it didn't give me what I thought I wanted. It didn't give me the feeling I thought I was looking for as an 11 year old kid playing Zelda and imagining what this newfound freedom of movement meant for games that would be made in the future. Spider-Man was probably the best of these games or at least the most fun for me because the actual mechanics of moving about the city and fighting were deeply satisfying on a visceral level. So if the freedom of movement isn't what I actually wanted and the photo realism isn't what I actually wanted, what the hell did I actually want? I wanted realism meaning a world that felt real, not one that looked real, not one that was built to scale, one that felt real. The division is almost a picture perfect Disney-esque scale representation of Manhattan and that game actually feels far less real in its depiction than Spider-Man did. Because through art design and gameplay Spider-Man captured the feeling of New York. It's strange, vibrant hopefulness and like weird sense of importance and you can only really experience it walking about the city as a resident in the spring or the summer. Spider-Man captured what it feels to live like in New York. And the game isn't even about living in New York. When we think of our lives of the real and important moments certainly place is a part of that but it's probably a less important part than it seems. We have places seared into our memories not because those places have any intrinsic worth. They're only a collection of matter, lumps of rock or brick or steel or trees, sometimes they're pleasingly symmetrical, sometimes they're noticeably chaotic but it's always just stuff piled in space no different than the billions of other places that stuff is piled in space. It's what happened in those places that gives them such power over us. This is the place I first kissed my wife. That's where my son was born. That's where my grandmother died. Here's where I realized that violence wasn't always the answer. Here's where I realized that I could actually die. That's where I figured out that I could be loved or hated or wanted or abandoned. What we were looking for was an escape into a world of emotions that were separate to the emotions we couldn't deal with in our real lives. An emotional escape not a geographical escape. Fallout 76 has really driven home to me precisely what I was looking for in an open world game all those years ago. Not a huge beautiful open space to wander and not a bunch of really pretty sunsets. I was looking for emotional weight. I was looking for a way to change a world to my desires. I was looking for a simulation of a world that would let me burn it to the ground or more rarely let me rebuild it to my liking. And a world without interesting people who we love or hate or sleep with or cheat on or double cross. That's just an empty world where changing it is utterly meaningless. It's a castle you build on the beach. It's quite engrossing to construct and you can imagine what goes on in there but when you leave it behind the waves will wash it away and it won't have had any lasting emotional effect on you because nobody lived there anyway. It was manifestly false. A 3D model, a holographic photo, a pale representation of the real thing and actually less satisfying than other already better versions of that representation. Now I said I was bored but the truth is I had a perfectly fine time playing Far Cry 5 but as my review made clear immediately after turning it off I got kind of mad. I felt strangely manipulated. I played a game for 50 hours while the illusion of a story was told to me. It didn't say anything and it didn't have any particular thing to communicate to me. It tried to pretend it was communicating to me. It was an illusion of choice and freedom meant to keep me playing at least long enough to feel like my purchase was a good value. A story about a religious murder cult in America without really talking about religion or cults or America without caring what I thought about religion and then ending with a big boom that I couldn't do anything about and was better off not really thinking on for very long. Fallout 76 feels very much like a theme park of the post apocalypse like if Disney had a post apocalypse world at Magic Kingdom it's simulating reality but not so much it gets uncomfortable or makes you ask any questions. There are some spooky bodies hanging around but also some nice upbeat music so you don't get too sad. There aren't really many areas roped off but there's not all that much reason to jump the lines anyway. All you would do is find the employee's smoking area and ruin the illusion for yourself. So the first Mass Effect game isn't an open world and I have much less freedom of movement than I do in Fallout 76. I can't shoot my companions and I can only walk exactly where the game lets me walk but that game gets closer to the freedom I wanted as a kid because it gives me the ability to change relationships and to tell stories that have consequences. Games have achieved freedom of movement and they've reached a level of visual fidelity so that almost no game pulls me out of the moment anymore because something looks fake or ugly well usually. The only thing that rips me right out of the game world now is plot, characters, story, people, choices and the thing that makes me sad is as the game worlds themselves have gotten deeper and better and more complex the actual things we do in those game worlds have gotten shallower and simpler and more generic. Fallout 4's characters and plot and quests actively worked against my immersion in that world. I almost never felt like I had actual freedom to decide even how to feel much less how to act. Far Cry made a half-assed attempt to justify its story without seeming to even think about how I'd react to that story. I replayed Doom 2016 recently and that story was more effective than most of the open world games I've played because it respected my intelligence every time it winked at me. It was always saying hey this is what we're doing we're not trying to trick you into thinking you got any real freedom your only freedom is which monster to dismember first. How can the dialogue system in games have gotten so very bad? How is the storytelling and character interaction in Fallout 4 worse than it was in Leisure Suit Larry or Fallout 1? How did we go from having comparatively no actual freedom of movement but freedom to feel how we want to having a huge world that demands we engage with it in a very scripted way right down to how I'm required to react emotionally. I'm rambling I know and maybe that's because I'm as confused as the people making these games must be. Didn't we all agree growing up that this is what we wanted? Freedom and size and spectacle? Well maybe it's time to take a step back and examine who we were and what we really wanted after all. It's time for game developers to realize they've done it. They've given me the huge open maps I wanted I got the freedom of movement I've gotten visuals so good I can actually get lost in them and totally immersed in a way Zelda could have never imagined. But they keep making bigger maps and hair with individual strands and testicles that shrink in the cold and none of that gets me any closer to what I was looking for. I was looking for people to talk to and love I was looking to change the world because I could never imagine a situation where my actions would even cause a ripple. I'm begging game developers to stop where they are and leave good enough alone and turn all of their manifest talents to finally perfecting the things that really matter. Horse testicle physics have now been perfected so move that guy over to modeling the responses of NPCs. Give me deep complex branching dialogues and actions. Give me game world to actually change based upon my actions. Give me true freedom to change minds and emotions. Give me the mixture of a good FPS and a powerful novel that lets me decide how it ends. Figure out a way to simulate a character falling in love or leaving based upon my words and actions in a game world. That's the freedom I want. The freedom to succeed or fail or not change anything based upon a complex web of situations and interactions. And yeah, I understand that it's complex and difficult to give me real choices that don't break the game but even there how about just letting me break the game's story. I've got a save file. Red Dead 2 is a better 3D representation of a world than Mass Effect but playing Mass Effect felt more real. Just like a regular photo, even though it's only two-dimensional, looked more real than my uncle's holographic prints. We are bumping into a realism uncanny valley in games and not visually. Red Dead has pretty much defeated the visual uncanny valley. We're bumping into it narratively. We're hitting it in the way the worlds respond to us. The larger and more realistic the games get, the more I can see all the flaws in the hologram. It all looks so real that the only comparison left to make is just how lacking they are in any actual meaningful choices or powerful emotional moments. And when I play these games, those lack of choices become so evident that I'm left wanting something that better simulates realism because it was written and crafted to elicit an emotional response from me. God of War is not an open world game in the way we've come to define them now and in it I play a literal God killing other literal gods and it felt much more real to me than did Red Dead 2 even though my horse's testicles adhere to real physics and even though Red Dead's story is very realistic and believable. And it's not that open world games can't work. Horizon Zero Dawn was rightly lauded because it's one of the best games of recent memory and when you pull it apart, you realize that it's a very very standard open world game. Bandit camps and light stealth and collectibles and a huge map, side quests and errands and limited dialogue choices. Horizon succeeds because while Gorilla has all those elements, it realized what was most important. There aren't 30 hours of errands. There aren't 73 shallow fetch quests. There are a few for pacing. Gorilla focused its attention on quality and depth everywhere in the design. Horizon succeeds because its story is deep and powerful and exciting. It elicits a sense of wonder that taps into the very feeling all of these games are trying to get at. Its world made me feel like a kid and its story treated me like an adult. It works because it's a perfectly excellent open world game and you can enjoy it for its stunning beauty and ridiculously fucking great combat. But you can also dig deeper and find an extremely complex and powerful story that leaves you asking questions. Hollow Knight's small, dense, meticulously designed world felt more open, real and far more powerful to me than Fallout 76's world did. Its very small, tight and ambiguous story left me feeling like I needed to explore more to understand it, produced a need to discover. It achieved a greater sense of freedom and wonder in one percent of the real state of any of these big open world games. And the 2D black and white photo a friend took of my wife and me on our wedding day is far more real looking than any hologram ever could be. Alright, thanks for sitting through that. I'll have regular videos up again next week. See you next time. Bye.