 There is a contradiction at the heart of the open world game. Despite promising an infinite expanse of choices and agency, they often funnel you into linear sequences of quests and busyworld. This was evident when the genre shot to prominence with GTA 3 in 2001, a world of boundless mayhem but a cinematic mission structure that constrained your agency. This served as a template for most of the open worlds of today, formulaic games that used the open world as a delivery vehicle for content. Then Breath of the Wild came out in 2017, invoking the design sensibilities of early Zelda's, actually fulfilling the promise that open worlds tacitly proclaimed. After a somewhat contained opening, you were given the freedom to choose where you ought to go, adventure beckon. Elden Ring renewed that promise, setting players to wander the lands between with nothing but their curiosity to guide them. No explicit instruction, just landmarks to prompt players. No demands to do something specific but a world of mystery to explore. Very directed exploration, non-linear mission structure, a systems oriented open world, no waypoint markers or segmented maps, these are the attributes of the neo open world game, where the core aesthetic is discovered. Except it turns out most people ventured to the Zora domain first in Breath of the Wild because the world structure, signposting and quest seem to point you in that direction. The castle visible from the opening of the game is where most Elden Ring players went to as well. It seems what matters to players is more so the option to do otherwise than freedom itself, the illusion of agency that the game does not explicitly for ground. Psychology can be invoked to explain this apparent paradox. People have argued that what matters to players is not freedom, but fulfillment, where players can feel competent and self-directed and connected to a world. We also know about decision paralysis and fatigue. Designers know this. The developers of Fallout allowed players to go anywhere, but the peril of the world is what limited players options. And freedom and control is a more subtle ideology though, one that transcends the mere confines of the game and extends into reality. We live in a globalized world, but one mediated by networks of control. Freedom is heralded as a right to be protected, but our private lives are being monitored by data and algorithms. The open world game has come to saturate the market, but players complain about their abandonment of the joy of discovery. The open world game is a microcosm of the world that informs it, mediated by behavioral controls that optimize our experience around the illusion of agency. We rebel when the illusion is not sufficiently maintained. The book Open World Empire makes a similar point. The open world empire is our contemporary empire of information technology, permanent war, and massacres that occur with little scandal or protest. It is our globalized hegemonic world, ravenous in its pursuit of profit, that uses war and productivity as a conduit for control. Nothing is connected to this intrinsically, as the book Games of Empire argues. Games were founded in the military industrial complex and carry values that mirror the status quo, not to mention having supply chains and labor conditions that reflect this more directly. These values then get expressed in games, framing the ludic space the same way reality is framed by forces beyond our control. Except in games, there is a chance for rebellion. The book continues. These games emphasize the common values of the open world empire, inaugurated by information technologies that reimagine the world as a space of openness and new frontiers. Open World video games attempt to give players freedom, yet their freedom is defined not by capitalism or state rights, but by a child's freedom from the masters of control, a freedom to reinvent and experiment within a magic circle of play. In essence, in the game we have a technology to see into the systems of control that pervade reality, and the open world game is the most robust representation of this. This is not easy to detect in games rooted in fantasy and escapism, but are more visible in games that foreground how the systems in games communicate values. Take Mafia 3. It's a traditional open world game set during the civil rights era. You play Lincoln Clay, a half black former soldier on a quest for revenge. What's interesting is not the language of violence it uses, its linear mission structure, or how it frames its narrative amidst the turmoil of the era, but how this is communicated systemically. This was still the time of segregation, and so if you enter shops not designated for you, you are reprimanded for trespassing. Discriminatory idle conversation from NPCs aside, the police also respond to your insubordination quicker should you break the law in a white neighborhood, and shoot to kill rather than maintaining any pretense of simply trying to arrest you. Its values are communicated procedurally through its systems. The designers were explicitly trying to represent the experiences of a black man during the civil rights era, authoring the world around a historical moment to let players empathize with the plight of the marginalized. Games like this make it more obvious what the values of open world games are. They are also about space and our relationship to it. Play any Far Cry game, and it is inevitably about conquest, about claiming land. Of course, the text frames this colonial enterprise as reclaiming what was taken from you, simply reinstating power in the hands of the people. But does that mediate the fantasy that governs the player's motivations when they play this game? The loop of a Far Cry game is now a meme. Climate tower, control camps, hunt wildlife, kill enemies, dominate the environment, force it to conform to your will. The game can subvert this though. Far Cry 2 made it impossible to permanently incapacitate outposts. They would respawn endlessly, conveying through systems the futility of warfare. Far Cry 2 invoked disempowerment as much as it did the power fantasy. Broken weapons, malaria, it was both about the colonial enterprise and the post-colonial condition, inviting us to feel the duality between freedom and control. Coltan, cobalt, copper, the supply chains in the production of gaming consoles benefit from an open world empire, one where corporations can extract a wealth at minimal cost for the purposes of entertainment, fueling conflicts in child labor practices. We are enmeshed in these systems as players, both within and outside the game. Open world games are also labors of love, like Red Dead Redemption 2. A meticulously crafted universe is built on the backs of an abused workforce. The scale of these games might necessitate this, but that doesn't make this any less perverse. Labor is also a word often used to characterize open world games, grinding, repetitious tasks, extrinsically driven busy work. To justify their scale they need activities for one to partake in, endless materials to accumulate, camps to destroy, meaningless quests to embark on. This need not be so solid if the work itself is engaging. One conceals the dire monotony of task completion. Again, like with the illusion of freedom, we want to be sufficiently convinced that what we are doing is in fact meaningful. Red Dead Redemption 2's plot features a group of outcasts resisting the arc of history, not as it bends towards justice but industrialization. They want freedom, self-determination. The government wants to territorialize not just physical space, but people's minds. Arthur Morgan and Dutch won't stand for it, but in the text of the game there is a contradiction. Like most open world games, the systems that govern the world seem disconnected from the constraints that frame the linear missions. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a conservative game, just like its anti-heroes are, resisting the tide of progress. But that progress would force them into labor they have no control over, much like the overly designed mission structure of most open world games. None of this is intentional, clearly. But in its glorious panoramic vistas and meditation about the nature of progress, the game reveals how we are very much like Arthur and Dutch. Stubborn and steadfast in our submission to the illusion of freedom. What happens when people are given the freedom they think they want, though? Launch No Man's Sky comes to mind, a practically infinite universe filled with almost nothing to do. Mind materials to fuel a ship, to mind materials to fuel one's ship. Labor and freedom now converge to create an eternal purgatory. The developers realize this, they sold the game on promises that could not be met and have spent years since trying to realize these ambitions. Like stated, what players want is a sense of competence, ownership, connection with others. Freedom is only valuable insofar as it is instrumental towards providing these things. We haven't disavowed this misapprehension. We conflate the size of a world with the self-actualization we actually want from them. We say size matters when clearly it doesn't, and like the vulgar entendre, it leaves people with distorted expectations, insecurity, and disappointed hopes. Some refer to this as the immersive fallacy. The idea that simulation, fidelity, and scope is more important than depth, engagement, and experiences. It's why we obsess over graphics, content, and aesthetics over meaningful gameplay. In fact, we confuse the two. This ideology has now parasitized the minds of both gamers and developers, creating an endless stream of games that scream freedom and individuality as they continue to be mass-produced. The military entertainment complex is what games are sometimes referred to as, birthed by the computational revolution and having its mechanics derived from war games, simulations, and role-play. It makes sense why the military has used games to simulate training and even recruit soldiers. However, it is the glorification of war and gunplay where games have excelled the most. Open-world games, even the ones we herald, are less about exploration than they are about combat. We travel from location to location, killing, attacking, incapacitating indiscriminately. When an exception crops up, it is truly exceptional. In other worlds, a game actually about exploration and discovery and mystery and intrigue and no weapons in sight. Explore a solar system that is nearing its end, trapped in a time-goop where knowledge is your only friend. The witness, an open island filled with self-contained puzzles, all of which are framing our understanding of truth, meaning itself. However, a game can lean into its own conventions to be critical of itself, the military entertainment complex. Metal Gear Solid 5 has us playing big-boss, trying to forge a private army free from any network of control. Soldiers without borders, an actual open-world empire. The game is like any other open-world game, but it integrates its missions with a systems-driven open world. You can, however, incapacitate soldiers and recruit them to your cause, discouraging murder, but incentivizing kidnap. You build an empire out of the elements that govern other games, grinding, collecting resources and materials, and take on contracts as a private military organization would. This is framed as evil, of course. We supposedly play a big-boss on its descent into madness. The thing is, the simulation of an open world is not just in the details and mechanics it presents, but also in what it omits. Soraya Murray argued this in her book On Video Games. Metal Gear Solid 5 takes place in Afghanistan and Africa, places victimized by the imperial ambitions of the West. The depiction of Afghanistan, though, free of local civilians, filled with Soviet occupiers, rife with tasks that are instrumental to liberation, is exactly the propaganda, the depiction the United States used of Afghanistan to justify intervention in the country in the first place. We must play a world savior, the power fantasy of the player and the power fantasy of empire finally fully converge, an open-world collapsed in space and time that can be circumnavigated efficiently. What is omitted? Civilian casualties, geopolitical instability, a legacy of mayhem that extended for decades culminating in extremists once more taking charge. The irony of rhetoric valorizing the liberation of lands and peoples afar in open-world games, when these games themselves articulate their space to restrain that very impulse, they are ultimately guided experiences, but invoke the aesthetics of freedom. However, because of their palpable contrivances in generating these experiences, the player can be made aware of systems and ways the real world seldom affords.