Sunday Thoughts: Freedom

So, in keeping with my motif of playing games so long after they came out that it’s vaguely ridiculous, I’ve been playing Burnout Paradise for the first time. It’s not that I didn’t think it was worth playing, it’s just something I didn’t get around to until now. In fact it couples up nicely with Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, the last game I played before Paradise.

Of course I’m referring to the free roaming aspect of both games, although the implementation and suitability of the system in each game varies wildly. I love the freedom of Assassin’s Creed, it really fits the style and the possibilities that have been added in Brotherhood really flesh out the gameplay and add a huge amount of variety to the title. In particular, freeing the city feels great and is a good way for you to get to grips with the city without ever feeling overwhelmed.

By way of contrast, I’m not sure I really like the freedom in Burnout Paradise. I’m not sure the ‘go anywhere, do anything’ mechanic is a great fit for that style of game. Sure, having a huge sandbox to play in is a lot of fun and I certainly enjoy finding shortcuts and smashing billboards. The issue is that the world feels too large, too much to try and gain any kind of purchase on at any time.

I’ll happily concede that it may well mirror a real city in that regard, I mean how much of a new city would you really know after less than a day? But that doesn’t necessarily make it a good aspect of the game. As an Arcade title, I want Burnout to be quick and dirty, getting into a race in five seconds flat and just going for it. Of course, I’m not saying that Paradise is bad but perhaps you can be too free in a game.

That certainly applies when you look at titles like EVE or Second Life (although it’s debatable whether or not Second Life is really a game). EVE lets you do so much in the universe that if you’re just coming into the game as a new player it can be hard to get a handle on. When you can do anything, doing any single specific thing can be quite tricky to achieve.

Perhaps the reason I feel the freedom mechanic in EVE or Burnout doesn’t work so well is that it almost completely sacrifices the game’s structure. In a traditional game, you have some kind of narrative pushing you forward. Even at the most basic level, you have new menu items (such as race tracks or golf courses) that unlock as you push forward. If you have a world where you can do anything you feel like, it’s hard to instil any sense that you need to push onwards. You need some kind of driving force to keep you hooked in.

Personally, that sense of moving forwards is one of the things that got me hooked into AC:B so heavily. Sure, there’s an overarching narrative structure but going through and freeing the city was enough of a driving force for me by itself. In fact, I put the main story aside for a solid five or six hours of gameplay just so I could free the city and renovate shops as they became available. On top of that you’ve got the Assassin’s Guild to work on, which has it’s management system set at just the right level between simplicity and enjoyment.

I think what it really is, is the feeling that your actions have an impact. There’s a huge range of options I have presented to me in day to day life, far more than any game will ever really be able to offer to you. Sure, I can’t drive a car at insane speeds or jump from roof top to roof top like a more agile form of the Grim Reaper, but there’s a huge range of things I could potentially go and do on any day.

The thing is, almost any action I take has no impact on society, on the world as a whole or even upon me personally. If I chose to just go to the pub and watch the football I may well enjoy myself but I won’t gain much. For me Burnout Paradise has that same issue. It has, for a game, a pretty wide range of options that you can take at any moment but none of them really feel like they have any impact.

Games aren’t just a mechanism to fulfil fantasies to do something we couldn’t practically do in the real world, they’re crafted to make us the hero of our own story. On some level most people want their life story to be some grand play where they save the world, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what pushes us forward as a society, it’s one of the reasons we’ve created the things we have. However in a game you actually can save the world. If you want to, you can save a dozen worlds before the week is over. If you’re utterly free don’t you remove that core element to some extent?

Is that something we really want?