Why There's No Room For Suburbs In Open-World Games (vice.com) 94
VICE's Ade Adeniji booted up The Crew 2, GTA V, GTA San Andreas, Saints Row, and Watch Dogs 2, and noticed a interesting pattern: there are no suburbs to be seen. "We are transported to major cities and vast countrysides, but nothing that really speaks to the in between -- to the suburbs," writes Adeniji. "[H]ow can open world games leave out a space that we fundamentally see as Americana? Is this about design choices and constraints, or does it speak to something deeper about how we really view American suburbs -- and how desperately we want to escape them?" Here's an excerpt from the report: I figured I would first take my suburbia question to someone who has been creating games since the early 1970s. Don Daglow, pioneer of the MMORPG genre with Neverwinter Nights, broke down his answer into three parts: scale, visual interest, and stereotypes. In terms of scale, suburbs typically have lots of smaller, more repetitive environmental elements when compared to cities. Think strip malls and identical homes versus the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. "Big objects in the environment create vertical movement opportunities as well as horizontal movement in 3D spaces. You can support superhero skills, think Spider Man, and jumping, think early Assassins Creed." Daglow said. "Godzilla never attacked a small suburb on the rail line north of Tokyo. Why would he waste his time there when there's so much more to chomp downtown?"
Lazlow Jones, voice of GTA III's Chatterbox FM and a longtime director, writer, and producer at Rockstar Games, agreed. But Rockstar itself made a gradual progression from the chaotic cities of GTA to the open natural worlds of Red Dead. Then the company brought the two together in GTA V. "When I was at Rockstar, we started off focusing on open world games set in urban areas because it gave us great density," Lazlow began. "But over the years we expanded to rural environments while keeping them interesting and engaging." [...] Carly Kocurek, who teaches in the Game Design and Experiential Media program at Illinois Tech, says suburbs operate in the realm of "perceived beigeness" making it hard to imagine them as settings for the kinds of stories and worlds we see most often in open world games. To the extent that suburbia does show up strongly, these spaces often serve as a starting or transition point for a character, akin to maybe the first 10 minutes of a film, or the movie's midpoint.
There are other design reasons why suburbs don't feature prominently in video games and why sparse areas away from intriguing points of interest are often the first to get cut. "You're really trying to compress a massive space in real life, into a virtual space which is actually really small. It's like taking something and cutting it down by 10x," explained Will Harris, who led the open world design team at Light Speed LA. Harris says that in world building, one of the first steps is thinking about defining features. What makes Chicago, for instance, feel different than Washington D.C.? Huge landmarks immediately orient us in a specific space and differentiate it from others. And woe unto you if you do try to architect suburbs in large numbers. Developers could try to build out distinct houses, began Erik Villarreal, an environmental artist at Visual Concepts/2K. "But this requires a developer to create homes that stand out from each other, which can be time consuming and tie up a lot of resources," he said. Harris adds that there are only so many mechanics in sandbox gameplay and design. He calls the suburbs "interstitial spaces." But the larger these spaces become, the more unwieldy, and the more quickly the player realizes that these spaces are superficial. We've all had the frustrating experience in gaming where we reach a certain part of a map, but then discover there's nothing actually to do there. "So the Staten Island kit gets vaporized. We trim the fat." Harris says.
Lazlow Jones, voice of GTA III's Chatterbox FM and a longtime director, writer, and producer at Rockstar Games, agreed. But Rockstar itself made a gradual progression from the chaotic cities of GTA to the open natural worlds of Red Dead. Then the company brought the two together in GTA V. "When I was at Rockstar, we started off focusing on open world games set in urban areas because it gave us great density," Lazlow began. "But over the years we expanded to rural environments while keeping them interesting and engaging." [...] Carly Kocurek, who teaches in the Game Design and Experiential Media program at Illinois Tech, says suburbs operate in the realm of "perceived beigeness" making it hard to imagine them as settings for the kinds of stories and worlds we see most often in open world games. To the extent that suburbia does show up strongly, these spaces often serve as a starting or transition point for a character, akin to maybe the first 10 minutes of a film, or the movie's midpoint.
There are other design reasons why suburbs don't feature prominently in video games and why sparse areas away from intriguing points of interest are often the first to get cut. "You're really trying to compress a massive space in real life, into a virtual space which is actually really small. It's like taking something and cutting it down by 10x," explained Will Harris, who led the open world design team at Light Speed LA. Harris says that in world building, one of the first steps is thinking about defining features. What makes Chicago, for instance, feel different than Washington D.C.? Huge landmarks immediately orient us in a specific space and differentiate it from others. And woe unto you if you do try to architect suburbs in large numbers. Developers could try to build out distinct houses, began Erik Villarreal, an environmental artist at Visual Concepts/2K. "But this requires a developer to create homes that stand out from each other, which can be time consuming and tie up a lot of resources," he said. Harris adds that there are only so many mechanics in sandbox gameplay and design. He calls the suburbs "interstitial spaces." But the larger these spaces become, the more unwieldy, and the more quickly the player realizes that these spaces are superficial. We've all had the frustrating experience in gaming where we reach a certain part of a map, but then discover there's nothing actually to do there. "So the Staten Island kit gets vaporized. We trim the fat." Harris says.
Boring (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they're boring. They're boring to look at, and they're boring to interact with and drive around in. So it's cities or nature, where there is much more variety in either case.
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Exactly. In real life, many people like to live in suburbs precisely because they're quiet and peaceful - boring, so to speak, while still not being too far removed from the convenience of a city.
The summary touched on this a bit, but it's also the reason (among other technical reasons) that gameplay worlds tend to be highly compressed in general. As a game designer, you generally want to squeeze a lot of gameplay elements into a fairly small space. Otherwise, it's too difficult for players to convenient
they can do some in an compressed way even if just (Score:2)
they can do some in an compressed way even if just an small border line and some games in can work as well X legal or semi legal in state A / county A / city A but not in city B / state B / county B.
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Exactly. In real life, many people like to live in suburbs precisely because they're quiet and peaceful - boring, so to speak, while still not being too far removed from the convenience of a city.
I lived in a suburb for about a decade. I'll never ever go back.
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the trick is the be right on the border get the big + with lower taxes.
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I think we'll probably see that change in the near to immediate future.
LLM AI models, integrated with game engines, will make it almost trivial to have hundreds, if not thousands, of novel side stories. If you've played any of these games, most of the missions are often - usually - just filler. There are only rarely exceptions, where the story outside the main story arc is interesting: games like The Witcher 3, Deus Ex, Cyberpunk 2047. A game like, say, Fallout (well, 3 or any since) is fairly easy to repli
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I think you're over-simplifying the problem of generating side-quests. The most memorable side-quests in games are interesting because the game developers went out of their way to add a unique mechanic, interesting location, or other bespoke content to it. That type of content is expensive and time consuming to create, and most of is (so far) still the kind of stuff you need artists and designers to create by hand. A generated story is not really the bottleneck there. Add a generated story to a bog-stan
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Indeed. Also one reason why we do not have these in Europe. Well, mostly, I am sure some places do even here. Have yet to find one though. The standard here is that any accumulation of living space of significant size needs a center with shops, maybe a park, something to go to and to do. There is no life in suburbs.
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We used to have both malls and parks in suburbia. But the parks are bland, and most of the malls are dead, killed by internet shopping.
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We used to have both malls and parks in suburbia. But the parks are bland, and most of the malls are dead, killed by internet shopping.
That's sad. But not universal. Our suburb strip malls are generally doing well, and at least in my village, we have multiple very nice parks. There is a "Tot Lot" not far from my place, set up specifically for the wee ones, a larger one a half mile away with a baseball diamond and tennis/pickleball courts, along with the standard slides. A few more of those scattered around. Then on the far end, there is a really big park with tennis/soccer/basketball/hiking paths/picnic pavilions. We also have some small m
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That's sad. But not universal.
In the US it is universal. Like everything else "American" it's suburbs are effectively overgrown fiefdoms held by "nobles" whose status is lacking by comparison. The strip malls and parks are essentially cordoned off areas made specifically to isolate the businesses and passers by from the "nobility." ("Get off my lawn!", "Not in my neighborhood!", etc.) While the fiefdoms in general are maintained via debt (mortgages / suburb development loans / tax incentives / etc.) and extraction of wealth from other
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That's sad. But not universal.
In the US it is universal.
If you think that all suburbs are identical, You aren't even wrong - you are willingly wrong.
Like everything else "American" it's suburbs are effectively overgrown fiefdoms held by "nobles" whose status is lacking by comparison. The strip malls and parks are essentially cordoned off areas made specifically to isolate the businesses and passers by from the "nobility.
Right - we Americans have armed Homeland Security people checking people's papers, and if anyone not on the list even tries to enter the park or strip mall, they are terminated with great prejudice.
I fear there is something really wrong with you, my friend. You hatred of everything American is a pure manufactured fantasy on your part, some deep need to feel white hot hatred and I'd continue this, but my mamma ta
Re: Boring (Score:2)
Suburbs absolutely can and more often do have parks and/or central hubs. As for Europe, there are definitely suburbs in Belgium, Spain, Netherlands, Uk, Poland, and Italy. Maybe not as many as in the US and Canada, and they might not sprawl as much, but they are definitely there if you look for them.
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You don't have many(yes, you do have them) suburbs because your town structure and many of your roadway paths were WELL established hundreds of years to millennia ago. Suburbs get plopped down outside larger bustling cities because of population overgrowth onto cheap land with near significant roadways into the local major hub. In Europe, there was small towns plopped down all along those roadways long before the invention of the car which meant the population spill over centered around them instead.
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Indeed. Also one reason why we do not have these in Europe. Well, mostly, I am sure some places do even here. Have yet to find one though. The standard here is that any accumulation of living space of significant size needs a center with shops, maybe a park, something to go to and to do. There is no life in suburbs.
Interesting. I live in a suburb that teems with life, not some dead place. Here's the scene of desolation. We have people out walking their pets, trees and multiple parks and tennis courts. We watch out for our neighbor's properties while they are away. We have a beer with our neighbors, and when someone new moves into the neighborhood, we drop by and say hello. Deer and even bear walk through our neighborhoods. Children play outside. I live a couple miles from work, and a mile from shopping and eateries,
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Love me them burbs. Perfect balance for growing up and for raising a family almost intentionally boring. I love visiting "the city" or being nowhere but give me the suburbs to live life.
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Re:Boring (Score:5, Interesting)
Look up the Cloward Piven strategy. It explains everything.
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Having briefly attended a boarding school run by nuns when I was a kid, I can assure you the not-so-modern nuns were no pushover either. Worst year of my school life.
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Yes tell us all about those welfare queens!
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my duaughter and I went straight to the local Catholic school. If she's going to learn about strong women, she can't do better than meeting some modern nuns. Those women are *tough*.
If they were so tough, they wouldn't need a magical sky friend to get them through life.
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my duaughter and I went straight to the local Catholic school. If she's going to learn about strong women, she can't do better than meeting some modern nuns. Those women are *tough*.
If they were so tough, they wouldn't need a magical sky friend to get them through life.
I think sometimes people confuse "tough" with nasty and mean". Most of the nuns in my Sunday schools were definitely nasty and mean.
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Suburbs don't exist in video games because they shouldn't exist at all.
Copy-paste houses in cul-de-sac copy-cat HOA-hells.
Nobody wants that stuff in real life, let alone venture through it in a game. Like the last time I saw a "suburb" in a game was in Fallout 4 right before it gets nuked.
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I'm not sure all the commenters are using the same definition.
I certainly prefer smaller places in real life.
I live in a town that's big enough to have a couple of hospitals and a few grocery stores, but not big enough to try wasting taxpayer money on a big sports arena or concert hall. We have richer and poorer neighborhoods, but no dangerous neighborhoods. We have a couple of dozen parks, and several fire stations.
Occasionally I have to visit a larger city (far less often now that I work from home), but I
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Axiomatically incorrect.
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You start in the suburbs for Fallout 4, and there's a lot of Cambridge - not really suburb but not really densely urban either.
US style suburbs are wasteland. (Score:2)
über-strict zoning rendered the suburbs bad
Escapism 101 (Score:1)
Maybe because suburbs are where most of us grow up and live. Escapism is thus city and country.
Chicago needs them to get ORD some what right (Score:2)
Chicago needs them to get ORD some what right.
Midway is not really an big airport and meigs is long gone.
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Wow, AI is getting better and better at writing posts on Slooshdot.
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No point to them (Score:2)
A suburb exists because people work IN the city, but don't want to be crammed together or pay the high prices that inner cities demand for space. So they live where the space is affordable and commute into the city. In a video game space is not a constraint, cost of space is not a constraint, transportation between places is not a constraint. So why would a suburb exist? You can create a portal or a command to wherever you want instantly. You can have every part of the game exist from a menu if you wan
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Maybe make that be the only place you can actually "save"?
The mechanic could be added in to make it more challenging, interesting, etc. There are elements of "this is a safe place where you can save the game" in most games, it's just not well thought out/considered.
Suburbs are, culturally, something of the middle class. They're something which a decreasing, small percentage of global citizens are able to relate to: most of the world's population lives in cities, and fewer and fewer people live their lives o
It's in the Name (Score:3)
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Faceless suburbia is the perfect thing to fill the spaces in between important places with, because even in real life it's all made out of the same assets. The same house plans tend to be used again and again, sometimes on the same street. It would be a terrible place to have to memorize details of in a game, which makes it kind of an ideal canvas for anything where you don't want the players able to do that. I was just playing a game with a modded NPC who commented on how rapidly you could walk across Bost
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OTOH much of the point of a video game is to let you escape the drudgery of real-life. People will tolerate an hours drive in real life, not so much in a video game. You can put in fast uncongested highways and let the player drive like a maniac but i'm still not convinced you can go much bigger than GTA Vs map without getting really annoying.
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Perhaps you've forgotten early SkyRim, where people would wander a desolate landscape for hours on foot without encountering anything more than a shack you couldn't even enter.
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Perhaps you've forgotten early SkyRim, where people would wander a desolate landscape for hours on foot without encountering anything more than a shack you couldn't even enter.
Maybe that's why everyone has forgotten it?
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Who wants "safety", "quiet", and "low crime" in their open world video game? The gold standard in the genre is outright named Grand Theft Auto.
Suburbs would work perfectly in an open-world zombie-type game
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Suburbs would work perfectly in an open-world zombie-type game
Funny you should mention that. Such a game exists [7daystodie.com]. It works quite well.
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Who wants "safety", "quiet", and "low crime" in their open world video game? The gold standard in the genre is outright named Grand Theft Auto.
Huh? Not sure what you think what you wrote has to do with suburbs. I know city centres that are safety, quiet and low crime, and the suburb I used to live in was the crime capital in my city.
Shitty demographics exist everywhere and aren't limited to a specific development type.
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Who wants "safety", "quiet", and "low crime" in their open world video game?
That open world game is called Turn the Computer Off and Go Outside
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Who wants "safety", "quiet", and "low crime" in their open world video game? The gold standard in the genre is outright named Grand Theft Auto.
I want the whole range... Sleepy middle class neighborhoods with convenience stores, retirement communities with golf courses, gangland ghettos with shady clubs, and rural trailer parks and honky-tonks that don't welcome strangers... Just because I may want to be a violent lawbreaker doesn't mean I want every NPC in the game to be one as well. Unless I'm trying to end my play session via suicide by police, I tend to be quite law abiding in these games. I prefer to obey traffic laws when not chasing/being ch
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Yea well Carl Johnson probably would not be executing a crime spree at a Starbucks nestled somewhere in Covina.
I mean... c'mon... is this going to be an activist issue? "Games discriminate against suburbia...."
Someone needs to get off my lawn.
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1) Cities have always equated crime and the most destitute and desperate of humanity, since the beginning of recorded human history. The opposite is the (only relatively recent, modern) exception.
2) It's not that cities are run down, it's that they were never really designed for human habitation to begin with, since every city in the US came about since the Industrial Revolution. The exception to that are a few cities like Manhattan, Baton Rouge, or Boston, where the "old world" city is at war with suburbia
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Not even close [wikipedia.org] and of those shortly after said revolution, most started as trading posts.
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Highway Robbery [wikipedia.org] by definition happened outside of a city. The further away from civilization, and ultimately the constabulary, the more likely you were to hear the phrase: Your Money, or Your Life.
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This is a story pushed over and over by Fox. They obsess over it. Especially in a blue state or a blue city, as they conveniently ignore urban decay in Dallas for example. People honestly believe the nonsense that poop is left on every street corner.
Yes, there is more crime where there are more people. Duh. And there's more crime where there are more poor people desperate for more money, drugs, something to do. That's not a liberal versus conservative thing, it's only a liberal thing because Fox is cr
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Bullcrap, suburbs could be proceduraly generated (Score:2)
If Game Devs or Gam Studios REALLY wanted suburbs in their games, they could simply design a handfull of buildings by hand (places significant to the story or to gameplay) and let the other buildings in the map be proceduraly generated.
That waym you could get the cookie-cutter sameness of the suburbs, while having "landmarks" to guide the player to the spaces where the story develops/moves forwards...
Is pure laziness not to include suburbs, if your game/story calls for them.
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Ugh, this sounds like Daggerfall. The procedural generation made the entire thing feel ridiculous; 5000 towns, all alike.
Another reason not to have suburbs in games... (Score:4, Interesting)
At least around Chicago, suburbs are where you typically move to when you want to raise kids. That's why you have lots of single-family houses, strip malls with lots of boring but convenient stores, a general lack of sidewalks (everyone drives), and very little in the way of nightlife or "third spaces".
And if you're designing a sandbox game like GTA or Saint's Row, you're not going to include any NPCs who are underage. Mowing down pedestrians in GTA is good fun, but it stops being amusing if the pedestrians are kids.
With that said. I've always thought it would be funny as hell to have a "Suburbs" expansion pack for GTA, which simply embraced everything that is suburban about the suburbs. You'd have to leave out the kids, of course, but you *could* include the following:
* Crossing guards who smile and wave at you inanely
* A slow-moving Chamber of Commerce parade that gets in your way
* NPCs who slow down their cars and give you weird, suspicious looks when you're walking down the street
* Cops who immediately give you a wanted star for improper lane usage
Actually, if I were designing it, I'd have a feature where any minor infraction of traffic laws brought down a ton of LEOs. Make it seemingly impossible to escape more than one wanted star. (But leave a couple of loopholes where you can just barely escape, which people would of course discover within a few weeks and post on Youtube).
Re:Another reason not to have suburbs in games... (Score:4, Insightful)
And it's why kids these days have no independence. We've boxed them in with fast, dangerous roads and basically put them under house arrest. [medium.com]
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America. Where freedom is reaching an age where a government grants you a restricted permit to travel if you can afford the multi-thousand dollar investment in a travel machine.
I've often seen here people say owning a car is freedom. I counter with true freedom is not needing a car in the first place.
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Mowing down pedestrians in GTA is good fun, but it stops being amusing if the pedestrians are kids.
I think you're drawing an arbitrary moral line for which there is no point. Gamers won't give a crap. There's no magic morality that makes adults fair game but kids off limits. There's no difference in fun (unless kids are small enough that they don't bounce over the car).
The only part of your kids argument which makes sense is staying out of the crosshairs of some conservative Karen group (e.g. Hot Coffee).
Now excuse me while I take morals and go shoot someone in the face online.
distance means time (Score:2)
It's bad enough to pick up a bunch of quests, trudge to the dungeon, complete the quests, then trudge back. But at least all the quest givers are relatively close to each other so you can grab a bunch in a short time. In a rural setting, you spend too damn long collecting quests to fulfill because everyone is at a distance from each other. Or you only do a single quest at a time.
By design, nothing happens there (Score:2)
By design (in the real world) nothing happens in the suburbs. You have your families whose most important criterion for their existence is that NOTHING HAPPENS that's not cheesy planned family activities. Sure someone might get hit by a jart, but that's because we planned it.
Or, like Dan East said above, they're boring. But they're not just boring by happenstance, they're aggressively, deliberately, boring.
They're also far too spread out for videogames, which like to crazily compress even urban areas, mu
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Huh, I disagree. (Score:2)
You are in a maze of twisty little passages (Score:4, Funny)
...all alike...
It wasn't even interesting in a text game, let alone one with graphics.
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Wrong game (Score:2)
If you don't see suburbs, probably you are playing the wrong game, if there would be a "Soccer Mom Sim", pretty sure that game would take place in a suburb.
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Sounds like a good pitch for Leisure Suit Larry 11.
Modern warfare 2 (Score:2)
COD: MW2 has some of the best fighting in suburbia as the Russians are invading.
dispersal (Score:2)
American suburbs are built around cars, meaning they are widely dispersed and dramatically uninteresting.
Which is dull, if you want to build a setting, to have to fill 80% with "authentic-seeming" but unused open spaces.
Not to mention, any event that requires changing location now involves getting into a car for 15+ minutes.
How would that be fun?
Uh, BOTH Saints Row 2 and Saints Row 3 had suburbs (Score:1)
Silent Hill (Score:2)
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suburbial bullshit? (Score:2)
VICE's Ade Adeniji booted up ...
well, i'd say VICE's Ade Adeniji has a very limited gaming culture because there are indeed several titles that play out in suburbs, apart from the handful crap blockbusters he seems to enjoy. just from the top of my head "project zomboid" (basically a huge procedurally generated suburb), "generation zero" or the entire "postal" franchise.
so: bullshit, which otoh is what you would expect from such an outlet, and ofc slashdot echoing it for a modest fee.
Play Xenoblade Chronicles X if you want suburbs (Score:2)
Suburbs are "emotional insulators." (Score:2)
They're psychologically defensive (some would say "soul-deadening") rather than nurturing or open, and built to be No Man's Lands rather than having a specific personality or anarchic freedom.
Star Wars Galaxies? (Score:2)