Following a
recent—and still ongoing—gaming binge I’ve realized that open world action
games, best exemplified by the Grand
Theft Auto series, constitute my favourite genre in the video gaming
medium. Following the fairly on-rails single player experiences of the Call of Duty and Gears of War games I’ve come to really appreciate interactivity or
at the very least well-executed mechanics: games like Half-Life 2, the Halo
series and BioShock give you a
variety of tools but don’t hold your hand, preferring to let the player work
their way through a scenario as they see fit.
In the case of
open world games, where missions are accessed in a continuous environment and
non-player characters abound, the beauty is how you can make other entities
react, like dropping a pebble into a pond just to see the subsequent ripples. Or,
in the context of GTAIV, dropping a live grenade in the middle of a traffic jam
smack dab in the centre of Star Junction.
