Scop’s Blog

Knightengale (who has contributed to this site in the past) is quite skilled at, and I say this in the nicest possible way, annoying the crap out of me. One of his latest offenses was claiming to be disinterested in the sandbox genre. I was shocked.

In one sentence, he managed to dismiss many games I adored. Assassin’s Creed? Fallout 3? Gasp, Saint’s Row? Come to find out, he had an extremely narrow definition of sandbox games. He essentially restricted it to the GTA series and “clones” thereof, such as Saint’s Row. This cooled me down some, but as I prepared to revise his definition, I realized… mine was not very good, either.

What is a sandbox game? Grand Theft Auto III is the classic (some would say archetypal) example. It had a story that was linear, but organized into missions. These missions were started by going to a specific location and meeting with a character. While each “mission giver’s” missions had to be done in order, players could jump back and forth between mission givers, and potentially miss missions depending on the events of another. When not in a mission, the player is in a “free roam” mode. The map remains accessible, and the player may partake in any number of side-missions or miscellaneous activities. Is that what makes a sandbox game?

GTAIII also had a huge, sprawling map. Getting from the eastern shore of the first island to the west shore of the third would take minutes (and probably a couple different stolen cars). While the racing side-missions and on-foot missions tended to be fairly linear, gamers are largely left on their own to navigate through the map, from one point to the next.. While they do, the world goes on around them, reacting to the gamers’ actions when necessary. Is that sandbox?

GTAIII had a number of game mechanics that it integrated into one relatively seamless experience. A single mission could find a player in the midst of a fist-fight, followed by a high speed chase, and concluding with a roaring gun battle. While any one of these components may have been done better in other games, non-sandbox games would never try to combine so many elements with the same ambition. Is that, then, what makes a sandbox game?

I could argue any of these views and more, but I do not know if any one is necessarily better than the other. I discussed it with Jere, another contributor to this site, and he considered the free roam portion of these games as the most indicative of the genre. His fondest memories of the GTA series involved hell-bent rampages through the city, wreaking as much havoc as possible before getting caught or killed by the police. Consider that most sandbox games do not end when the main story arc is completed. Players who fly through the story mode while completing a minimum of secondary tasks may not even see half of the content contained in the game, depending on the title.

Warning: Those with an allergy to academia should hiss and hide under the table for the next few paragraphs. I am about to drop some knowledge.

One avenue of game theory, generally called the “levels of play”, deals with three different categories for interactive activities that people generally consider “entertaining.” The first is the most general, and encompasses the other two: simple play. This can be as complex as a game of chess, or as simple as a baby playing with building blocks. In the latter example, the baby is not following any rules. He or she is simply interacting with the elements of the activity.

Skipping one, the third level is that of a fully realized game. For the sake of this article, do not consider game to mean a video game, necessarily. In the levels of play, a game is a rigidly defined interaction between actors (game players) and game elements (a ball, a game piece, a game controller, etc). The players follow rules dictated by the game (a pawn moves one square, and captures diagonally) to achieve a goal (checkmate, gin, or capturing the enemy’s flag).

The middle level, which is most interesting in this context, is called “ludic activity”. Ludus (not to be confused with “luddite”) refers to the quality of an activity that has defining structure, but not necessarily a goal. That is, you can clearly identify when you are participating in this activity, and when you are doing something different.

The classic example is catch. Typically, catch is played with two players and a ball, usually a baseball. No one “wins” at catch. The first player to drop the ball does not lose. It is simply an activity partaken to improve skills and entertain. While more players can participate, or some different kinds of balls may be substituted without changing the activity to something other than catch, it is fairly easy to determine when catch is no longer being played. If one player throws the ball to another, who then tries to hit it with a stick, that is not catch.

Now, here is the question. Is free-roam a ludic activity? All of the typical game rules apply. A bullet still takes off x amount of health, cops still react to criminal activity. Yet, are there any goals? You still have a controller in your hands, so it is definitely a playful activity, but what are you working toward?

This may not seem relevant, but consider what games are not considered sandbox games, namely, The Sims. While the game can set short term goals, like “Get a job” or “Make WooHoo with this person”, there is no real end game, unless you consider death.

More than anything else, this leads me to believe that sandbox games are more than a free roam mode. What else have we got?

Shifting gears only slightly (pun intended, you will see why), is the map size an important characteristic of the sandbox genre? Consider racing games (see, eh, eh?). In series like Ridge Racer and Gran Turismo, you go from a menu to the track, back to the menu. Few would call these titles sandbox games. Burnout had a similar reputation. Then Paradise came out, and all the sudden, that word, “sandbox” started creeping into all of the reviews.

Instead of a series of tracks, Burnout Paradise takes place in a city. When you finish a race, you shift into a sort of free roam mode. With the exception of collectibles, in the forms of gates you can drive through, all of the events initiated from this exploration mode were analogous in some way to the modes introduced in earlier series entries. Functionally the gameplay had not changed, you could now just screw around in between events.

Frequently, I am drawn to the concept of freedom when trying to define the sandbox genre. Previously, I described the diverse opportunities introduced in a thoroughly developed physics engine. Go over a wall and risk encountering resistance on the other side? Blow through it and fight on with that much less explosives?

There is a mission in Saint’s Row 2 which has you attacking a convoy of rival gang members recently released from an island prison and on their way back to the mainland. When I played it, I stole a motorcycle, waited until the convoy moved to police-escorted buses, and pulled up beside the convoy. Working my way from front to back, I tossed a remote-detonated explosive onto each bus, pulled away, then detonated each in rapid succession. Mission Complete. No cops. The game did not prompt me to do it this way, I just really wanted to.

Later, I discovered that most players stole a vintage World War I fighter jet and strafed the convoy while it was still in the water. Two ways to complete the mission, and I could think of a half dozen more.

To me, this fits with the actual term, “sandbox”. The idea of playing in a sandbox is to take the tools given to you and build something. At the end of the day, you are the primary creative force whether it is fighting gravity and the tide to build a castle made of sand, or getting away with NPC murder.

This definition, of course, has its own outliers and fuzzy boundaries. Assassin’s Creed has wide open maps and diversions, much like clear-cut sandbox games, but when it comes to actual objectives, the game is heavily scripted and linear. Even Fallout 3, with its admirable attempts at open-ended quests, still relies on the developers to come up with the payoffs.

Then you have games like the Hitman series. All of the missions in those games feature multiple ways to assassinate your targets, from pushing them off a ledge to dropping a chandelier on their head to a quick, simple dose of lead aspirin. Yet the game is rarely mentioned in the same breath as titles like Infamous and Crackdown.

If you put a gun to my head (please don’t), then this latter explanation is probably the one I would produce. Yet, there are plenty of sandbox games that feature little in this regard. Perhaps each definition has a grain of truth. Just maybe, “sandbox” is, to steal from computer science, an overloaded term. We expect too much from it, and slap the moniker on games before we take the time to properly categorize them.

One last parting shot to chew on: GTAIII is considered by most to be the reason for the popularization of the term, “sandbox”. With that in mind, I ask, “Why not Shenmue?” Discuss.