The Image of the Open World Game

Open-world games like Sable present expansive, virtual environments and use exploration of these environments as a central activity.How do players understand these worlds and organize their mental representations of their spaces?Kevin Lynch theorized that inhabitants of a city understand the "image" of that city in terms of five key elements: landmarks, paths, edges, nodes, and districts.We investigated whether Lynch's categories are also prominent in open-world game environments using thematic analysis of interviews in which players were asked to describe how they would navigate through these environments.We found that landmarks and edges feature prominently in players' responses, but paths, nodes, and districts are not emphasized as much.We also found that a sixth element type: "characters" stands out as a persistent theme in players' descriptions of these games.The addition of "characters" to Lynch's categories makes sense in virtual worlds, since the typical fixed routines of non-player characters (NPCs) make them more relevant to navigation than in the real world.