Open-world Games Research Articles

Immersion in open-world games based on Grounded theory -- A case study of Genshin Impact

In recent years, with the expansion of the game market and the rapid growth of game users, the game market has great potential. At the same time, open world games are loved by the vast majority of users. [Purpose/Significance] Explore the factors that affect the immersion of players in open world games, drive the improvement of the quality of open world games, help improve the industrial ecology, and achieve richer functional values. [Research design/Methods] Taking the open world adventure role-playing game "Genshin Impact" as a case study, semi-structured interview was used to obtain first-hand interview data, and coded research was conducted using grounded theory. Through several processes such as open coding, spindle coding, selective coding and theoretical saturation testing, the corresponding theoretical model is finally formed. [Conclusion/Finding] The results show that the basic feature of immersion performance is concentration. The two factors, the in-game condition and the out-of-game condition, together constitute the pre-factors that produce immersion. After entering the state of immersion, the main performance is to produce tension and emotional resonance. [Innovation/Value] builds a theoretical model for the generation of immersion in open world games, which lays a theoretical foundation for future theoretical model testing and empirical research.

Dynamic Music at the Macro and Micro Levels

The unpredictability of player behavior in open-world games presents notable challenges, particularly for developers with storytelling ambitions. Most composers have met these challenges by writing music for each distinct location in the game. The issue with a location-focused approach is that most open-world games have stories and characters who develop and change. These changes are communicated through characters’ choices or new abilities they acquire. Aesthetics, especially musical aesthetics, is a neglected storytelling tool. Most discussions of dynamic music have focused on the micro level: how the music may respond to the moment-to-moment actions a player takes within a single play session. There has been less concern with the macro level: how the music may respond to the player’s progress in the game, usually over several play sessions. Through a comparison of The Pathless (Giant Squid, 2020, music by Austin Wintory) and Tchia (Awaceb, 2023, music by John Robert Matz), I argue that different approaches to music composition and implementation may be needed depending on which level is the focus. Although both Wintory and Matz were attentive to musical development on the macro level, I argue that Tchia is more successful at this timescale whereas The Pathless performs better on the micro level. My experiences playing these games suggest that feeling that the score is responding to one’s macro-level progress depends on players noticing that the music has changed and linking that change to something they have done or something that has happened in the story. I argue that Matz’s tuneful themes that respond to a select few in-game parameters serve the macro level better than current tendencies toward ambient music and more and more complex implementation schemes.

A Study on the Freedom of Interactive Storytelling in Open World Games

A Study on the Freedom of Interactive Storytelling in Open World Games

Impact of Dynamic Weather System on Game User Immersion in Open World Game Environment

Impact of Dynamic Weather System on Game User Immersion in Open World Game Environment

AI-driven design and enhanced immersion in open-world games

AI-driven design and enhanced immersion in open-world games

City Of Dreams: An Open-World Games

In recent years, the gaming industry has witnessed a remarkable evolution, with open-world games emerging as a dominant genre that captivates players with expansive virtual worlds, intricate narratives, and immersive gameplay experiences. Among these innovative titles, "City of Dreams" stands out as a pinnacle of open-world game design, offering players a richly detailed urban landscape to explore, inhabit, and shape according to their desires. This research paper provides a comprehensive analysis of "City of Dreams," examining its technical development, player engagement dynamics, societal impact, and broader implications within the gaming industry and digital culture. The technical development of "City of Dreams" is explored in detail, encompassing various aspects such as game engine selection, character animation, environment design, and physics implementation. By delving into the technical intricacies of game development, this research sheds light on the creative processes and technological innovations that underpin the creation of immersive gaming experiences. Furthermore, the paper investigates the player engagement dynamics of "City of Dreams," exploring how its diverse gameplay mechanics, immersive world design, and compelling narrative drive player engagement and immersion. Through an analysis of player behavior, feedback, and interaction patterns, insights are gained into the factors that contribute to the game's success and longevity. Keywords—open-world games, player experience, player behavior, game development, immersive environments, Non-Playable Characters (NPCs).

Achievers, explorers, wanderers, and intellectuals: Educational interaction in a Minecraft open-world action-adventure game

A common dilemma in educational game design is identifying the right balance between freedom and structure. Too much structure limits constructive learning and curiosity, while too much freedom diverts focus away from the educational content. How can we create a feeling of freedom while encouraging students to interact with learning material? We argue that a compelling, open-world action-adventure game with a branching storyline could provide just the right balance. To test this idea, we created a single-player custom map action-adventure game, Ulfberht's Sword, using the popular Minecraft game. Our objective was that the game would support prehistory education and we piloted it with 151 students in their history classrooms. To determine how effective our game was for delivering educational material, we collected and analyzed the students' log files in combination with students' Minecraft experience. Our structure discovery revealed four interaction types, (1) intellectuals, (2) wanderers, (3) explorers, and (4) achievers, which reflect the students' interaction with the educational content and perseverance in challenging situations. Ultimately, the game design engaged Minecraft-experienced player types and guided them toward primary educational materials. Less-experienced player types remained curious but would have benefited from more direct in-game scaffolding, demonstrating the importance of players' pre-existing gaming skills and thoughtful choice architecture. In conclusion, the player types provide insight into how we can best support different types of students in the open-world game environment. In turn, this information allows us to identify design challenges and suggest better ways to strike the structure-autonomy balance in realistically heterogeneous classrooms.

Real in virtual or virtual in real? Intersecting virtual and real experience in open-world video games and heritage tourism

ABSTRACT The increasing numbers of open-world games provide a sense of immersion, as if users were in a virtual world, by guaranteeing free movement within that world. One example is Ghost of Tsushima, a game developed by Sucker Punch Productions in the United States and released in 2020. The game was created by adding fictional elements to the historical facts surrounding the Mongol Empire’s invasion of the Japanese island of Tsushima in 1274. The developer implemented a virtual world as close as possible to the truth through thorough historical research into local records. This article aims to investigate the relationship and boundary between real and virtual tourism afforded by realistic virtual worlds, as well as provide a hybrid analysis of community discussions around Ghost of Tsushima on the social media forum Reddit. The community’s posts and comments suggest that the game cultivates a sense of immersion that can generate the desire to experience Tsushima, Japan in real life. However, this study also found that the game’s particular representations shape expectations in a way that influences the nature and extent of tourist initiatives.

Last Remnants of the French Wild West: Remembering “Colorado” (1990)

Few settings are as quintessentially American as the Wild West. In games, the myth of the American frontier is the myth of American expansion. This myth explores, sometimes with enthusiasm, at other times with a tinge of regret, the conquest of the “wilderness” with its Native inhabitants and wildlife, and its replacement by “civilization” represented by settlers and railroads. Yet, European expansion on the frontier is not exclusively an Anglo-American story. It was the French explorers, traders, and trappers that first set out westward (and southward) along the rivers from Canada and the Great Lakes. The French experience of the frontier was radically different: for them, with the limited resources of their soon-to-be-sold colonial empire, the wilderness was effectively untameable, its Native inhabitants unconquerable: it was thus a place of permanent danger, where one might, with equal probability, eke out a living, earn a fortune, or simply perish. Only once has the French West appeared in a digital game, in Silmarils’s Colorado (1990). This paper examines Colorado as an artefact of French game development in the 16-bit era, as a unique depiction of the forgotten French West, and, finally, as a 2D predecessor of today’s sprawling 3D open-world games.

“Even Though It’s Completely Random”

Typically, the role of non-diegetic music in video games is to set the environment, connect important gameplay events, serve as a transition between moments of action, provide the player with information about the game, and/or create meaning in game events. Games that are successful in these functional goals use music that is bound to player action and game context including setting, time, and location. Music in popular open-world games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Dark Souls, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild all achieve their functional goals through their connection with player action or game events. Minecraft is an outlier among open-world games in that its music occurs randomly and sporadically, it is inconsistently connected with elements of the setting such as time and location, and the role of silence is less apparent than in other games such as those mentioned above. This article examines the following questions: How does non-diegetic music typically create meaning in game events? What implications does this have in Minecraft? And why do different players experience the music in Minecraft differently?

D-Tour: Semi-Automatic Generation of Interactive Guided Tours for Visualization Dashboard Onboarding.

Onboarding a user to a visualization dashboard entails explaining its various components, including the chart types used, the data loaded, and the interactions available. Authoring such an onboarding experience is time-consuming and requires significant knowledge and little guidance on how best to complete this task. Depending on their levels of expertise, end users being onboarded to a new dashboard can be either confused and overwhelmed or disinterested and disengaged. We propose interactive dashboard tours (D-Tours) as semi-automated onboarding experiences that preserve the agency of users with various levels of expertise to keep them interested and engaged. Our interactive tours concept draws from open-world game design to give the user freedom in choosing their path through onboarding. We have implemented the concept in a tool called D-TOUR PROTOTYPE, which allows authors to craft custom interactive dashboard tours from scratch or using automatic templates. Automatically generated tours can still be customized to use different media (e.g., video, audio, and highlighting) or new narratives to produce an onboarding experience tailored to an individual user. We demonstrate the usefulness of interactive dashboard tours through use cases and expert interviews. Our evaluation shows that authors found the automation in the D-Tour Prototype helpful and time-saving, and users found the created tours engaging and intuitive. This paper and all supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/6fbjp/.

Religion Simulacrum in Open World Video Game

<em>Apart from being a medium for entertainment simulation, video games also provide a representation of the social world. Game industry developers always carry out research to provide socio-cultural, historical and philosophical system content to enrich the content in the game. The story background in video games aims to provide experiences and impressions for the players. This research aims to qualitatively explore forms of religious representation that are simulated in open world video games. So players can play role characters in the game to experience spirituality and religiosity. Either through latent and manifest narratives or through moral choices in the context of developing the storyline and Player character in the Game. This research uses Emile Durkehim's sociological perspective of religion regarding Karl Marx's totemism and commodity fetishism to observe the incarnation of the gaming industry as an altar of worship for its players, as well as Jean Baudrillard's postmodernist perspective with his simulacrum concept to analyze the form of simulation and representation of religious symbols that appear in the game. these open world games... This research finds that the use of simulations and the distribution of representations of religious signs or symbols in games forms a religion simulacrum or a blurring of spiritual boundaries between the pseudo and the real. Video games build the Player's construction of religiosity and spirituality virtually in a simulated world that contains ritual practices, ethics, morality, cosmology, metaphysics, and theology.</em>

Research on the Reasons for the Success of Genshin Impact

Genshin Impact has taken the gaming world by storm. Developed and published by miHoYo, this game has captured the attention of gamers worldwide with its stunning visuals, interesting storyline, and engaging gameplay. Genshin Impact is an open-world game that allows players to explore a vast world and interact with a variety of characters. The game also has very diverse mechanics, including combat, adventure, puzzle solving, character development, and more. Players need to constantly upgrade their character level, combat ability, and equipment level in order to better explore and complete quests in the game. This paper will explore the world of Genshin Impact, using its scenario design, character design, and analysis of cultural output to examine why Genshin Impact is so popular. Its diverse mechanics, beautiful graphics, rich character settings and storyline, unique Chinese elements, exquisite graphics and sound effects, and Genshin Impact's positive cultural output have made the game much loved and sought after by players.

Helping and Being Helped: Exploring the Motivations and Barriers to Upstream Reciprocity in Open-World Games

In a game world, if you are having trouble, you may ask experienced players for help; after leveling up, you may help novice players avoid difficulties in turn. This phenomenon is called in-game “upstream reciprocity (UR)”. In this article, we studied the motivations for novice players seeking help and experienced players helping others through focus groups and tested the theoretical models of potential recipients (N = 232) and donors (N = 258), respectively. Our analyses showed that for both potential recipients and donors, higher degrees of extraversion and perceived value (utilitarian and hedonic values) increased in-game UR intention. Loneliness showed the opposite outcome in models that recipients with high loneliness degrees and donors with low loneliness degrees increased in-game UR intention. Besides, self-determination theory (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) was positively associated with UR intention in the donor model. Furthermore, we tested the discouraging factor hindering players from UR. Combining all the results, we suggested the keys for designers are to improve the function and gameplay of the multiplayer mode, encourage the sharing of in-game capital, and lower the rewards of social cooperation to increase autonomy.

Otwarty świat i narracja rozproszona w grze Elden Ring studia FromSoftware


 
 
 The article Open World and Dispersed Narrative in FromSoftware’s “Elden Ring” tackles a number of design issues associated with open world design in video games. Building upon Tim Ingold’s dis- crepancy of two distinct modes of exploring the reality (wayfaring and trail-following), the author proceeds with analysing how the categories in question might have influenced the design of Elden Ring’s ‘The Lands Between’, which is torn between two different ambitions. One is to create a high fantasy narrative in allotopia, whilst the other is to sustain the principles of procedural rhetoric typical for soulsborne games, well-known for leaning towards a dark fantasy design style both in terms of their aesthetics and narrative content. Consequently, the main goal of this analysis is to propose a potential way of avoiding such inconsequence in open world game design, which is termed here a “ludotopian dissonance”.
 
 

Meaningful Place: A Phenomenological Approach to the Design of Spatial Experience in Open-world Games

With the development of game engines and graphics technology, open-world games have gained popularity all over the world recently. One of the key features of this genre is a realistic open world space for the players to explore, to the extent that some even deemed it as the prototype of virtual world and the Metaverse. However, in comparison with the growing world size, the player's spatial experience is a downward spiral. Interaction in an ever-increasing game space suffered from a repetitive design pattern which rendered the world grandeur on the surface but hollow deep down. How to find meaning in this seemingly hollow world and what game designers can learn from it? From a phenomenological perspective, this paper distinguishes “place” from “space,” and, according to this, proposes a three-dimensional meaning structure of place, that is “orientation-identification-time,” as a design approach to reconstruct a meaningful spatial experience in the game world.

Mixed reality in threatened environments

ABSTRACT This article considers the ecoscenographer’s use of technologies to ‘timeshift’ performances. Timeshifting refers to watching locally recorded content after its originally scheduled broadcast. It explores the evolution, refinement, and emergent issues related to applying this approach to performing relationships within threatened environments, including how they relate to notions of ‘hauntology’ in highlighting and collapsing time in reference to climate change. The article reviews the cultivation of new technologies to provide located media in remote locations, such as: Dance Exchange’s 500 Miles/ 500 Stories, Out of Box Productions’ Rallentando, and more recent projects including Toasterlab’s Groundworks and park-based projects, Swim Pony’s TrailOff, The Only Animal’s 1000-Year Theatre, and Nakai Theatre’s Landscape Theatre. These projects establish a trajectory of emplaced mixed reality practice. This includes practical production topics such as asymmetrical data infrastructure and the trade-offs of accessible technology. It considers how gaming (i.e. open world games) and 360VR provide tools for scenographers to stage spatial performances that examine the deep performativity of space over time despite the limitations resulting from the phenomenology of archive.

Marketing of games--Take Genshin Impact for example

Genshin impact is an open-world game that was released in September 2020 and has attracted a lot of foreign fans in the months since its launch. It has been included in the list of national key cultural export projects and is a successful case of Chinese cultural export. This article focuses on the capabilities of Genshin Impact's operating company and why the game is so popular with gamers. A game and its company are not perfect, so this article will also mention the problems of game promotion, solutions and suggestions. Now Chinese culture is going to the world, more and more people like Chinese culture and want to know more about Chinese culture. Therefore, this paper also discusses the cultural exchange and cultural transmission in Genshin. Combined with the epidemic situation in the world and considering that many people are unable to travel, this game shows the characteristics of combining culture and travel on the whole.

Using Open-World Games to Support Inclusive Approaches to Computational Thinking

Using Open-World Games to Support Inclusive Approaches to Computational Thinking

Migration to the metaverse and its predictors: Attachment to virtual places and metaverse-related threat

The most ambitious visions of metaverse technology promise to create virtual places that offer the same possibilities as the real world. However, as any novel technology, the metaverse raises controversies and questions. Does one want to migrate to the metaverse? Does one's willingness to move to virtual worlds depend on the bonds with existing virtual places and the sense of threat related to this technology? To address these questions, we drew on the theories of place attachment and intergroup threat. In two studies – (1) among users of open-world games (N = 366) and (2) using a sample representative of the Polish population in terms of age, gender and size of the residential place (N = 995) – we observed a low level of willingness to migrate to the metaverse. The participants displayed a high level of perceived metaverse-related threat, ranging from privacy concerns to the belief that metaverse can deprive one of access to essential human experiences. However, greater attachment to virtual, as opposed to real, places was associated with both an increased willingness to migrate to the metaverse and a low level of perceived threat. The results provide a better understanding of individuals' perception of the metaverse and of how the bonds with virtual and real places translate into attitudes towards metaverse technology.