Sandbox Isn't a Genre

(Image courtesy IGN.com)

Or so says John Constantine in an interesting new post over at 1Up.com.  I can't say I agree with the entire article, but the thesis is well taken.  Even I make the mistake from time to time of co-opting modern reviewer-speak and calling sandbox a "genre," whereas it's actually more of a characteristic applied to a different genre.  For example, GTA4, Infamous, Prototype, Assassin's Creed, and Shenmue all share the basic underpinnings of a classic adventure game.  Adventure itself is really too broad a descriptor to be pinned down as a distinct genre, but as I always understood it, graphic adventure is distinguished from role-playing game in the sense that there is less an emphasis on stats and character-building, and more an emphasis on environmental interaction and object-oriented puzzle solving.

If that's the case, then Constantine is correct, I guess, in linking today's sandbox titles to Zelda and the classic text adventures... although he seems to conflate this all with cultural dichotomies.

Constantine casts the net a little too wide in searching for an East vs. West framework for the present sandbox characteristics.  Doing so doesn't really aid his thesis, and instead leads to confusion (wait, so Shenmue IS a sandbox-style game, but it's not aimed at American audiences and doesn't have a large environment, so it's not really the same kind of game as Grand Theft Auto?  I beg to differ!).  Moreover, there have always been Western RPGs and Eastern RPGs (Ragnarok Online, anyone?), as well as Western and Eastern adventure titles.  The common Japanese RPG, or "JRPG," is sort of a hybrid of the two genres, but I digress.

When it comes down to it, there are a lot of games other than GTA's style of "open-world" adventure that can be labeled sandbox.  Sim City, for instance, is a sandbox title, and the nature of the "world-builder" game has little to do with missions and quests.

In alluding to the limitless scope of childhood imagination, the term "sandbox" really just implies "the sky's the limit."  Developers have bestowed upon this term a heavy connotation with "choice."  GTA gives you many choices as to sidequests and distractions, as does Shenmue.  Sim City, The Sims, and Civilization provide the player with seemingly limitless choices as to how a single construction plan may play out.  Burnout Paradise lets the player drift endlessly off-course, towards discovery and away from following a linear path.

That doesn't mean, however, that these games aren't linear in one sense or another.  The aforementioned adventure sandbox titles--GTA, Infamous, Prototype, and Assassin's Creed--are heavily linear in terms of providing story content.  Very little separates the game Mafia, which isn't a sandbox title, from Grand Theft Auto.  Both games involve cars, huge real-world city environments, and missions.  Mafia, however, offers the player little in the way of choice despite the freedom suggested by the expansive cityscape.  You are essentially doing a linear progression of missions, and the game arguably could have been divided up into levels.  I personally think Mafia is a terrific game despite the lack of choice, as the game's quality rests on the potency of its storytelling and mission variety.  Thus, sandbox isn't inherently a descriptor that signifies additional quality.

So we should take care not to claim that sandbox games are the way of the future, or that they represent truly "open" and non-linear worlds.  Rather, the sandbox really reflects the evolving processing power or the medium.  As games have gotten bigger in size, they have afforded developers the ability to create greater scope and expanded availability of choice.

I seem to keep coming back to this example:  Bethesda's Daggerfall offered a larger world than Morrowind or Oblivion combined, but that didn't make it a great game.  You had plenty of choice, but that didn't aid other important factors like interaction and immersion.  The game's world was randomly generated, whereas Morrowind and Oblivion provided players with a distinct set of environmental landmarks and quests revolving around them.

Those games had a distinctly "lived-in" feeling... and if we're going by descriptors, that's a far more important one than "sandbox" will ever be.

Comments

[Bleed0ut]

Great, as usual.

[Matthew G Kaplan]

Many thanks! :)

[Chad]

Very nice post! I tend to see the term "sandbox" as more of a game mechanic that has graced more and more games as the processing power of our gaming systems has increased, like you mentioned. That mechanic can be in any number of different genres from city builders like Sim City, to arcade racers like Burnout Paradise, to RPGs like Oblivion...and just about everything in between.