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Comment by yowzadave | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting to note the similarities between theme park design and video game design—both involved worlds that appear “realistic”, but feature many of these tricks to make them more entertaining, more easily navigable, more conducive to discovery. In both cases, the worlds can feel “big”, but a are in reality much compressed from what their real-life dimensions would be, to keep people from getting bored/tired while moving about. Both involve intentional variety/uniqueness, features of interest at regular intervals, shortcut travel methods, landscape features to encourage travel to desired locations, etc.

In many ways, this kind of design thinking could be useful in designing real-world spaces as well.

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I've been puzzled by how much more entertaining exploring cities, forests, or whatever is in games compared to the real life. I play games like GTA or Skyrim and, after being awestruck by their vast, beautiful open worlds, go outside to explore the real world in the same way and get bored much faster. Why is that? Real life has more detail and complexity, so real world exploration should be more interesting, right?

You probably have the answer there. Even if the real world holds a larger number of interesting things than a game, the distance between the things is so much larger than in games that I have to spend most of the time just navigating between them. In games, I can get from one interesting thing to the next in minutes or seconds.

Nintendo actually spent a considerable amount of time balancing exactly that metric for Zelda Breath of the Wild, according to a presentation they did in 2017. They replicated some Osaka landmarks in the engine to gauge how to space landmarks in the final game.

Here is one of the few remaining traces of this, since they asked for all conference slides to be taken down a few years ago: https://twitter.com/pixelpar/status/1286425979615936513

>go outside to explore the real world in the same way and get bored much faster. Why is that?

you don't have to exert any physical effort in a video game. once physical exercise comes into play, the brain calculates an "is this worth it" equation. i'm guessing most decide it's not.

This and video games generally let you move at an impossible speed. Sprinting, fast travel, riding a horse a full gallop forever, and so on, never encountering hindering traffic, red lights, or such.

As an avid runner and hiker, I have the opposite perspective. A view from a mountain or hill top or distant location in a forest that I had to work to get to is, to me, much more enjoyable than one that is easily accessible. When you happen upon another person, there's a shared acknowledgement of not just the view, but the effort you each put in to get there.

right, but you're not getting bored, so this is a totally different situation.

videogames also attach rewards/values to objects around you, so exploring is valuable in an explicit, observable way. you'll gather up whatever rocks or mushrooms you find because they're useful for gameplay. or if you don't find any items, you might see that part of the map is now unlocked/marked-as-explored/game progress meter ticks up.

but the rewards for real world exploration aren't explicit. sure, maybe you found a cool mushroom that was fun to look at, but what's it worth? you probably cant go sell it for 2 gold pieces or eat it to gain 5% of your health back.

I also like exploring video games. I love hiking and the outdoors, too. To me, the difference in appreciation and experience is that one is art and one is reality. Art has been arranged by another person, typically for aesthetic effect, and so anywhere you look you’ll see something designed to elicit a reaction from the viewer. No such thought has been put into reality so despite the stunning amount of detail, it takes work and luck to find the beauty in it. One of the reasons we might say a particular moment in real life was “like a painting” or “like a movie”.

You can probably blame a city planner for that. Some cities are actually explorable in the way a video game or theme park is. However, a large problem with many modern cities is they aren't human scale which makes exploration arduous. Cities like Tokyo, Lisbon and Amsterdam are amazing places to just wander around and explore.

In a video game, you don't: get (actually) injured, get tired, get sweaty, get attacked by mosquitos, walk through poison ivy or have a nasty encounter with a thorn bush that leaves you hurting and/or itching for days, get sunburnt, spend 30+ minutes just commuting to the interesting thing/area only to realize you forgot something important and will now have a miserable time unless you want to burn an hour-plus round-trip going back for it, have to lose fifteen minutes finding some place that'll let your kid use the bathroom before they piss themselves and ruin the rest of the day (mainly a core-of-major-cities problem, sure, but those are also top-tier fun-having destinations), discover that the website lied and actually the thing you're here for is closed today, break expensive equipment if you make a mistake or are unlucky, soak your shoes and socks and have to take out significant time to solve that (very boring) problem or else just suffer the rest of the day, et c.

Game worlds are also usually far more compact and smaller than the real world, even the "big" ones. If it took a couple real-world days to walk to the top of the Throat of the World in Skyrim, while you're combo sweating-freezing in heavy clothes, legs are dead by halfway up, and most of the time nothing's happening and also much of the time you're in clouds obscuring the best views... it'd be a lot less fun. Instead, in the actual game, you can run the "7,000 steps" in what, 15 minutes if you ignore enemies?

It's telling that most of these games have rather high movement speed, and often also some form of teleportation, despite also having the advantages of being tailor-designed to be beautiful and fun and much smaller than real-world equivalents. Skyrim experienced at a realistic walking/hiking pace and without any form of time-skip fast travel would be a lot less fun. Ditto the recent Zelda games. Link basically runs everywhere, even when you're not "sprinting", and can perform incredible and quick feats of climbing to get over or on top of obstacles. Plus the whole paraglider thing. You climb a tall cliff in real life, now you gotta climb back down....

"I play games like GTA or Skyrim and, after being awestruck by their vast, beautiful open worlds, go outside to explore the real world in the same way and get bored much faster. Why is that?"

Because if you take an NPCs stuff in real life, it turns out vastly different for you than in the game.

" the distance between the things is so much larger than in games that I have to spend most of the time just navigating between them. In games, I can get from one interesting thing to the next in minutes or seconds."

This isn't quite true. Because there is more detail in real life, the distance between things is shorter than in games. The difference is that games only focus on what most people are interested in, so the distance between those things are smaller. The game is designed to be gratifying, and thus it needs to be near instant. Just like the algorithms feeding us Facebook content, it's designed for your engagement. There are plenty of interesting things in the real world if we are interested in the details.

Possibly because all that novelty and interesting stuff in the real world is owned by someone. In an open world game I can go explore someone’s house or steal a limeware platter but if I do that in real life I’ll get arrested. Not fun.

> In many ways, this kind of design thinking could be useful in designing real-world spaces as well.

They already are used. The difference in urban design, which is what I assume you mean by real-world spaces, is that in theme parks and video games, the designers effectively have complete control over the entire system from top tp bottom and bittom to top. In urban design, that is not the case and one needs to deal with decades and centuries old organic, ad-hoc design and evolution of the urban system.

This is exactly the thought process that led Walt Disney to want to build a planned charter city in Florida, the “Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow” (EPCOT), inside of Disney World. The plan didn’t survive his death, but the extraordinary legal privileges required to build a charter city survived until very recently.

Florida has The Villages now

I'm always amused at how "cities" in games are often just three to five houses, one or two general stores, and an inn/hotel.

Like, I get it, but sometimes the suspension of logic can get a bit challenging. :V

When you realize it’s a city for one person (the player) all the other stuff becomes unimportant.

Even the “massive” cities of MMORPGs are the size of a small neighborhood.

Once you start to notice it, it becomes impossible to ignore. For me, I always notice how silly-short travel distances are. It's only a few minutes' walk between "major cities" in Skyrim, and it's one of the reasons I don't find any game (outside of VR) "immersive".

Some games do a better job by means of a different cheat (though I'm not sure you can even call it that). For instance, making it clear you're only accessing a very small part of the city. PoE2, among others, does a great job of this with a "city map" that shows you moving through many districts before reaching the spot where the story actually takes place. Distances, meanwhile, can be demonstrated by other means. The old Fallouts, for instance, had the in-game date swiftly advance while travelling in the overworld.

There's actually a classic GDC Talk about this very subject!

They talk about using big visible markers (called weenies) for orientation and to help draw players. Having seemingly multiple paths that actually end up in the same destination. Tiny rewards for exploration. Good stuff

Talk: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1305/Everything-I-Learned-Abou... Slides: https://mrbossdesign.blogspot.com/2009/03/everything-i-learn...

I was just thinking that it was an interesting pivot for Disney from movies/animations into theme parks. You can tell that they obviously put a lot of thought into "experience engineering", and I was kinda wondering what the connection was.

Obviously the IP provides a nice jumping-off point, and there are broadly similar themes around building a new reality etc. But it's not intuitively an obvious leap from moviemaking to theme park building.

The idea of theme parks as "real life video games" provides some continuity to that.

IKEAs are designed like this as well.

IKEAs design is just stolen from one of Dante’s levels of Hell.

The only saving grace is the fire Marshall doesn’t like it so you can follow the fire exit signs to escape.

The real saving grace is that the website tells you where everything is in the warehouse, and nothing stops you from going in the "back" door, picking up what you want, paying and leaving.

I particularly love the fuel of lost souls, when you leave the bazaar of decoration, were they compress all the customers shoulder to shoulder, reminding them of the competition before they are allowed to storm the self service furniture pack storage area.

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