Open-World Blues: On Mechanical Dynamism and Difficulty Curves

Paper written for the 2023 American Society for Aesthetics Rocky Mountain Division Meeting.

Following C. Thi Nguyen, games can be understood as a form of artistic expression in which aesthetic effects are produced through player agency.¹ Game designers constrain player agency by imposing structured mechanical rulesets and parameters that enable and reward certain kinds of action while discouraging and disallowing others. In modern action-adventure video games, two major approaches to overall game design have emerged: linear and open-world. In what follows I explore some problems that such open-world design presents for achieving a traditional feature of action-adventure games, namely a consistent difficulty curve. Through an analysis of several recent major video game releases, I argue that much modern open-world design tends to undermine the possibility of satisfying play mechanic progression over the course of the game, leading either to flat difficulty curves or to erratic difficulty spikes. Moreover, I suggest that the open-ended exploratory mode valorized in such design presupposes a merely negative concept of agential autonomy.

Notes on Dialectic of Enlightenment, ch. 1

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, published 1947) is an account of the endogenous failures of modernity as rooted in the core presuppositions of enlightenment rationality. “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth.” Not a romantic call for a return to myth then; rather an attempt to diagnose the pathologies of the whole complex arising from this abstract opposition and a dialectical progression rooted in fear and a correlative desire for mastery.

In fact what would need to change is the structure of society itself. This is a philosophical analysis of a series of problems that philosophy cannot solve. It calls for the abolition of the principle of exchange and the division of labor predicated on class antagonism.