i always feel a little suspicious of level design in videogames just because it’s had a weird tendency to absorb and literalise the metaphors people use when talking about art. the concept of “leaving space for the audience” (to imaginatively respond, etc) comes to mean literally opening up space for them, as if the restrictiveness of a corridor were a direct stand-in for the attitude of the work itself. the idea of open and closed works becomes that of open and closed spaces. there’s obviously overlap across these things (it’s a lot easier to make emotionally prescriptive work if you’re also prescriptive about how to move through it, etc) but i think emphasis on medium specificity means it tends to be sold as more of a 1:1 relationship than it really is.
i guess this is my main problem with both metroidvanias and open world games: that i.m.o. vgames get more boring when the dynamic of a person engaging with an object is compressed to that of an avatar engaging with a game space instead, when things like exploration and curiosity become specifically aspects of the latter instead of the former. and i think what unites the two genres is the way they buy into a kind of master narrative of spatial design, as the thing that sits above and unifies everything else in a game. the “freedom” of open world games is tied to space in a way that’s right there in the name, while the twisty-turny landscapes of metroidvanias stand in for the engaged back-and-forth between designer and player that is their intended experience. but experiencing these spaces as such means having to buy into a set of other relationships - player to avatar, avatar to environment, player to UI, etc - which become ever more blandly immutable as the spatial metaphor has to carry more weight. it’s like space in these things has cannibalised all the other ways that a videogame can feel nebulous or uncertain.
well, i’m starting to sound like chris crawford for some reason. but it is interesting to me to think that “all games approach becoming open world / metroidvanias” because the spatial metaphor kind of gives these things a way to convert their own uncertainties from a bug into a feature; to eat and then reproduce their own limits in second-order, aestheticised form. maybe that’s why they feel so dead to me - as if they’ve finally managed to cut out contingent irritations, to exist in their own formal bubble, frozen cathedrals of orthodoxy.