Game Spaces

We recently covered this topic in class and I must say that I found it very interesting. At first I thought I had a pretty good idea of what a game space was, basically the game space in which you play, your environment. I found it really intriguing to compare the game spaces of different games, to see how different game spaces worked well for different games. For example, if you look at a game like Grand Theft Auto, the space in which you are free to roam around is absolutely huge. This helps to give the player a the feeling of freedom to do whatever they want, which is, in essence exactly what the game is about. So I think the game space works quite well in GTA.

I've played all of the games in the series and something which occurred to me while thinking about the game space of in all of them was that it seemed to increase with every new title in the series. Focusing on the 3D games(GTA3, Vice City, San Andreas and GTA4), every one had a bigger game space than than last...all apart from one- GTA4. San Andreas had a much larger game space than GTA 4, and that begs the question "Why?" Why did the developers decide to make the game space smaller?
Well, in an interview with someone from Rockstar who are the developers of GTA, at: http://games.kikizo.com/news/200705/101_p1.asp they said this: "I think when people think about San Andreas it was always about the size, scope and scale of the game, and in part it was almost seen as a 'features list'; it was all about how many cars, how many planes, how many this and that - whereas GTA4 is a completely different beast altogether. It's a far more evolved, more detailed game."
I think that Rockstar realised that there is probably a limit to the size of a game space before it just becomes, well, too big! While it gives the player a sense of freedom I also think it is important to keep the player focused on the goals of the game as well as other things. They still kept the game space big, but focused more on the detail of the city.

Anyway...I didn't realise how late it is! It's 2am no matter what the time written under the blog says! Time for bed I think! I have some more to offload on here about game spaces but I'll get to that tomorrow. :)

'night.