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I'd like to explore the relationship between a game's focus on explicit goals and the degree of world-interactivity it offers the player. As examples of different points on the spectrum, I'll take 3 console games: Metroid Prime (GameCube), Mario Sunshine (GameCube), and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (I played the PS2 version). Along the way I'll also point out the seeming trend towards extreme tedium in games.

Of these 3, Tony Hawk offers the most interactivity with world, by far. In this game, you control a character on a skateboard. You can move quickly through the environment, and you can interact with practically every object in the entire world. The levels are littered with vertical ramps that let you catch huge air, wires and rails to grind across, and a myriad of objects to trick off of.

Tony Hawk 4 gives the player a rich world and a rich combo system to explore. It offers more world-interactivity than perhaps any other game. (But damn those tedious missions!)

The game has a fairly complicated (and extremely well-implemented) combo system allowing you to string a huge number of tricks together as long as you never let all four of your skateboard's wheels touch the ground during a combo. The huge number of tricks and maneuvers combined with the huge number of interactable objects in the world make for nearly endless exploration of the combo system. Remember that you don't crawl through this world; you skate quickly, meaning there's an unusually high number of interactions per second in Tony Hawk.

So far, I've covered only the world-interaction offered by the game Tony Hawk. What about the explicit goals of the game? These come in the form of missions, most of which pervert or ignore the brilliant underlying mechanics of the game. I believe the main crime of the missions as a whole is that they are too "creative." When a game has such a rich interactivity as a base, many players will simply want to explore the combo system and the levels. Other players need explicit goals, but they'd be much happier with goals that play to the strengths of the game system rather than circumvent it.

The irony is that best missions in Tony Hawk 4 are the "boring" ones such as "Get 1 million points" or "Do a 300,000 point combo". (Shame on ign.com for knocking the boring missions.) Instead, the game is jam packed with such "creative" missions as "perform a manual [balancing trick] for a ridiculously long distance" or "find the 33(!!!) items scattered across this huge level in under 2 minutes." There are even "mini game" missions such as "ride a police car around London, reducing the entire game to a balance meter and a Dragon's Lair-like flashing light that requires you to occasionally move left and right." I mean, there's not even any skating in that mission! And don't get me started on the bug-ridden "tennis mini-game", which easily wins the award for "worst implementation of a tennis game ever."

There is certainly something to be said for missions that focus the player's attention on a particular aspect of the game (balance meter, air tricks, manual tricks, whatever), but it's quite a different thing to create dozens of missions which don't actually let the player PLAY the game.

Another notable feature of Tony Hawk 4, in fact the main innovation that version brought to the series, is the feature called "start, down, x." I have even joked that the entire game is the result of someone's bet: "I bet I can get 1 million people to press start, down, x on their PS2 controllers 30 times in the course of one minute." That "code" (which is merely pausing the game, going down once in the pause menu, then confirming) instantly takes you back to either the start of your last mission, or to a point in the level you configure. Since this feature is so fast and so good, it allows the design to get away with more difficult missions. The player can cancel out of a mission the *moment* it goes wrong. This is sometimes as little as 1 second into the mission...over and over. I'm not sure what this has to do with world-interaction, but it's a damn fine feature, and I wish more games let me instantly restart missions with no loading time.

And then there's Mario Sunshine. It certainly has less world-interactivity than Tony Hawk, but it still has some. Mario can run, jump, swim, hover, and more. Hovering with a strange water/jetpack is the game's main feature, and it's a pretty clever addition to the platform game genre. It's reasonably entertaining to just run around the main town and wall jump off the buildings to get onto the roofs, then hover around from rooftop to rooftop. It's not something you'd spend hours on end doing or make videos of to amaze your friends (like you might for Tony Hawk), but there is some fun to be had.

The hover pack is Mario Sunshine's main contribution to the platform genre. After playing it, it's hard to imagine not having a jetpack.

Mario Sunshine, like Tony Hawk, has a huge number of missions to keep the player busy with goals. The goals in platform games usually involve finding hidden and hard-to-reach objects (they're called "Shines" in this game), and fighting the occasional boss. For some strange reason, I tend to enjoy these types of games even though they are based entirely on collecting and picking things up, whereas in the real world I collect nothing, and anyone who's seen my apartment knows I don't pick up many things either.

Anyway, Mario Sunshine certainly has a good formula: at least a moderate amount of world-interactivity with goal-oriented missions thrown in to keep you busy. The main problem (well, other than the atrocious 3D camera) is that the mission design eventually becomes a pure exercise in tedium. I believe it's fun to find, say, one really well-hidden object on a level, and maybe 3-5 semi-hidden or guarded objects. That's a reasonable number. Mario Sunshine has 15 Shines to collect on each level. Let me put this in perspective, though: 1 of these 15 always requires you to find 100 yellow coins (they aren't really hidden), and 3 of the 15 always require you to find a total of 30(!) blue coins (these are hidden). The blue coins are so arbitrarily hidden that I defy anyone to find them all without a hint guide. I am quite averse to hint guides, but even I had to give in at some point due to the sheer arbitrary placement of blue coins.

Nintendo wanted to make absolutely sure you realize how great their jetpack concept is. They locked one designer—the one who kills ants with a magnifying glass—in a dungeon for one year where he devised these bonus levels, sprinkled throughout the game. They deprive Mario of his familiar jetpack, and place him in an absolutely sadistically difficult world of floating, rotating, disintegrating blocks.

Now let's turn to Metroid Prime. Of these 3, this one offers the least amount of interactivity with the world. Don't get me wrong: I'm don't mean that statement as anything negative against Metroid. Samus (the main character) can run, jump, shoot 4 different guns, use 4 different "visors" to view the world, roll into a ball, and drop bombs. Samus has a good number of actions, but in the absence of actual game goals, there's less fun things to do with Samus than with Mario, and there's way less to do than with Tony Hawk. This is no indication that Metroid is a bad game though. It just means that game elements must be introduced to keep the player interested. Metroid's premise is that you are in a large, fairly continuous world without "levels" or "missions." You explore this world and find upgrades that give you more moves and allow you to access more parts of the world. The world is peppered with fairly easy monsters and the occasional boss to spice things up. There are also a whole lot of hidden objects (upgrades to your missile capacity and health capacity) that are purely optional to find.

Metroid works as a game because its fairly simple interaction model is complimented by just enough goal-oriented elements to keep the player going. Even then it's admittedly sparse, but I enjoyed it.

But Metroid Prime didn't escape the trend of tedium that's going around games these days. The game requires the player to trek across already explored areas of its huge game world time after time after time on the way to new areas. Interestingly, Metroid uses the exact same formula as another game: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which avoided this problem. That game featured a large number of teleporter rooms throughout the world, allowing the player to skip past areas he's already explored. (Actually, Castlevania borrowed the formula from the original Metroid and Super Metroid.) Metroid Prime would have done better to replace all its save rooms with teleport rooms. By the way, why does it even have save rooms? I thought this was the 21st century, a time where game makers realize that the user should be able to save his progress at any point, not force the player to play another 20 minutes to find a save room.

So where does all this leave us? Three games that all have some level of world-interactivity combined with explicit game-like goals. Tony Hawk, the game with the most interactivity with the world (the best "toy") was somewhat ruined by missions that obscured the underlying game system. Mario Sunshine and Metroid, each with less world-interactivity, complimented their base systems with game-like goals, but again, Mario's ran somewhat wild, forcing the player to find literally hundreds of arbitrarily hidden objects. Meanwhile Metroid forced the player trek endlessly across its fairly barren world.

I think the lessons are these: 1) the more world-interactivity your game offers, the fewer game-like objectives it requires (the inverse is also true), and 2) for heaven's sake stop making games so damn tedious.

I just finished playing Zelda: The Wind Waker (GameCube), which fits nicely into the interaction framework described above. Your character has a medium amount of interactivity with the world, but he's given such an insanely large list of things to do that that's ok.

I can't help but point out the continued emphasis on tedium in games though. My least favorite entity in the history of video games is Hyrule Field in Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo64). It's an incredibly large, empty field that the player must cross many times, with basically nothing to do. The GameCube game Zelda: The Wind Waker takes this to a whole new level. Rather than just a field, we have an entire huge ocean that the player must constantly sail across, which is—you guessed it—mostly empty. On the one hand, it gives the game an immersive feel, like you're really sailing on the seas across this huge world. On the other hand, I played much of the game using my picture-in-picture feature on my TV while watching old episodes of Friends and Seinfeld. I enjoyed the game, but I don’t recommend it to adults who have a job.

Here's a screenshot of Zelda: The Wind Waker. I hope you enjoy sailing, as you'll be doing a LOT of it.