World Design in Video Games and Why It Works, from Pokémon to Hitman
In The Letters of J.R.R Tolkien, the legendary author notes, "I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit."
Given how well-loved the world of Middle-Earth has come to be, I guess he did something right.
Maps have a fascinating importance to modern video games; they don't just sketch out the land or point out where you've been and where you've yet to go. They—and the worlds they're a microcosm of—define the experience of the medium. Setting is a crucial part of almost all forms of media; it contextualizes the characters and the plot, adding both an ambience and a certain legitimacy to the narrative. However, the importance of good world design is dialed up to eleven in video games; players don't just observe what's going on in the world, we spend hours upon hours living in it. Great game locations therefore have immense staying power; every time you run around in a video game, your brain is hard at work recording all kinds of spatial information and creating a cognitive map. By the time you're familiar with the world in a game you've come to enjoy, running around in there feels as natural as navigating the neighborhood you grew up in. It's a special kind of immersion that you don't get elsewhere.
The homely Kakariko Village from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) and its sequel Tears of The Kingdom (2023) is widely considered one of the best-designed locations in recent history
I've inhabited dozens of fictional worlds across a variety of genres since I unboxed my first gaming console, and many of them taught me new ideas about worldbuilding in the video game medium. The Traveler's Tales LEGO games I grew up on introduced me to levels and areas that I could take apart and recreate, in line with the theme of LEGO bricks. Puzzles like the Portal and Talos Principle series suggested the idea that progressing through the world itself could be the challenge of the game, but not in a platforming sense à-la-Super Mario Galaxy. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order introduced me to the well-known "Metroidvania'' formula of gated exploration and maps that grew more accessible to me as my character learned new abilities, making me cycle back to revisit areas I'd previously seen but couldn't reach. Open-world adventures like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Elden Ring intentionally withheld information, giving me an empty map to begin and having me run around and fill it out myself.
Exploring effective worldbuilding isn't just an excuse to retreat into a few of the other fictional worlds I came to love over the years (although I'll jump at the opportunity)—it also highlights the medium's unique capacity for location-based storytelling.
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On the infinitesimal chance that I'm ever biographed, it'll be noted that the first ever video game I spent significant time with was Wii Sports Resort. Nintendo's 2009 smash-hit title is the second-highest selling Wii game of all time, and was in almost everyone's disc drawer in elementary school. Twelve easy-to-learn-hard-to-master sports and numerous side modes made us keep coming back to experience everything the game had to offer. But as solid as the gameplay was, Wii Sports Resort's finishing touch was Wuhu Island, the tropical getaway where the game took place.
Compared to its predecessor Wii Sports, whose sports existed in generic locations separate from each other, Wii Sports Resort's island felt connected and alive. It added an ambience to the game that elevated the casual-retreat vibe it aimed to deliver. You could easily imagine yourself stopping by the patio at the Cocoba Hotel to play some ping-pong, or the beach near Camel Rock for a Frisbee contest, golf on Wedge Island, or canoeing on Duckling Lake near Summerstone Castle.
Every sport is backdropped by a unique part of Wuhu Island
And all these locations were tied together by the Island Flyover mode, which encouraged you to freely explore the island and rewarded you for picking up little quirks and lore tidbits about every landmark you crossed. To eight-year-old me, it was mind-blowing to fly past a location and think, "Hey, those Mii characters are hanging out near the basketball court! And over there is the waterfall from one of the archery courses!" That sort of connectedness is a key aspect of effective world design in games; for an environment to feel alive, it needs to feel like it's an ecosystem that could live and breathe without the player being there to justify its existence. I probably spent more time in Island Flyover than any other game mode, and more time than I'd like to admit daydreaming about the island being a real place.
Island Flyover helped you piece together every part of the island you'd previously explored in other sports
I didn't know it then—I was more concerned with goofing off in the game than I was with critically analyzing it—but Wuhu Island was my first encounter with great environmental design. It isn't nearly as advanced, ingenious or even interactive as some of the other memorable locations I revisited before writing this article, yet it felt so completely real and livable. It’s all the more impressive when you consider that the game wasn’t narrative-based in any way, so Nintendo didn’t really need to go the extra mile and create Wuhu. But luckily for me and millions of other Gen Z kids, they did, and in doing so gave a story to a game that had none. Reflecting on Wii Sports Resort now, it's clear why the game set the bar for the worlds I'd encounter from that point onward.
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Before Pokémon was the world's biggest IP, spawning cards, shows, movies and Hillary Clinton's Hello Fellow Kids moment, it was a passion project for a handful of gaming enthusiasts at a small company called Game Freak; a black-and-white pixelated adventure called Pokémon Red and Blue (Red and Green in the original Japanese release). Regardless of whether you started with Red and Blue or a later entry into the franchise—the 2010 titles Pokémon Black and White were most popular in my childhood, although I also played a few of the older ones on an emulator—you're likely to rave about the core gameplay loop of catching the monsters out in the wild and having them grow more powerful in battle. Less commonly appreciated, however, is the games' clever map design.
The Kanto region, where Pokémon Red and Blue were set, wasn't the most fleshed-out world, in terms of environmental ambience. Noted game designer David Gaider writes, "Sometimes you'll see worlds where they've made only what is needed for their current story, and it's like an old Western set: it feels right, it looks right, but then you slowly get a sense of, 'Oh, there's nothing behind those doors.'" Much of Kanto, in that sense, feels like it exists just as a backdrop to you, the Trainer, as you pass through. The towns don't typically have any interesting stories going on in the background, the characters don't have much of relevance to talk about, and many roads and caves are exact replicas of each other. But what Kanto lacked in immersion, it more than made up for with the unique structure of its map.
The direction in which Kanto's map steers you contributes greatly to the narrative
At separate points in their journey, the player will travel through each of Saffron City, Celadon City, Vermilion City, Lavender Town, and Cerulean City. Hours after they’ve left the last of these towns, they’ll need to loop back for a quest which reveals that all of these locations that they thought were way apart in space are actually bordering each other via previously inaccessible routes. It's a literal full-circle moment that immediately pulls together so much of the scattered spatial information you'd gathered up to that point, like finding a missing piece of a jigsaw stuck under your carpet.
This discovery leads to a unique aha! moment that's rivaled only by a similar full-circle moment near the end of the game. After completing the second-last part of the story on Cinnabar Island, the player unexpectedly ends up right back where their whole adventure started—in their hometown of Pallet Town. Here, the last bit of the puzzle instantly clicks. All the way at the beginning of the game, when players initially left Pallet and arrived at their first stop of Viridian City, they could see the path to their final destination of Victory Road, but they weren't nearly equipped enough to head that way. Upon the player's return to Pallet Town—now with the entire rest of the region conquered—they know exactly where to go to wrap up their journey.
For a game that came out in 1996, manipulating the map to nudge the player into discovering the interconnectedness of the different parts of the world—which themselves represented different parts of the journey the player had taken—without explicitly instructing them to do so? That was revolutionary.
Later Pokémon games maintained these clever spatial loops in their regions while also vastly improving on Kanto's flaws; every town and route now had their own lore and felt visually, culturally, and geographically distinct from the last.
Castelia City is your typical ever-bustling metropolis in Pokémon Black and White's Unova region, but the vibe couldn't be more different just one town east in Nacrene City, where artists repurpose warehouses as studios for their avant-garde works
But it hasn’t been all sunshine and roses for the franchise. Recent Pokémon regions, like Galar and Paldea from the 2019 and 2022 Pokémon games, get a lot of flak (most deserved, some less so) for their rushed presentation, lack of explorable content, or overly plain world design—problems that likely stem from publisher Nintendo's incomprehensible mandate for Game Freak to churn out a new Pokémon title every three years. Nevertheless, Pokémon was one of my first adventure games, and as I take a retrospective lens to it now, I'm impressed by how even its oldest games were able to employ mapping to steer the narrative in unexpected ways.
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You would imagine that a game where your skill level and progression are titled "Location Mastery" probably places a lot of weight on phenomenal world design. In the case of IO Interactive's HITMAN: World of Assassination trilogy—which spans three games from 2016 to 2021—that assumption would be resoundingly correct. HITMAN is a stealth game where the player (playing as Agent 47) must infiltrate a location and kill one or more targets while completing certain secondary objectives, like recovering a case file from a vault or destroying a bioweapon. Each of the 20 levels in the trilogy is set in a loosely adapted version of a different real-life location, from Sapienza to Chongqing, and allows the player to keep coming back to pull off quicker, wackier, and more efficient assassinations as they slowly get the lay of the land (literally and figuratively).
Agent 47 gets ready to begin his mission in HITMAN 2's Miami
HITMAN’s locations are a masterclass in worldbuilding, which is just as well seeing as they're by and large the game's bread-and-butter; to master a HITMAN level is to understand how the world comes to life. For starters, you’ll need to figure out how you want to find your way around. You could get around by finding a disguise—Agent 47 might only have access to the public areas of a large hotel while dressed in his default Average Joe outfit, but posing as a guard or a manager gives him access to higher security clearance areas. Or you could take a more… hands-on route and brute-force your way through by killing anyone in your path. You'll also want to figure out each character's relationship to the environment; what part of the map does someone tend to frequent? Are they usually watched? Can you mess with the world to make them go somewhere else instead? Perhaps most important, however, is learning how to use the game's locations themselves as tools and opportunities. Having your target on the edge of a skyscraper terrace provides you a pristine opportunity to push them to their death, while a target standing under a chandelier is almost begging you to drop it on their head. A target coming in to enjoy a nice meal in a private dining area might have their food poisoned, whereas another might get locked in a sauna and succumb to a stroke. There's also the ol' reliable; wait for them to be alone and shoot them in the face. Or don't, and blow up everything that moves because you can and it's hilarious (you won't quite get the highest score for that, though).
Agent 47, posing as a surgeon, is on the way to destroy his target's pending heart transplant in HITMAN's Hokkaido
Part of the magic of feeling like you've got one of the maps really figured out is coming back to it and trying to do things differently by sneaking in and around areas that Agent 47 isn't allowed to be in. The developers describe their maps as "snail houses," which is to say they wrap around themselves, forcing players to take long, winding paths to get from one big area to another via hallways and stairs. But they also like to say that these locations have "swiss cheese;'' seasoned players will find small exploitable "holes" in the world, like open windows you can slip through, ledges you can scale, elevator shafts to climb up, etc. Finding these shortcuts feels like proof of your mastery over the location, delivering a satisfying feeling of having completed the spatial network in your mind.
Agent 47 sneaks around HITMAN 3's Dartmoor
Gun to my head, if I had to name my favorite game of all time, it would probably be HITMAN, which now sells as one title encompassing all three games in the trilogy. In a more longform work, I could write another five thousand words about the incredible map design in the franchise, which is all the more impressive given that said maps have to adhere to the realism demanded by setting a game in real-world locations. Every location is completely connected and self-sustaining, encourages you to discover hidden relationships between their sub-areas, and scratches the itch to map out and discover places you haven't explored (and in HITMAN's case, exploited).
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As I looked back on some of these games and thought about why I was so drawn to their locations, I came across this article by philosophy professor Emily Durham about how games can help us fulfill our desire to discover and explore. She writes, "There is something deeply seductive about large expanses of white paper and faint lines indicating coastlines that might—might—be there." Not everyone can go out and chart outer space or the deep sea, and so we turn to games to experience this exhilaration of venturing our way through a new place and filling in our maps.
It's a unique affordance that is one of the reasons I love games most.
To see more of what I’m playing right now, check out my Playlist account.
