Degrees of freedom in live-space:
Desire paths and open world games

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My primary desire in this moment is to find a good way to open this essay. About half an hour ago it was to not burn my tortillas, and tomorrow it will be to pass my learner’s permit test. Desire is the artery of purpose – funnelling impulse and reason into tributaries that all lead to some form of accomplishment. ‘Desire / I want to turn into you,’ Caroline Polachek calls out, serene and primal. I purchase a refurbished iPod Classic because I desperately desire to no longer be tethered to my smartphone, and secretly also to be perceived as a technological beatnik. I decide to take the long way home, walking from Footscray to Yarraville along the train line and noticing as much as I can. I cut across a poorly maintained nature reserve, making use of a previously brute-forced gap between two agapanthuses that have started going to seed. I am in no hurry, but the route takes me via a terrace house that keeps two amber silkie chickens in the front garden, and the promise of this feeds my desire for delight.

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In the real world, desire paths have become synonymous with poorly designed infrastructural spaces that appear to lack foresight on the predictability of human behaviours. Put simply, a blind spot of urban planning, a signal to do it better next time, and representative of public impatience concerning the placement of sidewalks and traffic lanes. 

I read them as a shrine to instinct, the epitome of ‘crowd wisdom’, an ode to wanting. As Robert Frost ruminates, when following roads with curiosity, agency so often rides front seat against a prescribed route, opting for the one that is less travelled, ‘grassy and [in want of] wear.’

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The introduction of open world video game settings (as opposed to more prescriptive, linear formats) manifests the tension between motivations and outcome by striving to offer players the sensation of unlimited choice. Where to next? How will I get there? As a result, the intricacies of gamespace cartography have expanded to include as many directional markers as a real street-scape contained on a smartphone’s GPS. 

Where we instinctively abide by signs, fences, and concrete footpaths, gamers can rely on things such as waypoints, NPCs, and trails of items to retrieve, build, deliver, calculate, and travel. It’s the developer’s mission to construct a virtual replication of intricate ‘live-space’ with an ever-present undercurrent of urgency towards something.

This carefully balanced game design relies on hidden guidance systems that build and diffuse attention on sites of varying degrees of interest. The enjoyment of continuous discovery must overshadow a predictable sense of level-climbing for an open world setting to be successful.

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The release of Nintendo’s action-adventure Breath of the Wild set new precedents for open-world game topography and its relationship to nonlinear narrative. The joy of exploration is at the core of this iteration of Hyrule, in constant dialogue with an overarching quest to find and save Princess Zelda, thus ‘completing’ the game. In a rare act of candour, Nintendo openly shared their experience building such a world at the 2017 Game Developers’ Conference, citing multiplicative gameplay as the key to unlocking a high degree of freedom of choice.

Through linking almost every item and encounter within the open world through physics and chemistry engines, instinct arrives at the centre of player experience. The ‘space between’ begins to pose us questions – suddenly an area containing a tree, river and travelling merchant becomes a field of choices: to act out any combination of foraging, building, trading goods or seeking new information.

So, what lures us to follow the main quest arc and save the princess while there are so many enticing distractions, pulling us in all directions? Early playtesting with behaviour-tracing heatmaps demonstrated that to get a true sense of agency, the setting needed to include procedural placement of minor, medium, and large points of interest, with landmarks (such as mountains) intentionally placed to obscure distant terrain until the player strays from the beaten track to get closer. When every corner of an open-world map is filled with these sequences of endlessly branching situational goals that ultimately do lead us to the finish line, diverting from the established road no longer equates to being lost – each distraction is a step towards the player building their own version of the hero’s story.

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Historically, players have added to a game’s live-space through the implementation of community-built modifications – colloquially termed ‘mods’. ‘DESIRE PATH BRIDGE TO WHITERUN TALOS STATUE’ adds a small bridge over a stream in Skyrim to avoid ‘jumping or getting your feet wet.’ The practical implication of the bridge is of course time saving, but the mod designer instead gives distinctly human grievances and motivations, as a nod to the player’s in-world immersion. This explicates the value in a desire path existing at all in a fictional, unreal setting – we want to feel that the world is alive alongside us.

Similarly, the Minecraft mod ‘Burden of Time’ offers player- or NPC-generated ground changes from grass block > dirt > coarse dirt > path with repeated wear, in addition to time-prompted moss variants and fluid erosion on rocks. ‘Breathe life into your world’ – it coos at us to touch grass by staying in the digital sphere. ‘Watch things grow and change.’ In the sandbox you have total freedom, you can go anywhere. But what if we could continuously log that impulse? The introduction of desire paths not only honours the trail that is ‘in want of wear’ but shows us – in a beautiful echo of real time –the material contribution of our decision-making

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A desire path forms with gradual wearing of ground cover - such as grass or snow – from repeated traffic. This feels an inherently visceral process; feet compacting earth over and over, slow witnessing of the natural environment bending to the will of pedestrians. Given its capacity to contribute to realism, these cyclical rhythms have been transplanted into the world of video games, signalling pattern behaviours and the relationship between characters and their journey. In the City Folk and New Leaf instalments of the Animal Crossing franchise, the grass deterioration or ‘animal trail’ feature (from the Japanese term ‘kemono michi’) tracks the human player-character’s movements around the map, slowly converting the blotchy green turf into worn dirt tracks.  

Some games assign this feature to NPC activity and movement, which can be influenced by player decisions and interactivity. In the more recent city-builder Going Medieval, the placement of key infrastructure determines the inhabitants’ preferred walking routes, which over time promote dirt patches in areas of high use. These can then be paved over with hardier materials like stone to increase walking speed, inviting the player to co-create travel mechanics and attributing a sense of desire to the computer-generated inhabitants of the fictional world.

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Hideo Kojima’s 2019 action game Death Stranding is perhaps the most notable piece of interactive media that utilises literal desire paths as a core narrative device. Its asynchronous online format transforms the simple act of walking through the apocalyptic open world setting into a form of communication with others, showcasing the storytelling implications of adaptive terrain. While players never directly interact as they would in a traditional online multiplayer, sporadic evidence of their existence - such as grappling hooks, cargo, and tools - will show up in other player’s environments as proof that they were there, enriching the sense of immersion and reliability on a breathing, populated environment.

Along with these bread-crumbed clues of travellers who came before, Death Stranding uses analytics technology to assess accumulative re-treading of certain routes amongst individual players, gradually forming worn dirt trails throughout the open landscape. Unlike the sanctioned highway road which the game log tells us is the focus of the player character’s quest, these pathways only began appearing several weeks after the game’s release, as an increasing number of people engaged with the setting.

Death Stranding’s desire paths rely on a snowballing effect, as once a shortcut is established, more people must choose to follow its creator for it to wear down and become more visible and easier to tread. The thrill of this comes from a feeling that one is contributing to something larger than themselves, turning the solitary act of engaging with a console into a collective project. Those who choose to stray and establish new routes are rewarded with the possibility of starting something that hundreds of other players choose to follow, and a digital landscape that responds to that collective willpower.

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While the synthesis of deviation and play becomes more achievable for interactive media, historically, the bedrock of desire-peddling lay in the exploitation of programming blind spots. Cheating against competitors, speed running, a sense of control over a game’s mechanics, or simply an urge to get from A to B faster have all prompted players to seek out and use accidental flaws in a game’s code to their advantage. Helpful glitches often build notoriety quickly, becoming synonymous with the title and gameplay experience. Early examples like Pokémon Red and Blue’s MissingNo. and Super Mario 64’s Backward Long Jump have endured as a means to rebel against the base code’s limitations while also generating a sense of comradery between users – a nod to acknowledge the flexed muscle of agency.

Developers are forced to engage in this dialogue – either by patching the glitch and ensuring player conformity or allowing it to settle and germinate in the ecosystem of emergent gameplay. In some instances, glitches are taken as an opportunity to directly engage with inter-player rapport. For example, Red Dead Redemption II’s Donkey Lady - a set of decaying remains depicting a human body with a donkey’s head - famously references a glitch in the original title where an NPC spawn went horribly wrong.

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Using glitches to clip through or bypass terrain has long existed as a means to travel more efficiently through a game, particularly in earlier iterations of the open-world genre. Avoiding geometry collisions in a virtual physics engine is essentially impossible, and so a sequence of actions that a game code hasn’t accounted for will likely result in some kind of visual error. The upside of this is that if an object or playable character interacts with an obstacle - such as a wall, tree, or mountainside - in a specific way or with enough force, it may be able to trigger the code’s weak spot and re-spawn on the other side. Here lies the ultimate manifestation of free-will against a game’s prescriptive layout, becoming considered more reliable as its limitations are tested and news of its efficacy dispersed amongst players.

This is the linking function of a glitch and a desire path. In the tangible realm, desire paths originate from the collective impatience of people walking places. Once you start to look, informal dirt lines can be found cutting across almost every public park, university lawn, nature reserve and outdoor public meeting place – even when surrounded by industrial infrastructure. It is habitual to circumnavigate inaccessibility to pursue the faster, lesser arduous, or more interesting route, so of course this instinct would transplant into the digital sphere. Even when a quest log isn’t rushing us, we will fixate on learning how to trick the medium into letting us enter through forbidden dead-space and out the other side. In the meantime, the open-world game’s capacity to offer us features like wayfinding (Skyrim’s compass) and journey tracing records (Breath of the Wild’s Hero’s Path) continuously pull us back to our core objective, but never unceremoniously shoving us forward without an already established sense of freedom.

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I am laden with shopping bags and gratefully opt for a shortcut over the median strip. Streetlights blur in my periphery as I stumble, intoxicated, away from the comfort of a handrail and across the grassy hill at a diagonal, a less steep route to the port-a-loos. I grow fed up with the slow walkers on the river and edge around them, scuffing the dirt that frames the slate grey promenade. In every instance I am minutely influenced by signs of others who have chosen these work-arounds.

Desire paths emerge and persist through the power of collective hum. They remind us of the power of divergence in building commonality; a rebellion against the ‘good enough’ that honours organic, human-centric and instinctual design. In games, rigidity suffocates and disengages. Increasingly, players seek stylised and embellished replications of their lived experience, their immersion pulsing like heatwaves out from the central device – choice.

We approach June, when the grass in my town grows fastest and begins to weave a new tapestry over the brown paths (read: desertification) connecting its haphazard infrastructure. Outside my real-life window, the courtyard greys and evidence of Autumn contrasts the sunny demeanour of my pixelated avatar. I lament being a southern-hemisphere resident playing a real-time game grounded in the change of seasons.

> Fertiliser and the Beautiful Town ordinance do not help regrow grass
> Placing patterns on the ground will not prevent grass deterioration
> Staying off the grass altogether will help it slowly regrow

My tendons and 64-bit plaster skin mimic the curvature of the space between a stable and a damp stone outcropping. I am 01100001010010101110001010 before I am human/drow/babysitting dinosaur again but I am in many ways changed. Attributing crawlspace to forbidden crevice will re-arrange the orbit of your textures and give you a glitch-hungry god complex.