they're almost entirely absent from video games' depictions of reality

May 6, 2023 5:19 AM

Why There's No Room for Suburbs in Open-World Games [Waypoint] [Games by Vice] “The other day I was replaying The Crew 2, driving from Texas to San Francisco in my silver 1955 Mercedes-Benz SLR. After passing through the epic canyons and peaks, I finally arrived at the glistening Pacific. Looking at my GPS, now barely 3 miles away from downtown San Francisco, I was shocked to still be seeing dense redwood forests and not, say, suburban Millbrae. Then in a flash, I was finally amidst skyscrapers. But when I looked in my rearview, there were the redwoods I barely left behind. Booting up GTA V, GTA San Andreas, Saints Row, and Watch Dogs 2, I noticed a similar pattern. We are transported to major cities and vast countrysides, but nothing that really speaks to the in between — to the suburbs. Where is New York’s mighty Westchester County, once ground zero for COVID in those early days? What about Chicago’s burbs where Ferris Bueller went ham?”
posted by Fizz (56 comments total)

It's like these fucking casuals have never even heard of the Sims 3.
posted by phunniemee at 5:24 AM on May 6, 2023 [39 favorites]

Booting up GTA V, GTA San Andreas, Saints Row, and Watch Dogs 2, I noticed a similar pattern.

Maybe the new Saints Row in Santo Ileso; I haven't played much of that one.

But both Stilwater in SR 1/2 and Steelport in SR 3 and beyond have substantial suburban sections. Suburbs are great for the mayhem activity because all them picket fences = munnnnnnny.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:33 AM on May 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

What's their definition of open world? Do you need to be able to pop out of a car and fire guns at NPCs, like GTA etc.? Cities: Skylines has suburbs. Click on a pedestrian or car and you can tool around them pretty easily.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:39 AM on May 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Probably something to do with the sheer tedium of creating suburban wastelands. I mean, seriously, that sounds like a punishment job at a game company.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 5:39 AM on May 6, 2023 [21 favorites]

I'm not a gamer or someone who has ever lived in a suburb, but I have friends who grew up in the 'burbs and would probably pay good money to take a virtual bazooka to them.
posted by The Card Cheat at 5:46 AM on May 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

these games also lack parking lots for the most part. they have some but never the actual amount of parking you’d find in a city like LA. the reason is probably parking lots. if you modeled the burbs correctly they would just be parking lots and roads with little warts of structures near them. the buildings are almost incidental to the parking. that’s pretty boring for a game
posted by dis_integration at 5:52 AM on May 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

I mean, seriously, that sounds like a punishment job at a game company.

ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-v, ctrl-v, ctrl-v, ctrl-v, ctrl-v, ctrl-v, ctrl-v, ctrl-v, ctrl-v, ctrl-v,.....
posted by mhoye at 5:53 AM on May 6, 2023 [14 favorites]

these games also lack parking lots for the most part. they have some but never the actual amount of parking you’d find in a city like LA. the reason is probably parking lots. if you modeled the burbs correctly they would just be parking lots and roads with little warts of structures near them. the buildings are almost incidental to the parking. that’s pretty boring for a game

And as the article references, zombie/horror games are where the suburbs usually pop up in gaming (The Last of Us, The Evil Within, Resident Evil). Curious that games in the suburbs are almost always demonstrating the literal and symbolic horrors of being in that particular environment.
posted by Fizz at 5:58 AM on May 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

There was a COD or MW shooter that began with the player on a Humvee blasting an Iraqi residential neighborhood. The end of the game was defending an American suburbs from russian soldiers in light armored vehicles, and eventually defending a chuck-e-cheese or something from the roof as Russians ran in across the glacis of the mall parking lot.

Also one of those zombie games literally takes place entirely in a mall.
posted by OldReliable at 6:09 AM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Roughly the same reason Sim City omits realistically sized parking lots, yes.
posted by Artw at 6:10 AM on May 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Dying Light and Dead Island franchises also take place in more realistic & literal urban/suburban environments and are also both focused on zombies. I do think we could use another symbol or theme in these spaces and still keep things pretty interesting. The zombies in the burbs stuff (while a lot of fun) can get kind of dull and plodding after a while.
posted by Fizz at 6:14 AM on May 6, 2023

Boy do I have news for you about European tourist-drawing cities.

If you'e been fortunate enough to afford some Rick Steves-ish trips to Europe, you might notice that a lot of cities there terminate abruptly at a city line, and commercial production of food or timber starts right there and then. No belt of dreary suburban dreck to go through.

It's not true for every city. The outskirts of Paris are not that way. London has Surrey. But it's true of Innsbruck, Koblenz, pretty much all of Spain and Portugal, Cork, and the English West Country.
posted by ocschwar at 6:28 AM on May 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm not going to read the article and point out that no one complains about how Spider-man never visits Aurora, Illinois or Edmound, Oklahoma.
posted by midmarch snowman at 6:44 AM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm not going to read the article and point out that no one complains about how Spider-man never visits Aurora, Illinois or Edmound, Oklahoma.

This is referenced in the article. But speaking to that, I was listening to a gaming podcast about Insomniac's Spider-Man game and someone had referenced, they would LOVE to see a Spider-Man game set in the forest or jungle. Lean into a more Logan/Wolverine-esque Spidey, hell bring Wolverine into the mix and you have a very gritty nature-focused Spidey that is stringing enemies up and trapping them in the trees. Lean into the WILD. I'd love that.
posted by Fizz at 6:51 AM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's just a matter of mature content. You can take players straight into the maw of hell itself, but suburbia crosses the line.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:55 AM on May 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

I realize that Spidey in a forest or jungle has likely been explored via comic-books but still. Would love to see more of that in film/gaming.
posted by Fizz at 6:56 AM on May 6, 2023

Same reason why in open world games there aren't hundreds of miles of farmlands. Even in fantasy games, you might see a few farmer's field's but never enough acreage to sustain a real population. It's also why "lost ancient ruins" are about three minutes of travel away from a town that's existed for hundreds of years.

It would be bloody boring.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:56 AM on May 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

This is a point that the article makes, but something I think about is that even the largest current gen open world games that I have played are just not remotely to realistic scale, and couldn't be (for the sake of the designers or the players). E.g. I don't know how long it would take you to jog across the entire horizon zero dawn map from east to west, maybe 30min to an hour? But it would still be a lot less than it would take me probably even to traverse on foot even just the suburb I grew up in. And, if I did, there also just wouldn't be a lot to see or do on that traversal in video-gamey terms (as much as it might be a nice walk!).

An interesting case might be fallout games. A few months ago I tried to get into fallout 4 again, and played through the first bit (again); this is a game that does in principle visit many Boston area suburbs. I actually grew up in Middlesex county near real Concord -- but I was very much reminded that the scale in the game is (out of necessity) a sort of cartoon version of a size I can only imagine Concord having like 300 years ago. Actual Concord (not a massive town all in all) is 25 square miles and in large part just relatively suburban housing (maybe on the large/wealthy side, more trees than some) -- it has of course various memorable highlights one encounters as a tourist, but I found an estimate that the in-game size is approx 3/4 square miles, so 2 orders of magnitude smaller than actuality. Fallout 4 puts in memorable highlights, but strips out the realistic details that give it its actual suburban character, so it ends up not really feeling like that part of suburban MA does -- and to be honest, I think we'd want that to not be there for the sake of the game. This seems to be even more true for the rest of Middlesex county in the game (though tbh I have never made it very far), which mostly just picks and chooses random landmarks, and mostly leaves out the relatively vast amounts of same-y housing stock.
posted by advil at 7:06 AM on May 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Surprised not to see Fallouts 3 and 4 in the article as counterpoints, both of which include various significant and interesting (and deadly) suburban enclaves. Of course it may have something to do with Falout’s theme of roasting Americana that they wouldn’t dream of omitting suburbs.

On preview, seeing advil’s comment—yes, the suburban enclaves are often just 6 houses in a circle, but they’re clearly suburban in tone! Is Fallout 3’s Tranquility Lane perhaps the best depiction of the suburbs in an open world game?
posted by ejs at 7:12 AM on May 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, that's also fair, fallout games do try to sometimes keep the suburban *aesthetic* (even if not the scope). But in the parts of fallout 4 I've succeeded in playing (which, not that much) my experience was that this was mostly in the prequel segment. I think part of what I'm saying is that for me as someone who grew up in actual middlesex county, that segment of fallout 4 at least did not particularly succeed at capturing the suburban MA aesthetic in the open world portion of the game, largely because of the scale reduction and the focus on exceptional landmarks.
posted by advil at 7:20 AM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

“This doesn’t get talked about enough, trying to get the world to play nicely with each other in terms of spacing, timing, and blending one art set into another. But that’s the hard part.” Harris says. “We’re not really trying to build realism. We’re trying to build believability.”

The last paragraph of the article gets at the tension of trying to make a game a pure 1 to 1 with its sense of space and place. Which would either be immensely dull and/or ridiculously expensive.
posted by Fizz at 7:23 AM on May 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I like that they use "What about Chicago’s burbs where Ferris Bueller went ham?" as an example, when Ferris notoriously went ham in and around various Chicago landmarks, to the point that people have reproduced his day off IRL, to some extent. It may be fun to occasionally have a movie action set piece in the suburbs--FBDO had Ferris' mad dash through the backyards, which is sort of reproduced in Spider-Man: Homecoming, showing Peter trying to chase someone in an environment where he doesn't have buildings tall enough to swing from--but I wouldn't want to play a whole game set in Anyburb USA.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:30 AM on May 6, 2023

As someone pointed out earlier, Call of Duty 2 had a very memorable set of levels featuring a very typical suburb. You had to clear a fast food restaurant in the middle of a very car-centric strip mall. You had to clear a McMansion and you could feel the terrible architecture while going through it.

But it was a one-time thing. If you were to try and bring that experience to an open-world game, you would feel so much repetition and dread. Because suburbs are inherently terrible. I get so unhappy when I have to drive through a suburb in my city.

Downtowns have, and are, more fun.
posted by papineau at 7:48 AM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Weirdly fir all the lack of suburbs GTA games absolutely love malls. They’ll just plonk one down anywhere.
posted by Artw at 7:51 AM on May 6, 2023

There’s not enough swinging around opportunities for spiderman, fighting crime would require a different adaptation.

I’m also not convinced that “horrifying, spinneret-less, tunnel boring, ambush predator, suburban spiderman” would be a hit. Maybe in a Tremors sense where the “this big hulking man bursts from the ground and sucks your car into a pit for rolling through a stop sign” is played for laughs while highlighting the car brained nature of the suburbs?
posted by Slackermagee at 8:00 AM on May 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Paperboy open-world remake, let's go
posted by oulipian at 8:04 AM on May 6, 2023 [15 favorites]

Paperboy open-world remake, let's go

Could just install a newspaper-dropping mod to Flight Simulator.
posted by credulous at 8:50 AM on May 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I haven't played all the games the author has played, but I think he must have a different idea of "suburban" than I do. The cities in GTA:SA in particular certainly do have peripheral neighborhoods filled with rows of cookie-cutter houses, with lawns and fences and hedges, strip malls, and yawning empty parking lots. Those areas aren't full-scale, they're not as large as real suburbs. But neither is anything else on the map. Is it possible the author forgot them because their very banality rendered them invisible?
posted by Western Infidels at 8:55 AM on May 6, 2023

Wondering if Powerwasher Simulator counts.
posted by Artw at 9:01 AM on May 6, 2023

I also suspect that, content-wise, you’re sliding into risky territory when you allow your players to shoot up suburban malls, churches, and schools. In a tightly scripted game those locations wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but in an open world the possibilities for producing really distasteful content are rife.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:50 AM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

driving from Texas to San Francisco

Sounds like they cut the boring parts out. Presumably they also cut out truck stops where two highways intersect in the middle of nowhere, construction zones, and highway patrol radar traps.
posted by pwnguin at 9:52 AM on May 6, 2023

I also suspect that, content-wise, you’re sliding into risky territory when you allow your players to shoot up suburban malls, churches, and schools. In a tightly scripted game those locations wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but in an open world the possibilities for producing really distasteful content are rife.

I mean, I remember throwing molotov cocktails into a marching band in Postal.
posted by delfin at 11:27 AM on May 6, 2023

I'm going to miss Waypoint.
posted by rodlymight at 11:43 AM on May 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

> I also suspect that, content-wise, you’re sliding into risky territory when you allow your players to shoot up suburban malls, churches, and schools.

But shooting up urban locations is any different?
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:00 PM on May 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's just a matter of mature content. You can take players straight into the maw of hell itself, but suburbia crosses the line.

You're making a joke here, but honestly where is the lie? I think that turning this question inside out is a much more useful way to look at it. Starting with a blank, infinite canvas of possible urban designs, in which we could build literally we can conceive of, without regard for economics or physics or anything whatsoever beyond the one meaningful constraint a designer faces, that "for this to be a good design, the participant has to be able to get from enjoyable thing to other enjoyable thing in a tolerable amount of time", what do we never build? What forms of architecture and urban design are never wished into being, in that world of infinite possibility, because nobody actually wishes they lived like that?

And the answer is, suburbs. The question isn't really why aren't there suburbs in video games. Suburbs aren't in video games because video games are about choices and to a first approximation nobody goes to suburbs if they have better choices. The question is, why do we tolerate them in real life.
posted by mhoye at 12:10 PM on May 6, 2023 [15 favorites]

It's an aside form what the article's talking about, but I can't help thinking about Psychonauts and The Milkman Conspiracy, which engages with the unnerving aesthetic of tract housing developments and some of the communities that live there in a way that really stuck with me.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 12:11 PM on May 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

But shooting up urban locations is any different?

Yes. Shooting up a suburban mall, church, or school holds a very particular place in the American consciousness because it happens so often in real life. If it looks like someone is reproducing Columbine or Aurora you’ll be in for some serious blowback.

Shooting up a parking garage, or multi-story cube farm, or city park doesn’t resonate the same way. There you’re just reproducing any generic action movie.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:21 PM on May 6, 2023

“In which we could build anything we can conceive of”, sorry. I missed my edit window, but don’t want my typos to make me seem like a willing participant in the further debasement of the word “literally”.

Figuratively speaking of course.
posted by mhoye at 1:10 PM on May 6, 2023

Some enterprising developer is going to use OpenStreetMap for their openworld map, or licensing Google Maps with its 3D geometry and StreetView appearances, and boom. Heck, maybe it could be a collaborative resource, and developers could just lay their game mechanics and etc. on top and beneath of it. I mean, governments of the world have mapped pretty much everything they can find, including caves, oceans, and all kinds of good stuff, and maybe those could be public resources. And you could just take chunks if you want Oak Park, IL right next to Pasadena. /beanplate
posted by rhizome at 1:38 PM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

One thing that amused me about European Truck Simulator 2 is that you visit a lot of European cities— and all you see is their scruffy industrial parks, the sort of places where you can put trucking depots and their clients. (But SCS seems to have decided this was a problem; in newer expansions they make sure to put in some landmarks.)
posted by zompist at 2:12 PM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

The entire point of the burbs is that nothing will ever happen there for any reason, that there will never be any reason to be there except to get away from things actually happening. Hence games mostly avoiding them (since games are about things happening) except for horror games which get some of their charge from transgressing that purpose.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:30 PM on May 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

GAME OF THE YEAR

2019: Untitled goose game
2020: HADES
2021: Binding of Isaac Repentance
2022: Stray
2023 (probably): Everspace 2, maybe Bramble.

I'm a clone of a clone of a clone of a combat pilot in space, or a Swedish boy in a folklore hell,
I'm a cat in a post-human robodystopia.
I'm a boy that shoots poo monsters with tears
I'm a man fighting through the greek underworld.
I'm an asshole goose in an English village.

Does anyone remember Paperboy? It was a game where you rode a bicycle and threw newspapers at people's houses.

The article has a narrow vision of games, which actually suits it's complaint. You have to be narrow to miss suburbia, when you can be a spacecat pirate. Or a goose.
posted by adept256 at 2:42 PM on May 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Untitled goose game is fun, but Outer Wilds was released in 2019.
posted by straight at 3:53 PM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ahem, Disco Elysium.

That’s right, we need some extremely drunken communist suburbs.
posted by Artw at 4:24 PM on May 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

That’s right, we need some extremely drunken communist suburbs.

Since it's DE, I'm assuming it's the suburbs themselves that are drunk, and talking to you.
posted by curious nu at 4:40 PM on May 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Only with sufficient Shivers.
posted by Artw at 4:56 PM on May 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

(The outbreak of tzaraath in Graad can be read as something a bit zombie plague like so maybe that happened in a communist suburb)
posted by Artw at 5:43 PM on May 6, 2023

GTA San Andreas absolutely has suburbs.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 3:22 AM on May 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

GTA V absolutely has suburbs as well, or at least areas that are supposed to represent suburbs. As stated above, the map has to be compressed for gameplay and storage/logistics reasons.
posted by Fleebnork at 5:41 AM on May 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

The question is, why do we tolerate them in real life

Because there is no longer any affordable housing downtown?
posted by thivaia at 2:15 PM on May 7, 2023

Except their rise predates that. Gonna tap the Robert Moses sign here.
posted by Artw at 2:27 PM on May 7, 2023

Well, obviously, if anyone built suburbs into a game with any sort of realistic scale vs cities etc that have lots of variety and vertical shapes, they'd be called foolish for including something so repetitive and hellish that it would be unrealistic and implausible. Nobody in real life would build, much less live in, such a dreary, homogenous place.
posted by dg at 8:54 PM on May 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Imagine if they did create the suburbs and then didn't give you google maps to get out of them. You'll end up stuck in the [Anodyne Name] subdivision driving around on streets named after boat types or forest synonyms never finding your way back onto the main roads and out to the city. For example it took me 20 years to escape the suburb I once found myself in IRL.
posted by srboisvert at 2:55 AM on May 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

I've lived this horror doing in home service work during the paper map era. Want to be confused? Try navigating one of the places where the main drag crosses itself and all the streets have the same named except being street/lane/wynd/close/place/boulevard/etc.
posted by Mitheral at 9:37 AM on May 8, 2023

The question is, why do we tolerate them in real life

Because city planners' primary job is to separate classes of people, not separate uses. And that goal is pretty much true in cities now too.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:26 AM on May 8, 2023

I think that turning this question inside out is a much more useful way to look at it. Starting with a blank, infinite canvas of possible urban designs, in which we could build literally we can conceive of, without regard for economics or physics or anything whatsoever beyond the one meaningful constraint a designer faces, that "for this to be a good design, the participant has to be able to get from enjoyable thing to other enjoyable thing in a tolerable amount of time", what do we never build? What forms of architecture and urban design are never wished into being, in that world of infinite possibility, because nobody actually wishes they lived like that?

The difference between a video game and the real world is that the layout of the game is made for the enjoyment of one person—the player. But the real world is a messy compromise based on all the people and their various amounts of wealth and power.

Nobody would design a suburb for themselves to live in, but a suburb is an obvious compromise solution for having lots and lots of people who want to own a house and some land while being as close as possible to the jobs and culture of the city.
posted by straight at 2:48 PM on May 8, 2023