The Sandbox

Photo of Jesse Williams and Lois Markle in The Sandbox © Jaisen Crockett/Art Meets Commerce.

In todays computer games, one of the popular genres is the Sandbox. The hallmark of this type of game is nonlinear gameplay and it can be incredibly fun. In my opinion, these games got their popular start in home RPG games like Dungeons and Dragons.  DnD campaigns in and of them selves are not by nature sandbox affairs, but with the right setup and agreement of the players and DM they can go this route. I’ve recently found an excellent series of posts describing an example of this type of game. It reminded me of a similar game our group played in back at the height of playing. John ran the campaign and the players were myself, Mike, Rick, Dave, his brothers, with a couple of other folks making small cameo appearances if I remember correctly. The details are fuzzy, but the fun we had was not.

The closest thing to a group experience like this in computers today is the MMORPG, but these fall short to varrying degrees because they are not true sandbox enviroments. Things you do in the world have no lasting impact. There are often world changing events but they only provide a passing illusion of impact. They are really just a hugely shared linear experience as they are often tied to game updates shared by all worlds tied to expansions. They are quite fun, but fleeting.

Sandbox games offer the player a sense of real impact, but in the case of the crop we have now, nothing is shared. Oblivion, Fallout, Grand Theft Auto, etc all offer rich worlds to explore but you do it solo. Maybe someday someoen will figure out how to offer the experience of a sandbox with room for more than one.