FMP Blog Chapter 2 (Literature Review & Academic Theory Study) - Open-World Level Design Showcase

My goal in the literature review was to analyse, compare, and summarise the academic literature that I have sourced in answer to the topic question - “How does freedom of choice and difficulty in open-world games affect players’ habits and desire to continue playing?”.

I aimed to investigate how too much choice and freedom can actually serve to overwhelm the player, as opposed to in a linear game with more focused objectives, as well as how game difficulty affects a player’s playing habits.

This was pertinent to my chosen FMP project of an open-world map as this type of level design is designed in mind for player exploration and usually allows freedom of choice from the start of open-world games (except the tutorial) for the player to go where they please and in which order.

The main aspects I studied and analysed within the literature review were:

• Player agency

• Freedom of Choice

• Difficulty & Player habits

I also collected credible academic/scholarly papers to reference, and these were added to my bibliography in my FMP, listed in alphabetical appearance of author name, and in Harvard style.