Meaningful Place: A Phenomenological Approach to the Design of Spatial Experience in Open-world Games

With the development of game engines and graphics technology, open-world games have gained popularity all over the world recently. One of the key features of this genre is a realistic open world space for the players to explore, to the extent that some even deemed it as the prototype of virtual world and the Metaverse. However, in comparison with the growing world size, the player's spatial experience is a downward spiral. Interaction in an ever-increasing game space suffered from a repetitive design pattern which rendered the world grandeur on the surface but hollow deep down. How to find meaning in this seemingly hollow world and what game designers can learn from it? From a phenomenological perspective, this paper distinguishes “place” from “space,” and, according to this, proposes a three-dimensional meaning structure of place, that is “orientation-identification-time,” as a design approach to reconstruct a meaningful spatial experience in the game world.