The Original Video Game Sandbox

Reflections on a time when play experiences were uninterrupted by ubiquitous, invasive connectivity

Video games used to be a meditative experience. It was just you and the box, with controller and cord as the connective tissue. Those thoughts — those pesky mental constructs — vanished to the experience in the moment.

It’s why there’s a soothing silence to consoles of yore. It’s you and its world — or it’s you and its world and the friend sitting next to you. It’s a date who leaves their phone in the car or, more aptly, doesn’t have a phone at all. Those sixth-generation start-up screens were the lights dimming in a movie theatre, a vacation with email switched off.

Then boxes got smarter. Downloads, friends lists, achievements — all reasons for your box to talk to you and never shut up. But this intelligence came at a cost: the death of the video-game sandbox. A word that suggests expression through play, walled off from the world beyond.

That sandbox was everything to us. It played host to infinite worlds — from the towers of Zanarkand to the struts of Big Shell. It was home to a thousand musicians with a thousand orchestras and a thousand designers with a thousand ideas. It was a guardian of our spare time and a sentinel of our mental health, its…