The world is your sandbox
Sandbox mode in the game of life
I recently had a long conversation with my oldest son, who is studying for his master’s degree in video games design. He explained the concept of a sandbox to me, and it wasn’t what I thought.
This is a definition from the website Techopedia:
“A sandbox is a style of game in which minimal character limitations are placed on the gamer, allowing the gamer to roam and change a virtual world at will.” (www.techopedia.com)
I’m really not a gamer; my gaming experience consists of playing Atari Pong as a child in the seventies, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text based game in the eighties (thank you, Douglas Adams), Myst in the nineties and The Sims in the early noughties. I was never very good at any of them. So my understanding of a sandbox game, or a sandbox mode within a game, comes entirely from my son and from Techopedia (while The Sims is a sandbox game, I’d certainly never heard the term when I played it).
For the benefit of other ‘gamingly-challenged’ contemporaries, traditional games generally require a linear progression through fixed levels, where the completion of certain tasks unlocks the next level. But playing a sandbox game, or in sandbox mode, means that the gamer is allowed to roam and select tasks according to his own…
