Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and the Allure of Open-World Video Games

One of the more famous scenes in recent video-game history can be found at the beginning of Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, from 2017. The player's avatar, Link, starts on a plateau high above the land of Hyrule. It's a test zone in which to familiarize oneself with the mechanics of the game. But a paraglider tool, obtained at the end of the introduction, makes it possible to leave the plateau behind and enter the rest of the environment. After exiting a cavern, Link stands at the lip of a cliff, and the camera pans out to survey the vast landscape, a patchwork of forests, rolling hills, seas of fog, and darkened mountains. Like Simba in "The Lion King," the player gets the sense that everything the light touches is her kingdom, a sprawling natural world explorable from end to end.