The subversion of  game spaces by the player is a prominent issue when discussing level design because designers can not account for every method of play or every choice a player makes. When I was a child, I often played the Nintendo 64 game Mario Kart 64 (1997), which is a competitive cart-racing simulation for up to 4 players.

The game features 16 racing tracks, or game spaces, and because they mimic the function of racetracks in the world world, they follow a predetermined course (the actual roadway, or intended path of competitors) through a spatially limited environment (the grounds of Princess Peach’s royal abode, in the case of the track “Royal Raceway”). The roadway in “Royal Raceway” can be seen as an analogue to the racetrack in a real-world course, and the spatially limited environment can be seen as the surrounding area, like the space of the spectators and the surrounding countryside. As a player, I typically utilized the game space in the manner intended by the game’s designers – as a racetrack. However, on several occasions I played the game with my brother and I subverted the intended use of the space by driving my virtual avatar (in this case, the mushroom-headed Toad) to the most secluded part of the game world, covering up my portion of the split screen, a I could find and instructing my brother (playing as the spiky-shelled Bowser) to “find” me on the game map. Our virtual “hide-and-seek” completely abandoned the primary, intended function of the game as one where players race one another. By playing hide-and-seek in “Royal Raceway” instead of racing one another for the best recorded time, we had subverted the game space as it was designed. The practice of players utilizing game spaces in manner other than intended is well-documented and studied, and it adds a layer of highly complicated depth to the discussion of linear level design versus open world level design because ultimately, a player makes a choice on how to experience a given game space, not the designer.

Designers can account somewhat for subversion of game spaces by placing constraints on how levels are accessed, as in the case of Half-Life 2’s “chapter” system. The fan-made map of Half-Life 2’s larger game space shown above is somewhat misleading because it presents the world of the game as one interconnected space, though this is not the case in the game. Though the game spaces (train station, city square, laboratory, abandoned highway, beach, etc.) exist as interconnected in the narrative of the game, the designers chose to isolate them from one another as “chapters” to encourage players to experience them in a defined progression. If the environments were linked spatially, a player could conceivably venture to the environment of the game’s conclusion and proceed through the environments in reverse, ending back in the train car where the game began. If this was possible, the subversion of the game space would inhibit the narrative the player creates as they progress in the manner intended. In Half-Life 2, the design choice to open access to game environments as the player progresses through spaces is inextricably linked to the manner in which narrative is experienced, because technology does allow for seamless, vast game spaces that are not isolated from one another but are interconnected. Games with spaces that are both functionally contiguous and narratively contiguous, like Grand Theft Auto IV and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, allow the player to create narrative in a space that is far less limited in scope than games that use more linear models.