Will Mirror's Edge 2 and Tony Hawk's 5 revive the idea of playful space in video games?

Many modern games treat their environments like real-world spaces, but two titles that challenge that notion are set to return and shake things up again

Video games are a spatial medium - they are about space. From Pong to Grand Theft Auto V, the designer seeks to create an environment that is navigable and enclosed, and that embodies the rules of the game.

Even sandbox games craft environments with boundaries - San Andreas doesn't go on forever. But there are also more subtle limits on the navigable space available to players. In GTA V, you can only go into certain buildings, and your interaction with objects is minimal. If you punch a coffee cup out of the hand of a passerby, you can't pick it up and pop it in a bin. That's fine, of course, because the game design doesn't require you to be conscientious about litter, it requires you to handle firearms. The world appears open, but it is entirely designed to facilitate death and destruction. That's perhaps one reason why GTA stunt and comedy videos are so successful on YouTube: to use the environment in this way is (apart from the few ramps littered around the city streets) transgressive.