Video games aren't anarchic – they treat us like naughty children

The way a game lets you treat its non-player characters can tell us volumes about the limitations of interactive adventures

We all know that video games offer us the chance to do things we'd never dream of doing in real life - robbing banks, slaying dragons, sorting falling shapes into the right position to make them disappear. Crazy stuff.

But in structural terms, games are nowhere near as rebellious and anarchic as they appear. Most are packed with rules and frameworks which are specifically designed to restrict the player - and there is usually a central narrative that you have to follow if you want to see the end. This is fine in a lot of genres, where rules are obviously necessary to create a tight play structure. But only a select few titles labelled as "open world" or "sandbox" adventures let you completely and utterly shatter the experience intended for you by the developers - or at least punish you in an imaginative way.