Within Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017 we see a fictional world that reflects on the very consequences of generating artificial worlds. It also engages deeply with a conventional tension in Science Fiction as a genre between the world and its inhabitants, and asks us as players to consider where empathy, responsibility, interest and ownership lie in a work which would be monstrously complex by any other medium’s standards. Presenting itself as a highly-polished, richly-detailed, systemically and narratively meaningful open world, Guerilla Games questions the nature of the Gesamptkunstwerk that is a modern AAA game. How does (how can?) such a baroque and totalising work of sights, sounds and experiences cohere as a world with a message? What can designers do with scale and detail that smaller works can’t convey? I argue that Horizon uses its sheer scope to tell us something interesting about game design, genre and the future of narrative architecture (Jenkins, 2003)
http://www.dearplayer.org/blog/2017/6/13/dear-player-narrative-horizons
