Borderlands, Fallout 3 and the RPG/FPS mashup

I'm really looking forward to a certain game named Borderlands. I've always had an affinity for these sorts of games - and, in fact, any kind of entertainment that promises me a large, open world to explore, either through the agency of an author, or through the agency of a DualShock.

I guess it is something to do with the way I'm wired. I really like to explore, sifting through the layers of archaeology in a world, picking up on the bits and pieces that the creators choose to leave behind. And, because I like to be rewarded for things, I like some elements of a role-play while I'm doing.

So on to the meat of the post. Borderlands, to my mind, sits on one end of a spectrum that runs from the full-on RPG that have a small FPS element, like Fallout 3 or Oblivion, to those FPSs that have some small element of RPG - like the two S.T.A.L.K.E.R games (yeah, I won't be typing that like that again). In those games, your character never grew: you were the same the moment you were killed by the Wish Granter as you were when you first enter the Cordon. The only way your character ever changed was by picking up artifacts in the world.

This meant that growth was at the whim of the environment. Artifacts spawned where they wanted to - and I didn't play either game through enough times to learn if they always spawned in the same place. So control of your development - and therefore the way you played the game - was almost entirely out of your hands. Such set-ups lacked the agency and authority that allows me, as a gamer or reader or viewer to really live in a world.

On the other hand, a game like Fallout 3 rarely holds your hand in your appreciation of the world it creates. Yeah, it points you to your next objective and all that, but it's really up to the player to make of the world what they will. For example, in a world ruined by a nuclear war, there's still an awful lot of intact garden gnomes lying about. You could go through the world, collecting garden gnomes, and pile them up somewhere, take a screenshot, and call it art. Or line them up, and push them off a bridge, one by one. If you wanted.

The obvious question, then, is how you find this sort of agency and control in a novel or movie when the story and world are presented to you from on high. The control over these worlds come from what the author doesn't say - when a room is described as having a rough wooden floor, it's still up to the reader to imagine for themselves how rough, what kind of wood, and how the planks fit together. And the reader can choose whether or not to examine scenes and dialogue for the sorts of environments that interest them. I find this sort of thing in Alistair Reynolds, China Mieville, and Peter F Hamilton, among others.