The Square Mileage of a Virtual World

Exploring enormous open worlds in modern video games

It’s wild that we’re no longer measuring the size of video game maps by tiles but by miles. But how do we measure virtual worlds and what do their sizes mean for players?

Tiles Versus Miles

One way to measure is by the relative size of the avatar to the world itself. The original Legend of Zelda . A tile is the amount of space a character stands on (let’s say one square foot), which makes this game roughly .0008 square miles large. In the early aughts of video games, it didn’t make sense to measure worlds in thousandths of a mile, but these days, we need to use real-life metrics to capture the size of modern video game maps.

The first open-world Zelda game, Breath of the Wild measured at . But this is relative only to the players themselves—AKA how large the game feels as we play and how much space we have to explore. But time doesn’t move the same way in games as it does for us. An in-game hour passes for Link during each minute in the player’s world. Traveling in “real-time,”