Jiawei Li

I’ve played plenty of games that try to impress me with size: bigger maps, more quests, more loot, more upgrades. Outer Wilds  did something completely different. It gave me a tiny slice of time, told me it would end no matter what I did, and somehow made me feel more free than most “open world” games ever have. That’s the design question I can’t stop thinking about: Why does a fixed-length time loop feel so attractive? Why is repeating the same time window not boring—sometim