Location, location, unique static mesh.

Here are a few ways I think the player can be coerced into caring for their environment in-game.

Environmentally memorable - there must be iconic visuals to remember the location by. The Hollywood sign represents the ostentatiousness of rich LA, perhaps also it's desolate, sprawling scale.

A feeling of ownership over a place or property. This can be cultivated with potential for individuality. Static, museum-like abodes, ala San Andreas don't cut it. In Vice City, owning the mansion broke down to long walks between the essentials like cars and save points.
Home, to me, was a little place in west Balmora, Morrowind - Caius Cosades' house after he kindly lent it to me for the duration of the game. That tiny single room apartment became a clumsily organised base of operations for my epic questing. Expensive tools, magpie-esque trinkets, weapons and collected books stacked up during the 120 hours I inhabited Vvardenfell. Every time I went to someone else's house, I'd steal their candles to brighten up the place, even eye up their vases and decorations, always thinking of my own four walls Back Home. The extent to which the current location differed from my flat only increased the sense that it was my flat.

People. The inhabitants of the environment have to share a quality that links them appropriately to their surroundings. If they don't have any character, then they don't have any impact on the identity of the place, and may as well not be there. Evidence of this personality can be en mass in the form of news stories or linear plot happenings, but there should also be player-witnessed 'street level' personal experience with the populace. Player governed experiences are always the most memorable. Easier said than done? This can boil down to minor writing changes for NPC responses, etc. Of course, how complicated this would be to implement varies according to whether speech is voiced, blah blah.

Effect. The player must feel some responsibility for at least one aspect of the location's make-up. If he/she cannot alter the world, then there is no emotional inclination to preserve (or change) it. *

Respect. There has to be a sense of something larger or more powerful than the player at large. A lot of players follow a specific desire to rule, or be the best - for them to retain this urge, something or someone must be the object of their desire. This also provides a opportunity for mixed emotion for the environment - ownership of a private property, ability to complete missions etc are all actions that empower, awe or fear for the same place in different ways provides a palette for more complex feelings in the player, (always a good thing, yet almost exclusively MIA).

My (real) experience of America has been one far richer than games have presented me with, naturally. But a lot of what I think has taught me most about the States is stuff that wouldn't be that hard to implement in-game. The first thing I thought of as we left in a taxi from LAX was "wow, this really in San Andreas". The comparison extended barely any further than the road architecture, but authenticity and identification with a virtual equivalent, or any fictional environment, I think, could be increased through the cultivation of the mentioned factors.




New York from the Empire State Building a couple of days ago. Wouldn't that be an amazing set piece? The NPC character who shows you up here could be an enthusiastic engineer, loves skyscrapers - dies falling from one - bittersweet association with the location is created.




* Of course, a want to have effect when it is impossible can be equally emotive - killer leaves to find your wife leaving you tied to a chair, etc. Perhaps a taste of both could prove the robustness of the world and its ability to cope with the player's presence, and narrative quality in sections when you feel most strongly and have no power to act. (More emotive when power to act is allowed? Hmm)