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| Types of immersion | |
| Posted By: Cody Miller | Date: 1/26/08 2:02 p.m. |
In Response To: The worst example is Floodgate (Baratos) : It seems like most game designers today want to make their stories as : incoherent as possible, to make way for immersion. That is why I could : never get into Half-life: I was so confused by the plot, the atmosphere : and gameplay had no effect on me. Immersion and plot seem to be at odds. If we define immersion in a videogame world as a lack of obstruction between the player and the world, as immediacy, then any effort to tell a story is going to impede upon that, simply because to tell a story, you need to take freedoms away from the player. Think about it; the story is in a sense the opposite of interactivity. It's passive; something that's told or shown to you. It's interesting you mention half life, because the first game was very interactive, but had rather little story. Sure, the plot was to stop a bunch of aliens by taking out their leader, but that was so incredibly simple, that it afforded the game a lot of immersion because it never got in the player's way. With each installment of half life, have you noticed that the story sequences become more expository and less interactive? In half life 2, you had more scripted sequences than in Half Life, and in episode 1, you had talking heads on monitors telling you the story before you could proceed. Episode 2 actually went so far as to take control away from the player, and give you a full fledged cutscene. Yet, the story becomes more coherent as the interactivity decreases. To me, this says a lot, when a game developer who was committed to showing you the world through the eyes of the character the whole time never breaking immersion, reverses this decision more and more as time goes on to tell the story. It tells me that immersion and story are tradeoffs with one another. But I think there's a different kind of immersion that's created when you make a deeper story. Studies have shown that people are actually more immersed in things like television and film than they are in video games. That's almost paradoxical in a way, given that film and television are not art forms with a high degree of immediacy, and what you see on the screen is highly manipulated and artificial. Rather, people seemed to be connecting on an emotional level to the characters on screen, and immersing themselves in the story that way. The illusion is so powerful, that sometimes it's hard to separate the actor from their character, even in real life. So to me, it seems that this idea of trying to remove barriers and letting the player have an unobstructed experience is not the way to create immersion, simply because the more you do that, the less you afford the player emotional depth in characters and stories. It's strange; Halo 2 had some of the longest cutscenes of the games, yet looking back it seems to have been the one that connected me most to the Halo universe (the first half anyway). When Metal Gear solid came out I was put off by the large amounts of non interactive elements, yet I feel more connected to that world than perhaps any other in videogames. Truly an interesting question for future game developers.
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