On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 7:20 AM, LingMac<lingmac@...> wrote:
>
> Immersion as I understand it refers to a game's ability to make you
> feel you're really a character `immersed` in its fictional universe.
> Why being given control of one and only character throughout helps
> this is pretty obvious.

"Obvious" is not one of my favorite words either. What's so obvious
about it? Does your character have an arc, does it change at all?
Otherwise being 1 character can get awfully boring.

> Believable sounds and graphics also enhance
> that. Night falls and you can hear the crickets singing, the eventual
> wolf howling in the distance; you look above and see a believable
> night sky, and as you approach home, "your" wife greets you with
> convincing facial animation and dialogue. You're immersed.

I think you just completely blew off the entire "mental task" sales
pitch I just gave you. Oh well, I will endeavor to make a stronger
sales pitch somehow, as a lot of people believe like you do that it's
all in the art assets. To that I say, go watch a boring film that has
lush visuals and wonderful audio. Cinematographers falling in love
with their precious scenes is common enough.

> Of course, by itself immersion CAN be pretty boring,

How can you possibly call it "immersion" if you're bored out of your mind?

> Suppose you wished to break immersion for whatever reason, what would
> you do then? Implement an over the top combo system, complete with on
> screen pop up words such as "5 HITS, WONDERFUL!", "10 HITS, BRUTAL!",
> "15 HITS, GENOCIDAL!". If you want to go the extra mile, you can
> actually add an obnoxious narrator to speak these aloud. :)

Hm, you seem to be talking about a different idea, the "suspension of
disbelief." You've got your player believing he's in a particular
time and place, and now you've gone and ruined it by spouting bad
dialogue and statistical drivel. On the other hand, if the game was
statistical drivel from the very beginning, nothing would have changed
and the player would still be believing the drivel. If it was
*engaging* drivel.

> Idiosyncratic, gamist rules can also have that effect. When the game
> allows "your" ten year old daughter to equip a Halberd twice her size,
> you're suddenly reminded that "you're just playing a game". And that's
> what ultimately kills it.

That depends on how it is narrated. Oversized weapons are very common
in anime. It is genre, it is part of the rules of their universe,
that weapons can be this way. It is possible for such things to be
believed, if they are explained or presented in a certain way. It is
no different than explaining or presenting a magic carpet that can
fly. If you can get people to accept the rules of the fantasy
universe, then there is no problem. On the other hand, just putting a
gigantic weapon in some teeny weeny girl's inventory without any
exposition may raise some eyebrows. On the 3rd alien hand, the
players might be somewhat gamist in their orientation and simply not
notice or care. Do you think hard about a Diablo II style "inventory
doll," or have you long since accepted the genre convention in all the
RPG games you play? Once the convention is established, it disappears
from the player's mind.

> So, if a player is engaged, he's entertained, one way or another.

No, he might be pissed off and trying to seek vengeance, on either an
unfair piece of software or a human opponent that has seriously
taunted him. He might be depressed, but feel a need to seek a
catharsis, an answer, or some kind of closure to the materials that
are making him depressed. What he is not, is bored.

>> Just as movies have their
>> moments of relief before the gloom and doom begins again. I think one
>> of the keys to sustaining engagement, is the mental task has to be
>> varied.
>
> Fighting bugs, fighting thugs, negotiating the hierarchical web of
> your group (if you decided to stick with one), finding supplies and
> defensible shelter, studying bug behavior, uncovering the lore of the
> land, scheming to take over the leadership either as a charismatic
> leader or as an iron-fisted dictator, watching your kid grow and learn
> new things... I'd guess there would be something for everyone and
> plenty for all. :)

As long as it isn't exactly the same schtick as in all the other games
out there. This drives experienced players nuts.

> I recommend you play Spelunky sometime (it's a terrific game anyway).
> Spelunky illustrates how the ability to save and reload can be a bad,
> bad, bad thing.

I will try it.

> But since there's no save..... "OH GOD FUCK GOD NO" *runs
> like a madman, spider in pursuit, is cornered into a dead end, throws
> a bomb at spider, gets the timing wrong, so the bomb bounces off of it
> and explodes in a corner instead. The explosion does open a tiny
> escape route, so as the spider pounces to end your life, you dash
> towards it and make it to safety in the nick of time.*

Or this gets old the 4th time around, you get pissed off at getting
killed the same way each time, and you quit playing the game. We'll
see.


> Really, you have to PLAY this game to understand how EPIC that is. :)
>
>>> 2 - Decision time menus! Do you
>>> A - Go fight the acid spitting, 30-headed, ten story tall Hydra to
>>> recover the little girl's doll or
>>> B - Rape the little girl, devour her entrails and offer her heart at
>>> Baal's altar to summon a cosmic evil unto the world?
>>
>> I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you saying that most people
>> won't choose B? I will certainly choose B, if I am in the mood to
>> play an evil villain.
>
> I'm saying four separate things:
>
> 1 - In and of themselves, those menus are intrusive.

Hm, film has a maxim, "show, don't tell." I've wondered if games
should have a maxim, "play, don't show." Although in this case it
sounds like "play, don't tell."

> 2 - To make matters worse, only extremes are usually presented. How
> about ignoring the girl? How about explaining to her how dangerous the
> Hydra is, and how you'll buy her another doll instead?

That would be the Interactive Fiction Branching Problem. It's
resource intensive to cover all possibilities. The Art would be in
getting the player to accept and like the limited choices presented to
him. This requires filmic notions like securing character buy-in,
having some sympathetic characters, not having a passive lead
character, setting up scenes to pay them off, etc.

> 3 - Decision menus don't allow the player to feel ingenious or
> inventive.

This is a prerogative unique to interactive entertainment, I think.
The idea that you're supposed to be allowed to be a research
scientist. I think game designers and programmers are far more likely
to feel this impulse than most of the people who buy games. That
doesn't invalidate the attempt, but it does say something about where
the impulse is coming from. The danger of unconstrained simulations
is they contain a lot of frustrating phenomena, a lot of serious
banging one's head against the wall for no result. That's the actual
nature of research science, as opposed to the fantasy that the
analytical types think they want out of a game. Another school of
thought about the game desinger's job, is there is no emergent
behavior, the game designer devises everything you're going to
experience. Abstract and seemingly open ended experiences are just
vectoral cages created by the game designer, to make you think you
have more room to maneuver. Such illusions are important as people
don't like to feel their possibilities have been cut off.

> Observant player notes similarity between blanket and
> doll, and remembers the protagonist is friends with a toy maker.

That's the "Guess The Adventure Author's Mind" problem. Not always
easy to know what the hell the author had in mind. It's why adventure
games aren't mass market, why the genre all but died. In the early
days of the PC, the computers were just as hard to use as the
adventure games. Early adopters had above average intellect and
patience for dealing with the crap. Such a temperament is exactly
what you need for guessing the mind of the author of adventure games.

> 4 - Combined with a save and reload feature, decisions lose emotional
> value and create apathy.

True that narrative continuity is disrupted, same as hitting the
"pause" button on a DVD player would be. On the other hand, people
pick up and put down books all the time, so there's a way to get away
with it.

> "Oh sure, I'll go fight the hydra. If I die,
> I'll just reload until I kill it. Fun."
> No, that won't do. The player should be torn over what to decide. When
> he does decide, that decision should carry weight to it. He's making a
> sacrifice, he's taking a risk, that is supposed to mean something.
> Again, play Spelunky and you'll understand. :)

Hold that thought.

> A mature game is simply a game whose themes will appeal to an adult
> audience.

Agreed.

>> What's wrong with being evaluated on "one thing," or knowing that
>> you're being so evaluated?
>
> Again, immersion. :)

Possibly. I think I prefer "suspension of disbelief." If games are
mental tasks, then it is indeed problematic to provide a UI that isn't
mechanical and clunky.

>>> Instead, it is silently (heh) and
>>> unobtrusively watching everything you do; whether your fighting style
>>> is reckless or conservative, if you are inquisitive about your
>>> surroundings and what seems to attract your attention most, etc.
>>
>> Can I tell that these things matter to the game?
>
> Not at first, but in retrospect it'll make perfect sense. Then you'll
> love the hell out of the Silent Hill series and become a lifelong fan. ;)

Hm, I guess historically it was only available for consoles, but I see
there's a PC version now. Maybe I'll try it sometime.

> You then receive a
> nonchalant pop-up message informing you all your food has been stolen
> by Hive raiders. Why? Because the game is a pseudo-simulation. It
> didn't actually compute the drones finding your food and lifting it
> away, it just rolled a probability die and decided that it did happen.

I wrestle with this a lot, how deep or shallow the simulation should
be. Should I make a game about Roman legions where every footstep,
shield wall, and sword cut is simulated? Or should I just
statistically decide that one guy "won the fight" for no particularly
good reason? My current plan is to start with the stats only
resolution and evolve a simulation of greater depth. Simulation
elements don't have as much value if the player is not directly
controlling them with the UI. At some point, there will be so many
simulation elements that they'll just be perceived as noise.

> Player feels thoroughly cheated. Why keep the pretense, with
> "scouting" drones on the field and stuff if it's not actually going to
> carry through with it?

Grand Theft Auto III was an extremely popular, totally bogus
simulation. All phenomena merely occurred in a "ghost pattern" around
your position. It didn't matter where you went in the game, the same
phenomena occurred. You could pierce the veil of the illusion by
pulling up your sniper scope. You would not see the same things
inside and outside the scope. There was no persistence.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every