Immersion: absolutely useless.

[SteinFaust]

...The fuck?

Shooting Nico out of a chopper in GTA4.... You'll never have more fun. You could be in a three way with a midget at an Iron Maiden concert while Bruce Dickinson juggles kittens, and you'll still wish you could chuck that foreign bastard out of a chopper.

See? good, I was hoping my example wasn't too vague

 

[SteinFaust]

Nym has the right idea. games can't lead to delusion. They shouldn't either, because that just gives the anti-gaming lobbyists more ammunition than all the Hot Coffee in Rockstar.

Why would anti-gaming lobbyists want to bash a beverage that Rockstar employees drink? [/humor]

LOL good one! but humor aside, they're really a bunch of knob-chompers.

 

[Alex_P]

You claimed that the word 'role-playing' is used as a synonym to immersion. I disagree with that use as I believe that the two mean different, albeit closely related things.

Nope. I simply said that "roleplaying" is another example of a word that's used in multiple conflicting ways and loaded with semantic noise.

-- Alex

 

[DannyboyO1]

Bingo. I've played games where I couldn't care less about the characters ("Oh look, that person just died. I wonder what's for lunch?"). But then I play games like Twilight Princess, where I won't spoil what happens, but I will say that there were moments where I was literally dreaming about what would happen to the characters. I must say, it was quite awesome.

Ahem. Rule 34.

 

[Mr. Fister]

No, I wasn't dreaming about them in that way, although you're free to believe so. I meant dreaming about them as in, "Holy crap, what's gonna happen to them?"

 

[Uszi]

Immersion for me was turning out all the lights, cranking the volume, and playing the Resident Evil remake for GCN. Scary.

"Hungry today so eat doggy food. Tasty."

 

[MercFox1]

Author has clearly never had four hours burn off during a session of "Sins of a Solar Empire". That's immersion (not "actually believing you are jumping on turtles"), and the mark of a great game if I've ever seen one.

 

[shatnershaman]

Clearly the TC has never played Wii Sports or Guitar Hero.

Aren't you suppose to RUN in tennis and baseball. FIELD in baseball. WALK in golf. MOVE in boxing. No just BAT,PITCH,PUTT,PUNCH,and LEAN.

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

Clearly the TC has never played Wii Sports or Guitar Hero.

Aren't you suppose to RUN in tennis and baseball. FIELD in baseball. WALK in golf. MOVE in boxing. No just BAT,PITCH,PUTT,PUNCH,and LEAN.

Just to be clear, I was joking - and hey, it's not like you aren't allowed to run around, it's just that it won't have any real effect

 

[Alex_P]

Hey, everyone. Thanks for your posts! I'm not avoiding this thread, I'm just busy. So, expect a slow conversation here. (Resist the tyranny of Internet time!)

Here's some responses.

Of course you never seriously believe that you're in the game, or that the film is real etc. But that's not the point. This belief is at a sub-conscious level, and is forced there when the film, book or game is good enough. Immersion, or the willing suspension of disbelief, simply refers to that point when you forget where you are, how long you've been doing it and that you've burned your soup. It's an extremely worthwhile goal in gaming, just as it has been in plays and storytelling for the past 3 millennia.

I don't think immersion "simply" refers to anything. It's been redefined and buzzworded quite a bit. Losing track of your surroundings isn't really particular to a media experience: you can be really focused while watching a pigeon at the park. Nor is it strictly driven by interest: you can be really focused while trying to make your way through a frustrating technical manual, you can lose track of your time while sitting aimlessly at the bus stop. I've played games that maintained intense focus and drove me to ignore outside distractions in my environment not because they rocked but because they sucked and I had to work to overcome their suck -- is that "immersion"?

And you're correct in your second paragraph; "suspension of disbelief" is the viewer/reader/player giving the movie/story/game permission to access his or her emotions. It's the ability to get people to set aside the idea that the experience is artificial and, in a way, experience the events portrayed instead of just watching passively.

See, I think this is where the concept of "immersion" is misleading. Do you need to "set aside the idea that the experience is artificial" in order to invest in it emotionally? Now, it's hardly a reach to go from one statement to the other -- the tiniest of jumps. But in the process, I think you're shutting out a whole class of potential experiences. There's art that's all about heightening the unreality and artifice of a work to produce an emotional response, isn't there? Why can't games do the same?

I'd say immersion is where you actually give a shit about the story and characters.

Well, why do we need this semantically noisy word just to say "this is interesting"? Sure, there's nothing wrong with saying "immersive story" any more than saying "awesome story," but I don't see anyone turning "awesome" into its own special game design concept(1).
 

It's not that you guys are wrong. It's just that I don't see how "immersion" as a concept helps you structure your ideas all that much. I still feel like it invites game designers to conflate things that aren't quite the same, producing confusion in the process.

-- Alex
 

1 -- Well, maybe John Romero. *rimshot* *silence*

 

[Pastey Old Greg]

It's all just an argument over a word. When you're immersed in a game, you're hooked to something in it, whether it's immersed in a game's world, story, characters, gameplay, etc. If you feel like you're "really there," then you're immersed. If a character you like dies and you actually care, you're immersed. If you're playing a game, and notice that the last time you looked at a clock was about five hours ago when you first started playing, then you're immersed.

Immersion is an important part of a game for many people. A game can be polished and playable, but if it seems ho-hum or you've played it before, then you're not immersed, and you can care less. But if you've been playing for god knows how many hours, have laughed at many jokes, or follow the storyline, then you're immersed, and allows for a better experience. In this regard, I think most people have experienced it at one point or another, and it equaled a better experience for them.

 

[shatnershaman]

I like shooting my buddies and make dead master chief piles (with blue spiders crawling around). The robot doesn't care.

 

[Alex_P]

In order to role-play correctly, one must be immersed in the character being role-played, especially if this character is incongruous with one's own personality. So in an RPG, for example, should your character be presented with a challenge, and you're aware that you are role-playing, an immersive game would elicit a more natural, intuitive response out of you that makes sense as something that the character you're role-playing would do. To be less immersed in your game and your character would cause you to do something that makes sense to you, the player, and not you, the gaming character, which could remind you that you're at a computer desk, and have you replay the part and choose according to your character's preference or alignment, or have you skip the part out of frustration and continue on with the game, dissatistfied. You cannot tell me that, in this case, proper immersion is not required. Of course it is.

This is the kind of thing you see repeatedly in discussions of pen-and-paper roleplaying. "What my character would do" is everywhere.

No, proper immersion is most definitely not required.

For years, the only way I've been "roleplaying" is in what's sometimes called "author stance." I choose what I want to see happen -- based on what I think will make for a cool story and what I think will entertain my friends -- and then inventing a character's motivations based on that. The fundamental act -- creating shared fiction -- is the same. Lots of people use this as their primary mode of play. Pretty much everyone who's "roleplaying" does at least a little bit of this.

If I want to see a story about redemption and I think we're at a good dramatic moment, "my character" is going to have a change of heart. It'll make sense. If you don't ask me about my thought process, it'll look almost the same to you. But

Hell, most of the time, it just plain works better than "what my character would do," because it's all about what makes good entertainment for me and my friends rather than about some nebulous fictional entity "would do" (it also frees us up to do things like have me introduce details about your character and vice versa, if we want to go that route as a group).

This approach is also massively more natural in a CRPG, where the environment and storyline are both highly constrained. It's much easier to just guide your Shephard or Jedi Exile or JC Denton down a path that looks cool to you than it is to actually come up with a virtual personality and then try to shoehorn that entire personality into a bunch of dialog choices and a few story branch points.

-- Alex

 

[Alex_P]

It's all just an argument over a word.

When you design around shaky concepts, bad stuff comes out.

-- Alex

 

[Alex_P]

Aren't you suppose to RUN in tennis and baseball. FIELD in baseball. WALK in golf. MOVE in boxing. No just BAT,PITCH,PUTT,PUNCH,and LEAN.

Hell, I'd settle for a Wii Tennis that doesn't make my little toon wave his racket rabidly any time I miss a shot and then try to swing my hand back to position to try to take another.

That's just crappy, unintuitive interface design right there.

(This post isn't really about immersion. Sorry!)

-- Alex

 

[Gunmanj]

OOOOOOH you meant the actual definition, I thought you meant the company, a relative of mine works there, so I was like, HEY thats not very nice.

 

[Russian Redneck]

There is no such thing as "pure immersion". Immersion is simply the act of being deeply involved with something. It gets kind of vague there but that's what it is. You can even look it up on dictionary.com.

 

[Saskwach]

I read the first few posts, and scrolled to here, expecting that the entire thread would be bogged down in semantics and over-analysis. Tell me, was I right?

 

[Alex_P]

There is no such thing as "pure immersion". Immersion is simply the act of being deeply involved with something. It gets kind of vague there but that's what it is. You can even look it up on dictionary.com.

... Which is why putting it up on an altar and developing elaborate theories about it, mostly based on equating it with immediacy and realism, is pointless. Yet a lot of gamers and game designers seem to do just that, all the time. It's totally crippling the pen-and-paper gaming world, for example.

-- Alex

 

[dusparr]

(from my Game design teach)
Immersion is:
1 The act of experiencing something in such a way that one
(a) do not notice ones surroundings/time
(b) have been drawn in to the point of reacting to non-needed reactions (IE jumping when startled)
(c) think, not in terms of oneself, but in terms of the charcter one is experiencing from (IE O crap I just lost *insert healers name here*, Instead of, My healer just died, better res them)