Immersion in games is a tricky thing. Many times, its out of the game's control whether you're immersed fully in the story or not. One moment I'm Cassandra the Gray Warden, hacking through Darkspawn at the side of my beloved Alistair, the next the dishwasher goes off and the phone rings and someone's knocking at the door and I see that it's 4:00 and I should really get the grocery shopping done so I can cook tonight. I have adrenaline pumping through my veins as I have the perfect ambush set up, and as I rush behind a squad of enemies throwing grenades and making precision strikes, the cat starts yowling for food and the boyfriend starts asking me how I'm enjoying the game so far. I'm running at the side of Francis, Bill and Louis, shouting that there's a hunter behind us and a smoker on the ledge to the west, don't shoot that car and move move move - then my internet goes down or I have to step away from the computer to howls of 'ragequit'.
So ideally, I'm a fan of games where short bursts of gameplay with lots of opportunity to take a break is possible. I hate save points. I hate gauntlets. I hate gauntlets followed by unpausable twenty minute cutscenes. And so on.
There's a range to how much immersion breaking one can tolerate. Dungeons and Dragons has the lowest possible standard. We use broken Warhammer figures and Lord of the Rings themed Monopoly pewter figures on cardboard maps with paper grids glued on. When my cleric Anorra flips a table over, the DM puts a little paper table on its side and puts the little pewter Galadriel behind it and asks me what my next action will be while I move my chair so our rogue can go get another pop and hollers if anyone wants a refresher on their doritos. Survival horror, in my opinion, has the lowest tolerance for immersion-breaking. Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 control nearly exactly the same, but they're both billed as survival horror. Dead Space is about sixty thousand times more effective in this goal because of the atmosphere, music, sound cues, npcs, communication system, and so on. But there's a reason that people talk about playing their horror games at 3am with the lights off - they're helping the game along to create the perfect environment. This is also probably why there's the stereotypes of giggling girls shrieking into their popcorn at the slasher films - the idea of breaking the tension and denying the film's reality.
Immersion is crucial to a game because a game is useless if I do not care about its protagonist and their goals. I can barely watch movies because I don't see secret agent Salt, I see Angelina Jolie, and I spend the entire time going "Hey, why is Angelina Jolie talking to that guy? Why is Angelina Jolie in a fight? Who's car is that, is that Angelina Jolie's boss' car?" and so on. Video games don't suffer from this, as you can often create your own face, and whenever characters are 'lifted' from real people those people are not celebrities but instead models.
One of the biggest problems I have with immersion though is a wink from the devs. I can't stand it. Blizzard does this all the time in World of Warcraft and it drives me insane. When storming the dread Icecrown Citadel to confront Arthas for the evil he's inflicted upon the world - and Arthas is a big bad who's obliterated one kingdom, wreaked insane havoc upon an entire continent, genocided one race succesfully and did a damn good job with two others and then raised huge portions of them to serve him in undeath, so it's important to the story that we take him down - and we run into Professor Putricide. The name is bad enough, but he's a Futurama reference who constantly spouts "Good news, everyone, I'm going to have to slaughter you all!" and such.
Fuck!
The old Fallout games did stuff like this too, like Juan Cruz the Hubtologist in the burned out church. But Putricide is so blatant and dumb that I can't get over it. Like I've said, you're already fighting a million factors for immersion - doubled by the fact that you're playing with 9-24 other people and you're all on Vent - and they ruin what they describe as an 'epic' experience by throwing this in.
What immersion-breakers bother you? What's annoying and what's unforgivable? Is there any way to recapture immersion once it's broken? Weigh in.
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I think I am my own immersion breaker, lol. It takes a lot for a game to really suck me in, and when a game does it's hard to break. But when it doesn't, I get super antsy. I'll pause every 20 minutes (or turn the game off), walk around, get food, get water, etc. Plus, for me at least there haven't been any decent games to get me to sit for hours and play them. Assassin's Creed II I'll sit and play for a few hours, but even that I'll gladly stop mid story to engage in other hobbies. I guess maybe my videogaming (at least since the PS2 became more or less obsolete) has taken a back seat to my art and other activities from a lack of games engaging enough to pay 60 dollars to play.
ReplyDeleteBut Assassin's Creed II brings up, I guess, a game made immersion-breaker for me: bad voice acting. Or in Assassin's Creed II's case: TERRIBLE accents. I'm serious, it was hard enough to not bust out with "Prego!" at the end of every other sentence, but then Uncle Mario shows up with a loud "Don't you remember me? It's-a me, Mario!" and I think I only laughed out of sheer madness. Thanks, Ubisoft, for actively pointing out how bad your accents were. Why didn't they just do the whole game in Italian, or at least give me the option to spare myself such audiotory torture? Hard to get into it when I'm cringing every 5 seconds from someone talking at me.
I love video games :3
ReplyDeleteThe most immersive games I've played recently were...
Patapon - holy shit once you figure it out & get the rhythym going you do not want to stop.
Lumines - same reason. I lost track of time repeatedly.
And oldie but goodie - Chrono Trigger on the DS. I already beat it like 2 dozen times in the 90s so I only bought it for nostalgia. I started playing and thought, "lol this'll be worth 20 minutes then I won't play ever again..."
and I just, I couldn't stop. I forgot so much & the story was so good & the controls worked & it's like it barely aged a day. I burned through it in a few days & was sad it was over.
It seems that for me music is critical. If the game music & sound effects don't match, I don't get completely absorbed. I like getting wrapped up in the game.
Dead Space creates a lot of its atmosphere with sound.
ReplyDeleteFor starters, you will never hear "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" quite the same way again.
One of the things I love about that game is that it's one of the handful of titles that gets "no sound in a vacuum" right, and uses it to greater effect. Fighting Necromorphs in hard vacuum is scary because you lose audio cues that normally tip you off to their presence; all you can hear is Isaac's increasingly labored breathing, the muffled thumps and zaps of your weapons, and Isaac's grunts or screams of pain, and nothing else. It manages to get across a confined, claustrophobic feel very effectively.
The incorporation of HUD elements into the character design I thought was inspired, as well. Life bars, ammo counters, etc, around the edge of the screen detract from immersion unless they have a reason to be there. Putting all that information on Isaac himself, and being consistent about that display (everyone's RIG has a life bar on their spine, for example), and then placing the camera just behind Isaac so things can still sneak up on you, also add to the immersion.
Zealous, that brings up an interesting point, which is the internal rules of the universe. It's like the argument where someone goes "Why are you upset by x in a fantasy game when orcs and elves are running around?" Dead Space (ignoring the offshoots which were all written by different teams and therefore contradictory), Dead Space has fantastic internal logic. They set firm rules in a fantastic universe and sticks to them. It does wonders for immersion.
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