Immersion, or What Do Games Owe Us? (Patreon)

Joseph Anderson’s Plague Tale: Innocence analysis starts with examples about how the scripting of the mechanics of a game world can spoil immersion a little. In the video, Joseph’s examples are a hole in the wall that Witch-Man Geralt from The Witch-Man should be able to fit through, but can’t, and invisible walls in Resident Evil 2, which the zombies can’t cross, that the game needs to give you so there are places in the game you can feel safe from being torn to shreds.

These are good, solid examples of where games engage in a little trade-off between believability and playability, but it got me thinking about immersion, and how many game reviewers I’ve seen on this blessed wonderful site of TruYoub dot gun say that something minor in a game, like a dodgy animation or clumsy bad enemy AI “breaks immersion” for them, and about whether games really owe us, as players, immersion.

Firstly, maybe let’s just do the classic video essay thing and ask what is immersion, or at least try to be a bit more thoughtful about our question. To be immersed in a game is to lose yourself in it, and think about it, and only it, and let it become your reality - at least that’s what it sounds like from the word, but that kind of sounds like a high bar: Not many people are playing Call of Duty VR from a sensory deprivation tank. There’s some sort of “immersing yourself” joke here, I’ll let you come up with it while I get pretentious about video games.

There is a video game genre people call the “immersive sim”, which would maybe suggest that the high bar of immersion doesn’t need to be cleared by every game, just these ones. However, according to the sacred texts an immersive sim is a type of game which “emphasises player choice”. Now, being able to make realistic decisions in a game is definitely something that adds to your ability to suspend disbelief - in fact we’re getting back to it later, so just immerse that one in the back of your mind for now - but games that have unchanging, linear stories, that narratively function more like books or movies don’t necessarily immerse the player less, they just immerse the player in the same way as - surprisingly - books, or movies.

To that end, games that function like cinema but with gun-shoot-sections and quicktime events are often criticised for failing to keep up immersion on very superficial grounds, such as the graphics.

Graphics have never been very immersing for me. When I remember games I played years ago I don’t see them how they actually look, I see them in sharp reality. When I think about Sonic heroes, or The Force Unleashed, Assassins Creed on the Nintendo DS, or Star Wars Battlefront - the original Star Wars Battlefront that is, or damn: Silent Hill 2 scared the ever-loving shit out of me and now I legitimately find it hard to understand how that could be. 

When I picture Shadow the Hedgehog, I see a perfect, photorealistic masterpiece, more realistic than we could even create with the graphics technology of the Year of our Lord, Current Year, and when I actually go back and replay the game I find, y’know what, I was right about that. Mwah. Perfection.

But other games besides Shadow the Hedgehog have aged like goddamn cheese.

This is a well recognised phenomenon. The memory filter makes games look better in your mind than in reality. I suspect this has something to do with Semantic versus Episodic memory - how we store memories as either facts, or things that happened to us. When you play a game or watch a TV show or a movie you remember the story with your episodic memory, so instead of remembering watching a show, on a television, you remember the show. Maybe the fact that you’re reconstructing the story as semi-real-life events makes you sharpen all the graphics retrospectively, but a part of that has to have something to do with immersion, right? You wouldn’t do that if you weren’t immersed in the art piece.

I also think this has to do with why if you were watching a TV show when you played a game, you remember the TV audio when you play it again, or when you go to a place where you listened to a podcast you remember the podcast. I don’t know, this is very anecdotal now. Serious academic psychologists, please come stop me spewing all this highly unscientific conjecture, I’m running seriously close to writing 12 Rules for Life right now.

Recently I’ve gotten into a lot of older games - Myst, Riven, Fallout 1 & 2, Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™ and the memory filter works on them even now. Myst feels atmospheric and creepy, and for the most part that game is just still images with some sound effects.

The oldest game currently available on GOG is Akalabeth: World of Doom, originally released 1979. The art up on the GOG store shows a snapshot of a dramatic moment in some sort of fantasy epic, probably involving magic, and noblemen and wizards and dragons!

The graphics in the actual game are… not… that.

Oh god help! My one weakness! Bones! Hang on, what’s that in between the skeleton’s legs?

But I know that when people played this they weren’t engaging with the lines on the screen, they were engaging with the imaginary world of the game in their head.

The introductory screen of the game explains how some Lord Mondain, who was “Archfoe of British” - well that’s understandable we do suck - turned the land of Akalabeth into an evil cursed place, and now you must go there and kick some ass basically. You’re going on an adventure, that’s the whole point!

I know that that art of the guy… smashing...the beanie (???) off the skeleton (???) was probably more recent art for the GOG store page, but that’s what players were seeing when they played this game.

I find all this especially funny, because Akalabeth: World of Doom is actually a direct rip-off of the most immersive game I’ve ever played, which itself has objectively the worst graphics. I’m talking, of course, about Dungeons & Dragons.

Tabletop roleplaying games like D&D - where you make decisions for your character and then roll dice to simulate your odds of success - remain timeless because of their incredible adaptability. Maybe it wasn’t fair for me to say they have the worst graphics. Arguably, they have the best graphics, because the entire game is in your imagination.

This is my point, that you are doing the work of creating the world of any game, and it’s only when you’re doing some amount of work putting yourself into the fiction that they feel immersive.

These kind of collective storytelling games engage you in a way that little else does, because by definition you have to work together with your friends and you create a world together, and what’s more immersive than that. And that’s why the return of TTRPGs is going to bring about world communism.

Dang, I’ve really gotta make my video about TTRPGs.

I’m mentioning my scripts here so people leave me comments encouraging me to actually write them. It’s my new productivity technique.

You may have seen cartograms - the weird disproportionate maps that are inflated based on a theme to create Dummy Thicc Britain. To be clear: not projections that stretch the globe in a funny way to make it into a 2D shape and accidentally enhance the glorious might of Greenland, but maps that deliberately warp the size of geographic regions to represent data.

Good mechanics should work like a cartogram, inflating the impression some things make and shrinking the impression other things make, except in games it should represent the artistic themes of the game, and not the world population or how many McDonalds are in each US state.

Death Stranding is all mechanics. Let me unpack that a little bit. I don't just mean that the game is fiddly or complicated, I mean that it communicates its messaging wholly using its gameplay. The symbolism in Death Stranding is famously extremely convoluted and bizarre, and a big part of that is that major parts of the piece are mechanically relevant to the themes, not aesthetically relevant. The chiral crystals are symbolism - equal opposites, named after the Greek for hand and the chemical notion of two things that are like reflections of each other. On the other - ha - hand, the baby you carry around isn't symbolism. The baby is mechanically relevant. We'll get back to the baby.

And when I say that the game communicates its messaging wholly through gameplay, I don't mean there isn't subtext in the other elements of the piece. It's basically a system of redundancy. Death Stranding is a really good game that communicates its themes competently and confidently through its mechanics and gameplay, and the cutscenes of Death Stranding are basically a kinda boring movie that incidentally happens to have all the same themes.

Where a lot of games keep you limited to a very small set of abilities, Death Stranding gives you abilities out the wazoo, from drinking monster energy, to going to the bathroom, to eating, to sleeping, to drinking more monster energy - Some tasks serving a vital purpose in the progression of the game, others being significantly more pointless. The overall effect of this is giving the player an experience that is very representational of the life of the courier - albeit with more ghosts and a significantly shrunken scale of space and time. The mundanity of Sam's life (besides the ghosts) gives you a lot of time to reflect and process a very specific feeling. And when I say a lot of time to reflect, I mean a lot of time. I have the video of me driving for 7 solid minutes at full speed along a smooth road to deliver a package to prove it. 

So Death Stranding is all about the mechanics. 

Its creator, Hideo Kojima, is famous for quirky lateral thinking when it comes to game design, for example needing to save the game and wait a week before playing again or set the Playstation’s internal clock a week forward to make an opponent die of old age.

Let’s look at three examples of ways that Death Stranding communicates its ideas through mechanics alone. What are the ideas? Connection, alienation, and the value of human life.

Connection is communicated through the mechanics of the online-mode, which shares your buildings to other players. If you make a bridge, it can appear in someone else’s game, and if they give it “likes” it can appear in more other people’s games too. When I first encountered the likes-as-currency thing I thought yes Hideo, I too have seen Black Mirror but it’s a big relief that it turns out not to be an edgy, unnecessarily pessimistic what if phones but too much element, but instead part of a really uplifting and positive theme. You are part of a bigger whole, and being an active and enthusiastic participant in society will help to heal all ills as it strengthens the rope formed by our many strands.

Alienation, of course, has to come before connection. The loneliness and isolation of modern society has to be demonstrated first - the problem must be laid out before Kojima can describe a solution. As such the world of Death Stranding is extremely lonely. The characters you deliver packages to are almost always just holograms representing real people who can’t or simply won’t bother to come out to actually meet you.

The enemies you encounter in the wild are couriers like you, but evil. But there is a little more to it than just Our hero is a postman.. What’s a good baddie for that? Evil Postman. The enemies - MULEs - are addicted to their jobs. They don’t see a reality outside of delivering packages, and as such they just want to steal your packages. MULEs never kill you, they have no interest in it. They don’t hate you, they aren’t ideologically opposed to you, they just want your stuff. And ironically it is more upsetting that they won’t kill you, because it means they don’t even care enough to hate you. They don’t see you as human at all, just a means to an end. They will fight you, they’ll beat you up, but they’ll never kill you.

All this makes the way Death Stranding approaches The value of human life quite interesting. Even knowing nothing else about the game you probably know that Norman Reedus has to take care of a little baby in a jar, which reinforces the famously tricky and intense walking mechanics of the game - it’s worth not falling over, because when you fall over your controller handset starts crying. The baby noises come out of the speaker in the PS4 handset, and if you want them to stop you just have to soothe the baby. Hideo Kojima pulled an absolute masterstroke in making thousands - hundreds of thousands - of gamers take care of a tiny baby and rock it back to sleep when it gets upset. Caring about people, which has been slightly anathema to gamers for a while, is pretty central to this game.

Hideo Kojima pulled the great gamer heist of 2019 tricking 200,000 gamers into being doting fathers, and that fucking rules.

Even the people you don’t care about - even the enemies - are worth not killing. Dead bodies in Death Stranding explode like a nuke if they aren’t disposed of properly fast enough. If you actually kill someone, you’ll have to burn the body or dump it in tar, both of which are really hard to do, so in short: killing people in Death Stranding is a massive goddamn ball ache.

Whether you should or shouldn’t kill people is a topic relatively few games have bothered to address, considering how many games take violence as natural baseline. Death Stranding’s solution of making killing people really boring is novel but it doesn’t really promote a pacificistic worldview, especially as the experience of machine-gunning a bunch of guys is still totally available, just with rubber bullets instead and if you really want to go full Patrick Bateman on a camp full of MULEs you can, it’ll just take a while, but on the other hand the area will be easier to traverse in future.

A game that famously does this much better is Undertale, which has optional paths to spare every fightable enemy instead of killing them. This has been commented on plenty before of course, but the more interesting issue is why people choose to spare NPCs. It isn’t because of real genuine empathy or pity for these fake people. You don’t love Vegetoid. You aren’t going to marry Vegetoid. Vegetoid isn’t gonna fuck you, bro.

Getting really cynical about it, you choose to spare NPCs in Undertale because when you spare them, you get more content. Every time you spare an NPC, you have to learn about them and figure out what would appeal to the character and how to get them to peacefully exit combat. It’s the inverse of Death Stranding - killing enemies is boring not because it involves a tedious task afterwards, but because it’s actually just less fun.

Any time a character is killed it could be viewed as a choice between content paths - route A and route B - not just in Undertale but in every game where killing is an option. Undertale even draws attention to this by presenting you with an early battle that you really think can only go one way and won’t realise until much later on that it is possible to do differently.

When characters are automatically hostile to you, the choice is ultimately between running away and killing, and generally speaking, running away is always less content. This contributes to the single mistake in The Outer Worlds, Obsidian’s space pirate RPG, the spiritual successor to Fallout New Vegas, and the video game Todd Howard sees when he has sleep paralysis.

In The Outer Worlds, choice is everything. Talking to characters and choosing the paths they set out make up the solid majority of the game. Realistic characters who feel like real people is clearly something that matters to the game, in a way that Obsidian is well known for. Between Pillars of Eternity, Fallout and now The Outer Worlds, Obsidian has a pattern of making RPGs that really translate the Table-Top RPG experience into video game form, rather than just first person shooters with Choices™.

In Outer Worlds especially, the importance and weight of violence, particularly against the people at the edges of society, is crucial, so it’s an absolutely awful fuck-up that the game also throws in enemies that are automatically hostile and can’t be talked to or reasoned with, and even worse that those people are just labelled “raiders” or “marauders”. The game is great for lots of reasons, but this runs almost perfectly counter to everything the game is about. There are animals you treat with more respect in this game, and that’s only because those animals are more likely to kill you. It doesn’t have to be like this! Dang I’ve really gotta make my video about The Outer Worlds.

SOMA on the other hand, wants to make you kill people. As high-concept philosophical science fiction, trying to engage with the ideas of transhumanism, SOMA wants to diminish the importance of a human body, an organic body, a physical form, and even any semblance of the “original” version of yourself in favour of the ideas of some version of you existing - living, in some meaningful sense somewhere, and to do that it presents you with several situations where you need to choose between the life and death of another character. Here, the content is on the side of the decision the game wants you to make, so it is at least appropriately thematically weighted, but that weighting is a filthy goddamn trick.

When you choose to kill someone so you can get a part to fix the train or whatever, the game is giving you a full on ultimatum - kill them, and get more content (the whole rest of the game in fact) or spare them and progress no further. To save this NPC you would have to commit to giving up on the game entirely, so to be frank, it actually has no bearing on whether you would kill someone for a train part whatsoever. The game is coercively making you agree with its arguments. I’m not saying that’s bad design, or wrong, though, just pointing out how this ultimatum of more content versus no more content works. For me, the better decisions in the game were when there were no stakes in the choice. Do you let this robot woman lie on the floor of the ocean forever, believing she’s been saved and she’s in heaven? Do you preserve the last living organic human being, even though she’s suffering and will eventually die anyway? The abstractness of these decisions, with no kind of content scales to balance makes them actually closer to the philosophical question the game is trying to ask you.

For me, the thing that breaks immersion the most is something like these decisions, where it feels like there should be more options. I should be able to bring the robot woman with me instead of just leaving her in the sand, and it comes down to how the writers craft that choice, and when the decision to kill someone is based on content, I feel let down. 

Rewinding through about ten years of popular games criticism, this is ludonarrative dissonance! Dang I’ve really gotta make my Outer Worlds video.

All of this is about the way that the mechanics uphold the themes and meaning of the game, and looking at it with immersion in mind, what this has in common with graphics is that the more the game aims to do, the closer scrutiny it’s going to come under.

It’s about scope. When a game sets out to do more, it gives you more, and so naturally there’s more to fail at, and more to critique.

When a game wants to give you photorealistic graphics and perfect animations, it gives itself a responsibility to you, and that specific way of letting you down, essentially.
When a game wants to give you philosophical rigour and powerful, weighty choices, it gives itself that responsibility to you, and then it has to live up to that.

When a game gives you just a framework, and the game exists in your imagination, it can be anything, and that’s why tabletop games will always be the best. Ah fuck, I’ve really gotta make that video.