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Re-Examining the Immersion Factor For First-Person Shooters
An opinion piece on Gamasutra looks into the common perception that a first-person view provides a much more immersive experience in shooters. The author argues that this concept needs to be reconsidered, as immersion nowadays is more dependent on what you see, rather than how you see it. The question is further complicated by ever-improving technology and new control schemes. "It's important to realize that making a first-person game almost necessarily means making a game for the dedicated gamer. Innovations on the interface side could help lower the casual block, perhaps through the Wii, Project Natal, or the PS3's new motion controller. Regardless, it will take a lot of work and concerted effort to penetrate the casual audience with a first-person camera. The question is whether we even need to, when there are so many camera systems that games have yet to fully explore."
The Star Trek arcade game (you remember -- the kind you had to put quarters in) had both a first person view (ok, first ship view) and a top-down view. The first person view was nice eye-candy, but a useless distraction in actual combat. The top-down view had so much more usable information and no distracting eye-candy. It was all you needed to play the game effectively (as long as you wanted on one quarter once you mastered it).
That doesn't mean Crysis would be better without the first-person view. It's the realism that makes that kind of game.
"It's important to realize that making a first-person game almost necessarily means making a game for the dedicated gamer." ...emphasis on the "almost."
I think Portal is a great example of a FPS that's interesting to serious gamers while still accessible to casual ones.
One of the main reasons I don't play more FPS titles nowadays is their length: a lot of games, like Half-Life and GTA, build these epic saga storylines and take many days to play thoroughly. In high school, I thought both of those were awesome (especially HL2 and Vice City, respectively) but now, in college, I just don't have time.
Portal is so short, I played it in one sitting. It's also simple: you have exactly one kind of gun throughout the game, and only a handful of opponents. It's the antithesis of a game like WoW, (which I realize is not FPS), and which requires a lot of in-depth game-specific knowledge and deep time commitment to become good at.
Portal goes to great lengths to teach players how to play as they go along. The developer commentary is fascinating... each of the first few levels has a specific concept that it's designed to convey. If you understand quickly, these levels go by fast. If you've never touched a controller in your life, I'd bet money that you could still do them. It's all part of the challenge.
My thoughts are really disjointed tonight, so forgive me.
I do agree with the author, sometimes a first-person perspective may not be the only way to immerse a gamer. Video games, especially first person shooters, used to rely solely on vision. The original Wolfenstein 3D on the PC did not have a rumble feature or 5.1 surround sound, but was still considered groundbreaking because of the perspective it put the gamer in.
The best games, however, do more with existing technologies, such as using a vibration in the controller to indicate either a pulse or that danger is nearby. The use of dark ambient music, creaking noises in floorboards while walking around, or the sudden screeching noise when something pops out also helps. While we cannot do anything with our sense of taste of smell in video games yet, (thank GOODNESS...) we can at least emphasize certain sounds and touch a little more than just pretty graphics.
Going along with the article, the first person perspective brings the dilemma of the "silent hero", because that hero is supposed to be you. However, you rarely get to interact with anything beyond acknowledging an NPC's request to retrieve something for them. You don't get to forge a bond with any of the characters based on your personality traits. I think this is key -- I was way more into Final Fantasy VII because of the level of interaction with the characters. You get to know them and you get to like them. Rockstar Games tried to get characters more involved with NPCs in GTA IV by having the players go out and spend time with them, but you really never get to know them. You go out with them, but only hear side-conversation going on. You're not really allowed to say anything in that game beyond clicking on the NPC to get the next quest.
There are still limitations. There are only a finite number of dialog choices and while you can allow the gamer to make their own dialog (as with the original Police Quest series), NPCs won't understand most of it and will only give canned responses. MMORPG's will allow gamers to say whatever they want to other gamers, but are still bound to the NPC's world. Most games don't have that story-telling feature to allow the gamers to create their own quests.
So yes, it's not all about the first-person perspective. Sound and touch also play a role, but the biggest factor of all is the depth of interaction with other characters and the unique, likable personalities that let you identify with them.
Best "String" Ever!
There are a lot of things you might want out of a game, of which immersion is only one. You might also want engagement, fun, thought-provokingness (okay, maybe less from an FPS), and lots of other qualities. There even some research showing that perfect immersion might harm some of these other properties, and may not be the sweet spot--- playing games on some perfectly immersive, like the Star Trek Holodeck, might not actually be what a lot of people want. I know I personally enjoy some mediation between myself and the virtual world; I like to feel that I'm playing a game, not actually in the world. But then i like turn-based and 2d games, too.
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The most immersive game I've ever played is Nethack.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Nothing kills immersion more than having to look up which button does what. But if you've played one FPS, you can sit down with any other and have an immediate, intuitive understanding of how it works. In real life, you don't have to think about how to walk, run, drive a car, swim... So if you want immersion, you have to make all that as intuitive as possible -- easily accomplished if every game of the same genre has the same control scheme.
There are a few games that really got to me:
1) Alone in the dark. The first incarnation of this. The graphics were horrible but the immersion was immense. This game had me actually scared of what was coming next.
2) Half-life 1. Much more so then Half-life 2.
3) Alien vs. Predator. Where you play the squishy marine, and you just gone inside a long tunnel. You end up in a chamber where one of you fallen comrades is, only to find he's been encapsulated into a wall. Then your motion sensor goes berzerk, and you start running.. back through that long tunnel. When you look back now and then the walls and ceiling are crawling with predators trying to catch up with you. Every now and then you have to hit a switch to close a door. _This_ was some fucking immersion, nearly had a heart attack, but I'm still happy I made it out of that tunnel alive.
4) Some incarnation of Splinter Cell. I played the whole game with the self-imposed restriction that I wouldn't kill a single character. Turns out there were 2 situations in there where I was obligated to kill a key figure. However by stocking up on stun gas grenades I was able to defeat one 'boss' by stunning him (after _many many_ tries). Come the cutscene, he was dead ;)
5) System Shock 2. Oh god.. I'm alone on a huge space ship.. Somebody hold me!
There are a number of other games that I can't recall the name of, but immersion seems to be independent of graphics to me, as long as the graphics don't hinder your immersion. To reach immersion I think you need to heed the following points:
- Don't put anything in the game that will irritate the user. I'm talking interface here, so go for a minimal, but useful HUD. Use sane controls that can be reconfigured by the user to his/her liking. Make sure you take out the bugs.
- Make it a whole. Make sure there is a backstory and that the character and his/her actions fit into it. Let the user find out that there is a whole galaxy out there with strange and wondrous things. You don't have to show it all, but make some references to things that 'happened' without going into too much detail. Leave the gamer with questions. This is the reason why Star Wars was so popular as a genre.
- No jumping puzzles.
- Make the game challenging. Make it 'hard' without actually even having be hard. But give the gamer a sense of accomplishment. You don't do this by making him have to shoot 30.000 of identical aliens btw.
- Give the user choices. _REAL_ choices, not a 'good' and 'evil' choice that end up with the same result anyway. Give the user some actual influence in the game. World of Warcraft is an example of how not to do this. Everybody is 'special' but you are indistinguishable from all the other players.
- _NO JUMPING PUZZLES_, no really
- If you do introduce puzzles, make them logical. On the other end of the spectrum is Monkey Island, where you have to combine the extendable rubber hand with the pepper shaker so you can make the skeleton sneeze to blow out the candle so the room goes dark so that you can safely steel the treasure without the skeleton seeing it. It's just not logical. :)
- Make the player care for the main character and cohorts. You can do this by not making him invulnerable. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of horrible games that implement the 'one glance from an enemy and you are dead' principle, but that is not good either.
- Personal development. RPG's are fun because you get to 'build' your own character by improving those things you enjoy/think are important. So introduce some RPG bits to your FPS. Classic examples are Deus Ex and Bioshock. Don't let players have it all, make them choose.
I can think of a lot more things, but graphics is not one of the components that define immersion in my book.
PS.
(no jumping puzzles)
You know what's the biggest obstacle to my immersion in games such as Call of Duty or GTA? The way it's all scripted. It's a bit too much like a movie, the game designers want too much control over what I see. As a result, I know the story is waiting for me, no matter if shit is hitting the fan all around me and that NPCs are yelling that I have to hurry up. I know that if I die it's a minor convenience, I just have to do again exactly what I did for the last 40 seconds or so (at most, except for GTA, where every time you fail you have to do the same fucking thing, seeing the same cutscenes, for minutes all over again) and try again until I succeed.
These game fail me at immersion because they're just the sophisticated equivalent to turning the pages of a book. The story will unfold as scripted no matter what you do, even if it might need repeats (funny thing about failing, failing is always mostly non-canon. That too ruins the immersion.). I was really excited the first time I played GTA III, because I was really into it, until I failed a mission. I wondered a bit scared what would happen next, and to my relief I could try it again. Then I felt less immersed, because I can kill my boss, I can kill myself, I can fuck up everything, but the story will have to unfold, even I suck really hard.
Such games may be geographically open, in that you can go anywhere, but everything that matters is on rails. Well actually that's something that Battlefield 1942 got right. You could get defeated, it was canon, you didn't *have* to win, the war unfolded as you were making it happen. Well the idea wasn't pushed very far in that your failures didn't affect the rest of what would happen.
TL;DR : The problem with games is that they're full of very carefully created content; places and storylines, to the point that the designers make sure that you get to see all of their content. They wouldn't design a whole map if odds were you'd fail to get there. I think that instead of designing maps, they should design worlds, and instead of designing carefully crafted stories they should make great AIs so that their interactions with you result in a story (i.e. in a war game, have strategic AIs, which decide of where to take the war next as to try to defeat the other strategic AI. In other words, AIs would play a RTS, while you'd play one of their units).
You just got troll'd!