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How Game Gimmicks Break Immersion
The Moving Pixels blog has brief discussion of how gimmicky game mechanics often break a player's sense of immersion, making it painfully obvious that he's simply jumping through carefully planned hoops set up by the developers. The author takes an example from Singularity, which has a weapon that can time-shift objects between a pristine, functional state and a broken, decayed state. Quoting:
"The core issue with this time control device is that it's just not grand and sweeping enough. It doesn't feel like it's part of a world gone mad. Instead it's just a gameplay tool. You can only use it on certain things in certain places. You can 'un-decay' this chalkboard but not that desk. You can dissolve that piece of cover but not most of the walls in the game. The ultimate failure of such cheap tricks is that they make the game world less immersive rather than more compelling. The world gets divided into those few things that I can time shift, that different set of things I can levitate, and that majority of things that I can't interact with at all. ... I'm painfully aware that all that I'm really doing is pushing the right button at the right place and time. Sure, that's what many games are when you get down to it, but part of the artistry of game design comes from trying to hide this fact."
I liked how there was a sizeable number of PDAs strewn around that you just happened to find in an order that progressively revealed a story. What are the odds of that?! Oh the fun I had reading all those PDAs!
That truly was the worst mechanism for revealing a story I've ever seen. The only thing worse was the actual Doom 3 gameplay. How that game got such good reviews I don't know but I'm making sure not to pay any attention to the Rage hype.
I actually really enjoyed the gameplay. The moment I discovered the idiotic system of codes for the weapons lockers, I went online and printed out a list so I could ignore the various PDAs and audio messages.
The biggest disappointment of all? I got my hands on that leaked E3 Alpha, which was about 10x more interesting and scary than the actual retail game.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
I'll bite...
You can't throw a gimmick in that's not part of the game mechanics. To me, a game mechanic is no different to a real life mechanic. If it happens on A, it should happen on B, C, D, through Z. To restrict the player to using the gimmick a set times is just as bad as these stupid quick time events. "Press X to do something without skill", yeh, that's full immersion.
A game that breaks it's own rule set is a game that's not fun. The device in Singularity is supposed to be some sort of "I win!" button... at least that's what they were teasing for months before release. If you can't figure out how to limit it's use (via ammo or power levels) in a logical manner, why even put it in game?
Replying to myself here.
The problem TFA describes and with similar discussions herein is not limited to just video games. A long time ago some friends would gather around to play table top rpgs. We tried various systems and nearly all of them have the same issue.
At a certain level (or points) the game just goes to stupid. It was very easy to break GURPS in a supers campaign. Generally, the only way to control a rampant and degradation of the game was to play it fairly mildly.
Now, sometimes it is just fun to head straight for stupid and see what kind of fun you can have.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
You can largely solve that problem by implementing realistic time-scales and offering players benefit to out of play aging.
It doesn't work in MMORPGs, but a DM can easily have you travel uneventfully for weeks or months between realms and have you return to the gaming table after a layoff to a character that has been gaining languages or other useful skills at the expense of an aging hit.
The out of play aging is great because a good DM can allow players to create their own interim story and choose from a palette of minor but useful skills that will help during the new campaign. A good group can spend a couple evenings 'back rolling' their stories with each other; and when the actual gaming begins everyone is already in the right headstate.
Anyhow, the cumulative effect of travel time and out of game aging is a character that needs to begin looking at replacing valuable eq slots with anti-age eq around the same time that the game starts to break... If the eq is balanced of course.
Play it again with commentary on. Valve are really seriously thinking about this stuff.
You see, having a game based around a minigame is OK, having a game that using minigames are an extension (most often optional) to the gameplay often makes it better. However making serious shooter or RPG where a gimmick or minigame is central to the gameplay is bad and this goes for most game types. My point is that some people like games such as Tetris or Tower Defence that are based around simple principals as a minigame is, whilst most shooters/RPG/Strategy games cannot work as simply as Tetris they can often use minigames with simple principals to break up the flow and ad atmosphere and character to the game.
If the last sentence offends you, go back to threatening to cockpunch people on Modern Warfare, this conversation is for adults.
Many games have implemented mini-games as a core yet optional part of the gameplay experience. The parent mentioned Bioshock which really is the retarded cousin of a game that was released almost 10 years before it called System Shock 2. Bioshock fails so badly at even getting close to living up to the System Shock 2 standard it's not funny but that's another story. In System Shock 2 there was a hacking minigame, based on selecting squares to illuminate and getting three illuminated squares in a row, of course certain squares would fail to illuminate and three failures resulted in an alarm going off, Which squares were failures was randomised. This was done as a side panel, so the game was going on around you as you tried to hack and there was no time limit. Bioshock, in it's many failures turned this into a skill/time based game which basically turned a fun extension of the game into a clickfest. You had to race against the water moving bits of pipe, further more this removed you from the game. So hacking in Bioshock sucked a lot of fun out of the game by changing the pace of the game and removing you from it. Mini game done wrong. Fallout 3 also removed you from the game but it made hacking and lockpicking optional and the minigames maintained the character of the game.
A well done minigame adds to the atmosphere of an immersive shooter as it did in System Shock 2 to those of you who think Modern Warfare is an immersive shooter, go back to button mashing as this conversation is for adults whilst a poorly done minigame detracts from it. This can be said of all facets of gameplay. Much like Quick Time Events, when they are overused and become a crutch to the central gameplay elements (shooting, jumping, puzzle solving, story) they detract from it and only serve to annoy the player, however a well place QTE will add to the excitement of the game, much the same as cut scenes (which should come in after an accomplishment, when the player is relaxed not when the player is in the middle of something. Valve understood this, even with cutscene-less Half Life, they didn't display pertinent information whilst the player was busy).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You left out the best part of SS2!
The hacking 'minigame' wasn't much of anything. The first System Shock did hacking sooo much better but I'll come back to that.
In SS2, you can pick up a portable gaming system that is a parody of Gameboys. It was called Gamepig and most of the games were simple ones you've all played before but had pig related names and artwork. However... there was one game called Overworld Zero. It played like an old school action RPG, running around a randomly-generated looping area, killing monsters and leveling up.
As stupid as it sounds, it's the best game-within-a-game I've ever played.
And as for hacking in the first System Shock, it was soooo much better. You broke open panels and fiddled with wiring until you found the right combo or messed with... I don't even know how to describe it. You had connected nodes (similar to SS2 hacking) but the changes weren't permanent. You clicked one to allow power through but that could change connecting nodes to the opposite setting. Depending on the puzzle difficulty (the game had customizable settings for combat, mission, puzzle, and cyberspace difficulties), they could be really frustrating.
Most of these guides will state: if your players have a point, don't deny it. If they really want to do something, let them and improvise. If you force players into something "just because" - because you failed to foresee it - you will hear "CHOO-CHOO! RAILROAD!" and get marked as a hopeless railroading fag of a DM.
Some of the favorite motives and best gameplays in RPGs I played were where the players DID break the story and pulled it their way. Yes, the fucking genius wizard did figure out how to use the catapult. Yes, the canny gnome did repair the transport lift to get it to the surface. Yes, the greater earth elemental needed only 2 catapult hits instead of an epic battle. But the amount of heavy thinking they did outweighted the amount of heavy fighting they would do otherwise.
Of course a computer game can't reasonably improvise and react to what developers didn't think about in a way players think is reasonable. Still, instead of noise of door handle flapping helplessly, Morrowind provided the player with one of hundreds generic interiors. Instead of a thousand empty or unbreakable crates, it filled them with generic, cheap, random stuff. Instead of transparent walls it used steep slopes which you couldn't scale but could levitate over - if you were advanced enough to possess levitation, or insistent enough to buy a potion instead of better gear...
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While I can understand or at least guess the rationale behind it, it does break immersion every time it happens. Suddenly the game rules have temporarily changed to something completely different. It's like suddenly entering a room where you walk on the ceiling, or clicking on a link and on that site alone you have the toolbar browser on the bottom and the URL field disabled.
It's stuff you notice because it's different from what you've been conditioned to do without even thinking any more. The whole game I've essentially learned that if someone is wounded, I hit the heal spell. And not just in that game, but in every game I've played or could control a healer.
And I've already suspended disbelief in a reality where magic works and is an integral part of. We're not even talking Tolkien like worlds where there are two mages total, and they cast nothing more useful than making a staff's tip glow, but worlds where mages and clerics are a dime a dozen and every peasant goes to one when he has the sniffles. And if somehow you don't have one around, you could have been run through and had an arm lopped off, and one night of good sleep will fix that too. And suddenly all that doesn't work like that any more, and I have to suspend disbelief in why it doesn't work in this particular situation.
And sometimes it really works by neither RL nor normal game rules. E.g., in Dragon Age Origins, when you meet that guy who basically gives you the quest to buy the Return To Ostagar DLC. (Yeah, they took nickel-and-diming the players that far. Now you have NPCs in the game telling you to fork over more RL money. And don't get me started on how much _that_ breaks suspension of disbelief.) That guy has been run through an left for dead, but he neither just stays unconscious RL-like, nor can be healed as per the normal game rules. You can revive him well enough to have a long and coherent conversation, but not well enough to actually stay alive.
And, you know, I'm starting to find it lazy. They could always find some in game explanation for why that guy can't be healed. E.g., in Persona when they have to poke one of your characters unhealable, they actually have the bad guy prepare a spear that causes unhealable wounds.
It's not even something outlandish. People actually believed that kind of thing IRL about various "magical" wepons. E.g., about the Crocea Mors sword of Julius Caesar. Any wound from it, no matter how superficial, kills. Or Persona essentially uses the Holy Lance in that role. (I've said "prepare" it previously, in that the setup of the game is basically reality by consensus. If enough people believe something, then it is real. So if you could get enough people to believe that you have the Holy Lance, then that spear _is_ the Holy Lance.)
Heck, historically people believed all sorts of bogus stuff about various pieces of weaponry. We have good weapons, evil weapons, weapons that can't be sheathed back unless they tasted blood, etc. And those were people who would have had more reason to doubt it. In a game where we're already conditioned to suspend disbelief, how hard would it be to have some makeshift explanation for why that wound can't be healed.
Or poison, now that's a low hanging fruit. Some special rare poison that can't be healed except by extraordinary means. Heck, it's the whole setup for Silverthorn, so if it was good enough for a novel, it must work in a game too, right?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm pretty sure that a self aware adult would acknowledge that games are essentially frivolous. There's no "WIN IN THE REAL WORLD" achievement.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Valve is really serious about play testing their games to death, which sadly however also removes what makes games interesting, as instead of giving you something interesting to discover, the games are so smooth and through fully tested that you have close to zero chance to discover anything the developer didn't intend.
Valve games for me are like amusement park rides, sure they are fun and all, but at the end of the day you are riding on rails, seeing a well crafted show, not an actual interactive world.
Red Faction, the first one, was actually really good with its Geo-Mod tech. Your point is valid, there were some times when you had indestructible object (often things which in real life would be a lot weaker than a solid wall of rock) but all in all I think they did a great job on it. The first Red Faction game was, coincidentally, the first PC game I pirated, played through the campaign, then went to the store and bought, for the multiplayer (which was fantastic, except for the odd dick who would just camp with a rail gun).
Aside note: Was Red Faction based on Total Recall, or rather, PK Dick's novel? The story line seems very similar in some places.
Many shooters these days (Bad Company 2, even MW2) offer so-called "Hardcore Mode" which, in addition to being closer to realism (bullets actually kill quite quickly, in small amounts) they remove most if not all aspects of the HUD; no crosshair (so firing from the hip is fairly blind-fire), no healthbar (you are either dead or not), no ammo display (you keep track of how much ammo you burn. when it's empty it's empty), no map (unless you have a UAV in the air, in the case of MW2). The score/time left is also not readily available unless you bring up the scoreboard.
Immersion is the wrong word to use to define the concept described in TFA.
What is described in TFA is much closer to what is called "The Suspension of Disbelief"
In any game that is telling some sort of story, the objective is to design the game in a way that tells a story. And every good story should draw the "reader" into the imaginative world of the story (Suspension of Disbelief) so that the "reader's" imagination can assist in filling the gaps. Whenever a story includes or excludes certain details (inconsistencies) which cause the "reader" to be jarred out of the imaginative world of the story, it momentarily disrupts the "reader's" imagination.
The best storytelling goes to great lengths to avoid such inconsistencies, while the worst storytelling doesn't care about "Suspension of Disbelief" at all and doesn't bother with trying to remain consistent.
This is true for movies, or novels, and for storied games. It doesn't apply to games that have no story, such as Tetris. So, when a story based game has jarring inconsistencies or is injected with strange pauses while the player is required to complete some weird mini-game that doesn't fit the environment of the rest of the game, it disrupts the fun of the game by disrupting the Suspension of Disbelief.
You keep using that word.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
I don't get this? You prefer to find bugs or areas of the game you can get into but not get out of? The point of the game is for a developer to tell a story. You shouldn't be able to discover anything the developer didn't want you to. Otherwise it becomes what essentially amounts to a bug.
Now if this makes the game boring then that fault lies squarely on the developer.
You know, this has been why I've been giving a lot of game developers shit the last few years wherever I go. I ridicule them as far as I can because they've gotten lazy and simply covered up good game design with graphics. Immersion is a very, very, very strong element in any game and game developers can't even seem to see the benefit of adding completely destructible environments to a game. Of course that means that game has to be less structured. IE you can't just run one guy through a bunch of carefully shaped alleyways against a never ending stream of bad guys they have to fight upstream against. Games such as CoD make you feel like you're a trout swimming up river. That's all it ever felt like. Being able to blow up buildings, crush your camping opponent with rubble, or shoot through the floor...
There are so many really, really cool things they could do with games and yet they're still stuck making the same crap and regurgitating it because it had good sales or imitating a game that had good sales. It's really quite sad.
I know this is almost completely left field for game developers, but they should take a few classes in psychology to learn about the people they're making games for. The term the opening post is referring to is called 'Flow' in psychology. It's really quite a easy thing to understand and I'm sure almost everyone has felt it. It's part of what makes up a good game as well. Being able to lose yourself in something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Honestly though, past game developers didn't need science to coin terms for them to find out the right things a game needed. They simply created what they thought would be amazing and fun rather then look for a magic recipe. I don't know if it is because people are now going into programming just for a job instead of being passionate about it or the people who actually control what games are being made no longer care about making good games.
Either way this is something I feel quite passionately about and it's really quite sad games have been relegated to such a sorry state. They're just soups with the proper ingredients (MSG) to sell well rather then all around wholesome. It's been a really long time since I've seen a new one that was really just 'good'. I don't say that simply from the point of reminiscing about what I once played, rather because games have went down hill.
Sometimes there is something with the hacking or access, but yeah, mostly its crap. Though the gadgets that double Hacking and Access time can pay for themselves many times over. Of the two Access gets you more loot, like locked doors to apartments you can loot.
I'm playing Red Dead Redemption right now, and safecracking is a fun little mini game, the controller vibrates when you're close to the right number on the tumbler, its intuitive to anyone who's ever had a high school locker and I don't see how you could screw it up, but its kinda neat, and there is ususally some cash in the safe.
RPGs are another place where stuff like this breaks the flow of the entire game. I can smash chests, but not doors? I can pick some locks, but not others? I want to go down this road, but I'm not allowed to? This lack of consistency is EXACTLY what breaks the feel of the game
That's what I loved about Arcanum. You can break, loot, lockpick or kill anything and anyone you want. However, it's (usually) not gonna make your quest any easier...
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.