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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'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?
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.
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.
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.