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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."
This is the biggest problem I have with cheesy minigames. Really? I have to "hack a computer" by redirecting pipes so water can flow through them? (Or whatever the hell it is you're doing in Bioshock... this is the best way I can explain it). That shit was fun when it came with my Games for Windows 95 pack, but it's a bit out of place in a modern immersive shooter.
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Scribblenauts actually did fairly well with a free form diverse tool of summon anything.
In fact, it was just too much fun to randomly see what I could do. ie, summon a vampire, a priest and a vampire hunter to watch them duke it out. (Seriously, you can do that!)
The down side is there really isn't much more to do then solve their word puzzles. I'm sure in a more complex game the free form behavior of the ability would break any attempt at constructed story telling.
If you can solve the problem of allowing god like powers and keeping semi-structured storyline in place you probably should start working on a product now.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Ya, the article is kind of bickering, but how many games have you played that offered so-called "fully interactive environments" that just aren't fully interactive? It's always a let-down.
Also, gotta love the "cheap shots." I mean, I just killed about a hundred soldiers and got shot a thousand times, but one guy walks up behind me and cracks me on the head to knock me out so next I have to start in a jail cell with no weapons. And these "guards" that are holding me? Bitch please, I could melee all of them in about 30 seconds and not feel a thing. But instead you have to play along and "steal" the key because otherwise... GAME OVER!
that's teh shizzle bizzle
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.
Did it right.
Almost every other game with a gimmick = does it wrong.
This is exactly why Portal was so awesome. Although it was a FPS, it behaved like any old 2D puzzler. It started out the same way for 15 levels: Light walls you put a portal on, dark walls you don't put a portal on. I began to see the game abstractly, like looking at a Minesweeper board. Then you go behind the wall and find the surprise. "The cake is a lie" was a funny internet meme for a year, but before that it was kind of disturbing to see for the first time. More games should challenge your expections, I hope the sequel lives up to it.
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.
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I always hated this part of RPGs.
The messenger/last survivor of the massacre with his last gasp, says a bunch of nonsensical stuff, right before he dies. WTF? There's two fucking clerics in the party that can cast Heal in the middle of a battle. And now that the dude's dead, why can't my guys cast Raise Dead on him? Total crap.
Planescape Torment is one of the few that get this mechanic even close to right.
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?
The syntax 'GET LAMP' has nothing to do with immersion. Whether the GET command behaves similarly with all described objects or only works with defined items like LAMP would be the immersion consideration.
Yes, Red Faction. A game which touted the ability to use a rocket launcher to blow the shit out of rocky caverns and construct new tunnels to traverse through... and yet when fired at the partitions in office cubicles would do absolutely nothing.
Still, apparently it worked much better in multiplayer. Probably because the need to artificially limit the player was less of a requirement in MP than it was in SP.
For me, quick time events are the worst offenders of all that have ruined many modern games for me (Resident Evil 4/5, God of War series, Uncharted, etc.) . Interrupt the game, destroy the atmosphere by displaying console-specific button prompts, and then force the player to play some lame simon-says game resurrected from the dark era of "interactive movie" games on the mega-cd. Yeah, that's a great idea...
This is the problem with a HUD. Health bars look dumb, and remind you that you're not playing a person but some abstraction of a person. Magic bars, too. It's unfortunate that the real-world mechanics of death are no fun to play, and so we have to create an unreal world, but hiding this is an important aspect of design in *SOME* games.
On the other hand, the current crop of games trying to 'go no HUD' are often worse. Putting the health bar on the player's back doesn't make it less of a health bar, and serves only to remind me that they're trying to fool me. HUD is at worst a necessary evil, and at best a useful tool.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
Unfortunately, a game mechanic is not the same as a real life mechanic. In real life, adding a particle to a system increases the system's information processing ability, allowing it to keep behaving at the same speed and level of detail as before. In virtual worlds, the total processing power is (very) limited, so adding a part to the simulation slows it down, unless it switches to a higher level of abstraction; but that means that all those high-level properties that exist as a result of low-level properties are lost, unless the new level of abstraction is specifically defined to have them.
In other words, computers are nowhere near as fast to run consistent physics for any reasonable-sized world. Scribblenauts gets close, but as a result, the levels are very small.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
This is like a modern cartoon. American children's cartoons tend to be the worst offenders. Backgrounds are usually static while only the foreground is animated. The background might even be drawn with different penmanship or a different style altogether (e.g. a watercolor background). Sometimes the effect works, as it does in some video games, but in particular if a character has to interact with an element of the background, then things start to look very out of place.
My personal favorite example was from a cartoon showing a series of fences. They were mostly soft, pretty detailed. Except every fence had a few panels in a line that were drawn with heavier lines and flatter colors. It was easy to predict that the scene included a character breaking through those panels.
That was probably intentional, to make it seem like it was really written on a PDA with a crappy keyboard.
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However, the game could have consistent rules. For example, raising-from-the-dead magic can fail to work if the dead guy was blown up (you could revive him, but not put him back together) or killed with a magic spell that prevents revival and then have the plot important death happen this way.
The nuke level magic spell could, for example, be limited to living things and/or just your enemies. But if you say that the spell works just like a nuke, then I expect to be able to level a city with it.
But if I have a rocket louncher using which I can destroy various wooden barriers then I should also be able to destroy the locket rotting wooden door or at least be offered a reason why I must find the key (there is no way to launch the rocket safely because earlier I found out that launching a rocket from a closed space can be bad for your health; the sound will alert someone or whatever) and not just "yea, you could blow a hole in that wall, but here your 10 rockets won't work against this door, save them for when you need to blow up a battleship"
reminds me of Eye of Beholder 2, where you fall down a random pit, find a bunch of bones with a complete skeleton mixed with them, and if you bring the skeleton to an altar of resurrection, you gain a valuable party member.
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First, Tetris has no narrative, while these games do. Immersion in a narrative is different than absorption in a puzzle. Just because they're both "games" doesn't mean you can successfully mix-and-match the fundamentally different experiences of narrative and puzzle. Narrative immersion isn't dependent on realism, but internal consistency. There's a willing suspension of disbelief, and if you break it, you've failed as the crafter of a narrative.
Second, even puzzle absorption can be broken by jarring inconsistencies. If Tetris had random blocks that couldn't be moved or rotated, or sometimes arbitrarily reversed the effect of a rotation, the change would break puzzle absorption, and the game would have been much less successful.
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.
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'm just playing it now for the first time. It's pretty neat I felt tense and rushed as I was being chased through the city. Then about an hour into it I find this room with a ladder where you have to turn around and jump onto a pipe then walk on it to get to the next room. Dang I did it once then fell back down... after 10 tries I decided to go to bed.
Or when I'm stuck in a little room full of water with 2 pipes connecting to it, one I can get out by the other is just out of my reach. Oh wait, I have a crowbar. Nope, can't use it that way.
Oh well, just save it and come back later when I'm bored. If I come back later that is.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I especially love Cutscene Queens - where an NPC is awesome in a cutscene, then joins your party and proves to be lame. Or the time honoured "Boss X is an extremely hard fight. After the fight Boss X joins your party and somehow turns out to be mediocre at best"
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
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.
Thank you. I've been saying the same for a decade or two now.
All you need is to START your game with sensible rules. Then build the game around those rules. Get some good, power-gamer playtesters, and turn them loose in a room together with a prize for the most badass stunts. Make sure they don't totally break the game, and you're golden. If they do, examine how you implemented the rules.
There's no good reason to selectively enforce rules in a game. If you can't be bothered to make a consistent game, you obviously don't care enough about your game.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
If you are upset that your rocket launcher can't blow open an inconvenient door, be glad that you have a rocket launcher at all... because you know what's easier than making a sophisticated sandbox game that respects all the laws of physics and allows you to anything you think of with the tools at hand? Taking away your rocket launcher entirely.
And in a multiplayer game like an MMO, respecting "reality" means you can get ganked by more powerful players. Some players like that. Most don't.
Making games is hard. I sympathize with all y'all that want things to work better, but making that kind of game is difficult and expensive. And at the end of the day, are you sure it would be more fun?
Like politics, making games is the art of the possible.
What breaks immersion for me is rubber-band AI. It typically shows itself in racing games. Usually, this means it's extremely easy to catch the pack, kind of easy to work your way through the pack, and next to impossible to check out. That certainly detracts from my enjoyment of the game, possibly more than any other design aspect. Simply having an option to shut that off would be enough, though.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
The key word here is "consistency". The 'frills' don't matter; what matters is that what is implemented is implemented well.
Two good examples of this are Duke Nukem 3D and Deus Ex. In DN3D, the gameplay world interaction was fairly minimal: there were trash cans, toilets, windows, mirrors, and hookers/strippers which you could destroy and/or alter. There were also the occasional wall you could blow up (often the rough equiv of a keycard door), as well as some mini-games (which were extra fun, and not part of the game's "goal". There wasn't much, but it was consistent.
Deus Ex is a classic example for a game implementing an internal "mini-game" and doing it right. You didn't have to play them, as there were multiple ways to accomplish a goal: you just chose to, and it was often a fun alternative way to reach the end game. Importantly, they were part of the game's plot and development.
Really, when it comes down to it, I think a large part of this immersion failure is due to rushing the games out the door. The newer games feel incomplete and very "demo" like compared to games from 10+ years ago, with significant components which don't seem all that well thought out. Sometimes they manifest as a bug, but most of the time they're something like a map which cuts off where it feels like it should continue or stuff as outlined in the topic.
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