Against "immersion" (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, March 31, 2014, 12:12 (3899 days ago) @ electricpirate
edited by Cody Miller, Monday, March 31, 2014, 12:16

As we get closer to viable VR systems, it seems like this is what people want. They want this feeling of presence, like they are actually in this game. When people talk about games you hear about how the UI "Breaks Immersion" or the way a piece of bad AI "Broke immersion" as a negative. Thinking in this way is a mistake though, because the pursuit of immersion is a bad idea, that makes games worse.

In short, "immersion" is bullshit.

This is absolutely, 100% wrong in every way imaginable.

To start with, watch Frank Lantz's great rand from GDC 2005, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JzNt1bSk_U
So why is this, why is the strive for immersion harmful? Because it obscures what video games are and what they are capable of.

I listened to this, and this man is a hack and an idiot. What he doesn't realize is that every video game is a simulation. The better your simulation, the more immersive it is. However, this does not mean you have to be simulating reality. In fact, simulating reality is a pointless endeavor, since a perfect reality already exists and we are in it. Game simulations are fun precicely because they simulate something that is different than reality.

Video games communicate in symbols, that gun in Halo? It's not so much the simulation of a gun, but it's a set of symbols we interpret to function like our understanding of a gun. That's a crucial difference, because in that difference we experience a huge part of the game. It comes from the guns having impossible properties, (ie: hitscan, zero recoil, etc), it comes from how we understand them (IE, learning how the spread pattern of the AR works, or the burst of a BR pulls up).

Refuted above in three sentences. It is 100% a simulation of a gun, albeit a gun with no recoil and hitscan.