Immersion: My Two Cents
2010-02-11
As I mentioned before, there have been some interesting articles on immersion on various sites lately, namely Wolfshead (who describe's how WoW's marketing and other decisions are eroding what immersion it originally had), evizaer of That's Terrible Idea (who felt that it didn't have any to begin with), and Tobold who thinks the whole thing is moot.
These last two I disagree with, and this is the post I've been meaning to write explaining why. It's not going to refute their positions blow by blow (mainly because there are so many blows); instead I'll just go on tour and ramble.
Like I usually do.
Immersion of game, immersion of dressing
First, let's get a little terminology out of the way. We're talking about MMOs, most of which count (by various definitions) as virtual worlds with games in them. Even for those that are difficult to consider virtual worlds, we can make the distinction between the mechanics of the game and the window dressing that surrounds it. I think the distinction is important, partly because I can imagine people (not necessarily those linked about, although there's certainly some disparity in definition going on) meaning two entirely different things when they talk about 'immersion':
Immersion of gameplay isn't what people generally mean by immersion, although I can see hints of crossover in some of the referenced articles when the writers worry about the mechanics. If you're talking about losing yourself in the playing of the game rather than the experience of the world or the dressing, you're probably talking about flow rather than immersion.
Immersion of setting/world/dressing is what I think people generally mean by the term, and is mostly what's meant by the three articles. Which is why I find it interesting that they've got such diverse opinions on it.
Immersion isn't Realism
I like that, but I don't think I'm reading it quite as it was written. See, a lot of people (such as Tobold, by the look of the 'dragon vs. motorcycle' section of the post) seem to consider realism to be a major factor of immersion.
Realism can be immersive, of course it can. An entirely realistic game world with entirely realistic representation would likely be incredibly immersive, depending on what it actually had for players to do (the chances are the mechanics of any games set there would have been badly compromised for the sake of that realism, but I'll get back to that).
That doesn't mean that immersive worlds must be realistic though, not in the terms of being like our real world. That's why I like the quote above: immersion is the player's impression that they are in a real world, but not our real world. It's a stupid distinction, I hear you say, there are no other real worlds, but the lack of the definite article raises the question of what makes a world 'real'.
I've been using 'realism' to mean 'like our real world'. It's not entirely consistent with my position, but I believe it's the prevailing use of the world and I think to redefine it would confuse people. But let's look at what I would have redefined it as...
The role of Consistency
So I'm arguing that to be immersive the world doesn't need to be realistically like our world. It does need to be realistically like the world it ought to be - claims to be - though, and since the details of it are all fiction, what that really needs is consistency.
A world that isn't like our own may be harder to get into, and that is the role of realism, in my opinion. Using familiar tropes provides a handle that lessens the difficulty of becoming immersed in a non-realistic* world, although those same tropes can make your world seem similar to everyone else's, and often tired and unoriginal.
Suppose your world includes dragons. Dragons aren't realistic, but the rule of cool encourages their inclusion anyway: they're a staple of a certain kind of fantasy world (and a few that aren't). It doesn't hurt that dragons aren't realistic, provided the rest of the world shows that there's a place for them. In a world with prolific magic, why wouldn't physics be malleable to let dragons fly? If on the other hand you have a gritty milieu with no other fantastic elements, dragons might be a bit much.
(The film Reign of Fire puts dragons into an otherwise null-fantasy setting. Personally I feel it does it fairly well, and the film is quite good fun; careful use of technobabble can distract all but the most serious science-heads (and even some of them at times) enough to have them suspend disbelief if the experience is fun.)
* I use 'non-realistic' rather than 'unrealistic' to stress that realism wasn't intended.
Once you can get a feeling of being in a world, the consistency of it is what allows it to sink delightfully into the background and silently contribute to the experience of playing the game you came for.
Suspension of Disbelief
This is a crucial concept. You don't need people to believe the world is real, you just need them to forget that it isn't. The conscious mind is always trying to prove that these things aren't real, but it can't do so quickly enough to protect you from initial shocks and emotional impacts. That ability gets worse the busier it is, until you engage it so thoroughly that it no longer bothers; there's also a tendency for it to put in less effort when disbelieving things that are pleasurable, so if you can show it enough fun you'll get that effect quicker.
(I realise I'm stating this stuff as though it's fact. It's part of a pretty widely accepted theory of neurology and psychology, albeit one that I should read more about. I suggest Raph Koster's Theory of Fun as a start; there was a little more in one of Edward Castronova's books, but I forget which.)
Respect the Fourth Wall
Related to both the above (to the extent that I'm having trouble deciding what order to put these sections in) is the 'fourth wall' between your world and the player's (or players', if you'd rather).
Pop culture references are one of the biggest threats to immersion. I get that they're great fun to write (really, I do...) and I understand that real-world tie-ins may even appeal to some kinds of player, but they are a compromise with the ability of the game to engage and immerse. Immersion is fragile, and any reminder that there is another world out here will likely break it; if the immersion was important to you it'll be more trouble getting it back than the benefit you get from a cheap pop culture joke.
Do you need to break the wall? Of course: some elements of the whole (such as the interface) exist in our world, and so need to be explained in those terms. At other times there are compromises to be made. Tobold uses the example of WoW's dungeon meeting stones (which players can use to teleport other party members to the entrance of a dungeon, comparing it unfavourably to the new dungeon finder that lets you find a group in an interface window and teleport into the dungeon straight off. That is an immersion breaker, because the meetings stones are explained in the fiction - in the consistent rules of the world - but an interface window necessarily can't be. Is it a bad thing? In my opinion, no: it's a worthwhile break from immersion in order to bring gameplay benefit.
Since it's necessary to break the wall sometimes, it's important to do it right. In places that means taking a big breath and smashing it rather than trying to write extra fiction to protect it. When you die in Star Trek Online you get an FPS-style countdown before you respawn. No explanation, no fiction, you just come back. Sounds like it would break immersion, and maybe it does, but given that it's an established setting with no fiction that brings people back from the dead it causes less trouble than trying to contrive an answer to the question of how players manage it (and then of course why NPCs don't).
Player Expectation
Let's go back to consistency for a moment, because there's a glaring issue there. See, in order to see the consistency in the world, players must be exposed to the right parts of it, quickly. If you've used tropes (and if now, how on Earth did you manage that?) then you need to bear in mind that these will imply extra details about your work: If you have elves and don't demonstrate soon that they're not like Tolkien's elves (or WoW's elves, or Warhammer's elves, or whatever) then when players do find the difference they might find it jarring.
There may not be much that can be done about it, but it may help to bear in mind that players aren't always rational; they may make additional assumptions at odds with whatever prior sources or real-world fact you were hoping they'd understand. Not so long ago RuneScape gained a handgun weapon: there was outcry from a portion of the players because this was inconsistent with the fantasy world they felt they knew, even though that world already has cannon (rotating auto-targeting ones) at that, electricity and various other things are aren't traditional fantasy.
Immersion isn't Obvious
This one almost went without saying, but perhaps it's not as blatant a fact as we might hope. If you can see the immersion and comment on it, you're not immersed.
Why bother?
I've now gone on at some length about what I think immersion is, and various things that threaten it. Do I still think it's important? Yes. Why?
Because without immersion your game is just a game: it's the activity, a formal system with problems to solve. It's dressed up, more so than chess at least, but the player is mostly looking through that and staring at the mechanics. An immersed player is acting on a world as part of playing a game; he will appreciate the fiction and the presentation (without generally noticing that he is) and provided your world varies properly will have a variety of experiences along the way. A player who is not even slightly immersed is playing for the mechanics; if he's appreciating the sound, the graphics or the pop-culture references he's doing so by looking straight at them, and the experience of each will be detached from the rest.
Most importantly, the player who is not immersed is staring right at the game mechanics. Maybe he's going to stay because you hooked him on incrementing some or other 'progress' number, or because he has friends here, but ultimately he's soon grokked your game and he's not having nearly so much fun as the guy in the next game over who has a deliciously evolving collection of experiences even though most of the fights are tank-and-spank.
These last two I disagree with, and this is the post I've been meaning to write explaining why. It's not going to refute their positions blow by blow (mainly because there are so many blows); instead I'll just go on tour and ramble.
Like I usually do.
Immersion of game, immersion of dressing
First, let's get a little terminology out of the way. We're talking about MMOs, most of which count (by various definitions) as virtual worlds with games in them. Even for those that are difficult to consider virtual worlds, we can make the distinction between the mechanics of the game and the window dressing that surrounds it. I think the distinction is important, partly because I can imagine people (not necessarily those linked about, although there's certainly some disparity in definition going on) meaning two entirely different things when they talk about 'immersion':
Immersion of gameplay isn't what people generally mean by immersion, although I can see hints of crossover in some of the referenced articles when the writers worry about the mechanics. If you're talking about losing yourself in the playing of the game rather than the experience of the world or the dressing, you're probably talking about flow rather than immersion.
Immersion of setting/world/dressing is what I think people generally mean by the term, and is mostly what's meant by the three articles. Which is why I find it interesting that they've got such diverse opinions on it.
Immersion isn't Realism
"The best definition I can think of for immersion in gaming: the player’s impression that the they're in a real world. This may capture an extremely superficial understanding of why games interest and addict players, but it misses the point." - evizaer (emphasis mine)
I like that, but I don't think I'm reading it quite as it was written. See, a lot of people (such as Tobold, by the look of the 'dragon vs. motorcycle' section of the post) seem to consider realism to be a major factor of immersion.
Realism can be immersive, of course it can. An entirely realistic game world with entirely realistic representation would likely be incredibly immersive, depending on what it actually had for players to do (the chances are the mechanics of any games set there would have been badly compromised for the sake of that realism, but I'll get back to that).
That doesn't mean that immersive worlds must be realistic though, not in the terms of being like our real world. That's why I like the quote above: immersion is the player's impression that they are in a real world, but not our real world. It's a stupid distinction, I hear you say, there are no other real worlds, but the lack of the definite article raises the question of what makes a world 'real'.
I've been using 'realism' to mean 'like our real world'. It's not entirely consistent with my position, but I believe it's the prevailing use of the world and I think to redefine it would confuse people. But let's look at what I would have redefined it as...
The role of Consistency
So I'm arguing that to be immersive the world doesn't need to be realistically like our world. It does need to be realistically like the world it ought to be - claims to be - though, and since the details of it are all fiction, what that really needs is consistency.
A world that isn't like our own may be harder to get into, and that is the role of realism, in my opinion. Using familiar tropes provides a handle that lessens the difficulty of becoming immersed in a non-realistic* world, although those same tropes can make your world seem similar to everyone else's, and often tired and unoriginal.
Suppose your world includes dragons. Dragons aren't realistic, but the rule of cool encourages their inclusion anyway: they're a staple of a certain kind of fantasy world (and a few that aren't). It doesn't hurt that dragons aren't realistic, provided the rest of the world shows that there's a place for them. In a world with prolific magic, why wouldn't physics be malleable to let dragons fly? If on the other hand you have a gritty milieu with no other fantastic elements, dragons might be a bit much.
(The film Reign of Fire puts dragons into an otherwise null-fantasy setting. Personally I feel it does it fairly well, and the film is quite good fun; careful use of technobabble can distract all but the most serious science-heads (and even some of them at times) enough to have them suspend disbelief if the experience is fun.)
* I use 'non-realistic' rather than 'unrealistic' to stress that realism wasn't intended.
Once you can get a feeling of being in a world, the consistency of it is what allows it to sink delightfully into the background and silently contribute to the experience of playing the game you came for.
Suspension of Disbelief
This is a crucial concept. You don't need people to believe the world is real, you just need them to forget that it isn't. The conscious mind is always trying to prove that these things aren't real, but it can't do so quickly enough to protect you from initial shocks and emotional impacts. That ability gets worse the busier it is, until you engage it so thoroughly that it no longer bothers; there's also a tendency for it to put in less effort when disbelieving things that are pleasurable, so if you can show it enough fun you'll get that effect quicker.
(I realise I'm stating this stuff as though it's fact. It's part of a pretty widely accepted theory of neurology and psychology, albeit one that I should read more about. I suggest Raph Koster's Theory of Fun as a start; there was a little more in one of Edward Castronova's books, but I forget which.)
Respect the Fourth Wall
Related to both the above (to the extent that I'm having trouble deciding what order to put these sections in) is the 'fourth wall' between your world and the player's (or players', if you'd rather).
Pop culture references are one of the biggest threats to immersion. I get that they're great fun to write (really, I do...) and I understand that real-world tie-ins may even appeal to some kinds of player, but they are a compromise with the ability of the game to engage and immerse. Immersion is fragile, and any reminder that there is another world out here will likely break it; if the immersion was important to you it'll be more trouble getting it back than the benefit you get from a cheap pop culture joke.
Do you need to break the wall? Of course: some elements of the whole (such as the interface) exist in our world, and so need to be explained in those terms. At other times there are compromises to be made. Tobold uses the example of WoW's dungeon meeting stones (which players can use to teleport other party members to the entrance of a dungeon, comparing it unfavourably to the new dungeon finder that lets you find a group in an interface window and teleport into the dungeon straight off. That is an immersion breaker, because the meetings stones are explained in the fiction - in the consistent rules of the world - but an interface window necessarily can't be. Is it a bad thing? In my opinion, no: it's a worthwhile break from immersion in order to bring gameplay benefit.
Since it's necessary to break the wall sometimes, it's important to do it right. In places that means taking a big breath and smashing it rather than trying to write extra fiction to protect it. When you die in Star Trek Online you get an FPS-style countdown before you respawn. No explanation, no fiction, you just come back. Sounds like it would break immersion, and maybe it does, but given that it's an established setting with no fiction that brings people back from the dead it causes less trouble than trying to contrive an answer to the question of how players manage it (and then of course why NPCs don't).
Player Expectation
Let's go back to consistency for a moment, because there's a glaring issue there. See, in order to see the consistency in the world, players must be exposed to the right parts of it, quickly. If you've used tropes (and if now, how on Earth did you manage that?) then you need to bear in mind that these will imply extra details about your work: If you have elves and don't demonstrate soon that they're not like Tolkien's elves (or WoW's elves, or Warhammer's elves, or whatever) then when players do find the difference they might find it jarring.
There may not be much that can be done about it, but it may help to bear in mind that players aren't always rational; they may make additional assumptions at odds with whatever prior sources or real-world fact you were hoping they'd understand. Not so long ago RuneScape gained a handgun weapon: there was outcry from a portion of the players because this was inconsistent with the fantasy world they felt they knew, even though that world already has cannon (rotating auto-targeting ones) at that, electricity and various other things are aren't traditional fantasy.
Immersion isn't Obvious
This one almost went without saying, but perhaps it's not as blatant a fact as we might hope. If you can see the immersion and comment on it, you're not immersed.
Why bother?
I've now gone on at some length about what I think immersion is, and various things that threaten it. Do I still think it's important? Yes. Why?
Because without immersion your game is just a game: it's the activity, a formal system with problems to solve. It's dressed up, more so than chess at least, but the player is mostly looking through that and staring at the mechanics. An immersed player is acting on a world as part of playing a game; he will appreciate the fiction and the presentation (without generally noticing that he is) and provided your world varies properly will have a variety of experiences along the way. A player who is not even slightly immersed is playing for the mechanics; if he's appreciating the sound, the graphics or the pop-culture references he's doing so by looking straight at them, and the experience of each will be detached from the rest.
Most importantly, the player who is not immersed is staring right at the game mechanics. Maybe he's going to stay because you hooked him on incrementing some or other 'progress' number, or because he has friends here, but ultimately he's soon grokked your game and he's not having nearly so much fun as the guy in the next game over who has a deliciously evolving collection of experiences even though most of the fights are tank-and-spank.
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