Immersion and Realism
are not synonyms
So I, like many gamers, surround myself with people who
enjoy the same hobby. We play Garry’s Mod together, we have a night where we
play Guns of Icarus and so on. In my friend group, I’m “that guy”. I’m the guy
that points out the negatives in games because I wish to see them grow as a
medium. For instance, I love the Kingdom Hearts series, but it could stand to
be a little less serious sometimes and I just wish it could decide on a
gameplay style.
However, you didn’t come to this for a Kingdom Hearts
retrospective. You’re here to pity me, probably.
But I digress. One day I was having a debate with a few
close friends of mine (Although they hasten to call it an argument) about
Immersion.
Immersion is an important thing these days. Gaming has moved
away from its youth and has become more analytical. Instead of reviewing games
on categories like “Sound” and “Graphics” (Seriously, kids, we used to review
games like that. Go look at any IGN review from 2000-2006 you’ll see what I
mean.) We now focus on stuff like the framerate and how well the game runs. And
rightly so. In this day and age, we want our entertainment to be as good
looking as it can possibly be and with all the new tech it’s not that hard to pull off.
The discussion with said friends was brought up over Halo:
The Master Chief Collection. This game is known far and wide as the best example
of why you shouldn’t rush shit out of the door to get the pre-order cash now
and then worry about the game working five months down the line but I digress,
yet again.
In one moment in the trailer for the game, a character pulls
up an SMG (A fan favourite weapon of the series, at least in Halo 2). What should
pop up? An Iron Sight for the gun.
Iron Sights, as a concept, have always baffled me. People
would not stop jizzing every pair of pants they own when Iron Sights were introduced
into Fallout New Vegas and I honestly don’t understand them. Functionally to
gameplay, they serve no real purpose. You have a perfectly good targeting
reticule you can use to execute your fellow man, why are you getting so excited
over the fact you can now do it with forty percent of the screen obscured by a
rifle butt? No matter how sexy and next-gen and shapely that butt is, I was
doing just fine without it all over my face.
When I brought up this concern to my friends they all came
back with “It’s more immersive”.
Immersion is one of those
words in the games industry today. You know the sort. It’s a word like Synergy
or Web 2.0. It doesn’t really mean anything. A company has synergy because all
departments are working together. A game is, by its very nature, immersive
because of the way we interact with it.
When you play a game, how many times to you think to
yourself: “Man, why am I running down such a long corridor?” or “Dude, I really
need to level before killing this big demon bastard”? I’d wager it’s a lot.
That is immersion.
At the end of the day, it isn’t you who’s running down the
hallway, or killing the demon bastard. You
are someone sitting on a couch probably eating some sort of Cadbury’s chocolate
and drinking Ribena (If you’re me, that’s what you’re doing anyway). You are
simply pushing buttons and making stuff do a thing on a screen.
However, due to the interactive nature of a game, you feel
as if you just downed that boss. You just shot that terrorist in the face
because he’s invading your homeland and stealing your women. You just collected the Jiggy from the
fucking engine room after dying several times. That is awesome. The fact that a
game can make me feel like I’m doing something substantial when in reality I’m
sitting on my arse waiting for the days that the reaper will come a-knockin’
with a plus size body bag is great. It’s what makes the medium unique and incredibly interesting.
Following that mind-set I brought up to my friend that “Iron
Sights don’t really make a game more immersive”. To which he replied “They do
though. They make it more realistic”.
Realism is yet another thing that pisses me off a little
about the industry. Everything has to be “Realistic”. Stuff like physics, I understand,
but it’s spreading to everything recently. Our guns have to be super realistic.
Our combat has to be realistic. We can’t have a fucking HUD in our game because
it’s not realistic enough. Let’s have the character stare at a tattoo of a
heart on their left breast to see how much health they have because, y’know,
realism, right? (That last example comes from a game where you can literally
punch dinosaurs to death, by the way).
My friend followed up his point with: “Tell me the game you
felt most immersed in and I bet it was realistic”
Without missing a beat, I shot back with “Persona 3 FES”
For those of you that don’t know, Persona 3 is a game about
teenagers killing god by shooting themselves in the head. You can’t get more detached
from reality without being Suda51 or having one’s head locked in a vat of some
sort of noxious gas.
My friend brought that up, and ended our discussion.
I bet some of you are wondering why I use that game as my
go-to example of immersion over, say, Arma 3 or Euro Truck or something, and it’s
a pertinent question.
Persona 3 features a calendar system. You have a set amount
of days to do stuff and on certain dates set events will happen (A boss will
appear in the city, a festival might happen or something else in a similar
vein). When I was playing the game, 2014 was still very innocent and sweet and
hadn’t been corrupted by the cold depression of winter. I was at the stage in
Persona 3 however, where it was mid-November. I’d sunk in around 60 hours at
this point, so I was pretty invested.
I remember having a discussion with my mother about our
family holiday. She asked “What’s the date today? I need to know so I can put
the deposit down”. I told her it was mid-November despite the fact we were outside,
sitting around a barbecue in the “sweltering” heat of June.
To this day I haven’t lived that down.
Regardless, the reason for that was because I was immersed
in Persona 3. I was immersed to the point where I ignored all of my senses and
stuck to what the game had made me think.
And this is a game where you can summon a chariot being
piloted by a giant green penis that shoots fire. No, I’m not joking.
In short: A game does not have to have super realistic
gameplay to immerse us. A game does not need to have Iron Sights. A game does
not need to feature a realistic level of human ability and stamina to immerse
us. A game simply needs to be engaging.
Now I’m not saying that realism is bad. It is a tool to be
used to create immersion and, much like all of the other tools in the designer’s
tool belt, should be used to varying degrees. However, “Realistic” is not a
synonym for “Immersive”.
At best, it’s a very sexy adjective.
