vurt on 1/1/2024 at 16:48

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You won and at this point you have also been validated.

Congratulations (i mean this).

demagogue on 1/1/2024 at 20:09

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I posted about simulation thinking being part of the DNA of imm-sims above, but even as I posted it I knew it needed to be explained.

In my understanding, the mindset behind OG imm-sim was part of a zeitgeist in the period from like 1988 to 1998 at a place like Origin and the group of people with its way of thinking. That zeitgeist was about game devs coming from a community of "amateurish hobbyists". That kind of mindset thought about creating living, breathing worlds in code, and they got off on thinking about systems, and in particular systems that were tricky to code the logic of ... objects being inside or on other things, so if you move object B, object A comes with it; water taking up space, flowing, converting the player state to swimming, etc., and one of the most notorious problems was believable rope behavior, and then social and agency behavior of AI/NPCs. In my reading of the history, that kind of mindset I think really first developed in the IF community, and in some of the branches off that like Adventure Games and RPGs, but Origin and the Ultima games were one place where they put a lot of thought into it, and that mindset was central.

So it's in that context that I think simulationism was in the original DNA of imm-sim design thinking. But since 1998 a lot of things happened. The scene was moved into 3D games, you had the Holy Trinity (TDP, SS2, DX) setting the baseline for the genre, etc. Following that, going into the 2000s, the original simulationist and hobbyist mindset weren't such big parts of what the tradition became. I think it became much more about building on the norms and tropes set by the early 3D imm-sims.

And certainly by the time Arcane was reinventing the genre from Dishonored onwards, that original mindset seems really quaint -- they're more "professionalized", they're more mindful of the business side of it and the tropes of contemporary games (like screen bling, faster flow, etc.), listening to focus groups, etc., the simulationist problems the first generation obsessed so much over actually doesn't take up so much of the thinking like it once did... Like a lot of problems have been solved now, and it turns out swimming doesn't have to be such a big part of the game.

Although one part of that thinking that I think does still survive and is important is the idea that your game should be about systems and the physical & social environment (space and motivations), where you're solving problems or negotiating the environment and AI using tools and systems rather than solving riddles that the dev cleverly thought of using exactly the verb+noun combo they want you to to make progress, where you have to read their mind. I think that's still a central aspect of imm-sims, and I think that mindset comes out of the OG simulationist mindset, but in our current era it's become it's own norm in its own right separate from that original way of thinking, which has pretty much fallen away and hasn't been a part of the scene since the early 2000s.

Well that's my take on it, whether or not that's contributing anything to the debate that was going on above, if it even was a debate.

Edit: I was thinking this was the imm-sim thread too because of that discussion, but now I see it's not. Sorry for the sideline that this post may be.

Pyrian on 1/1/2024 at 22:24

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I've started playing The Talos Principle 2. I really liked the first one, but was kind of skeptical of the story for the second. But, it's really good so far! It's like a great walking simulator with some puzzles, lol.

Tomi on 2/1/2024 at 01:24

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Time to wrap up the year 2023 and this thread, and get with the times? Maybe keep the imm-sim discussion here though? :p

I find it a bit surprising that this 2023 thread ended up being longer than the 2021 and 2022 threads, and I hope that this thread continues in the future!

2023 was an unusual year in gaming for me. There were lots of great new games and my ever-growing backlog grew even bigger, but I barely played anything on my PC. I bought my first ever gaming console (XBox Series X) and I've quite liked it so far. You can't beat gaming on PC though, but the XBox is just so much more convenient when you've got half an hour to spare and/or you want to play something with the family.

Sulphur on 2/1/2024 at 06:37

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Technically post 667, so I guess we missed the opportunity to add in the satanism sim argument for U8.



It wasn't a debate, of course. But I appreciate bringing in some thoughtfulness anyway. The thing people point to as the prototypical imsim origin story (or 'Origin' story, sorry) is Ultima 6's testing where a player got Sherry the Mouse to squeeze through a portcullis and open it from the other side, which was Spector's a-ha moment that inspired him to make games that did that. In a way, vurt is right about one thing, because without Origin or Ultima, we may never have had imsims, at least not as we know them today.