heywood on 4/1/2017 at 18:45

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One of the problems with lumping all of the games people mention as “immersive sims” together in one category is that they don’t have much in common gameplay-wise other than being in the first person with a human avatar. Some are shooters, some are stealth games, some are hybrids. Some are RPGs, some are RPG-lite, some with no RPG elements at all. Some have puzzles, some have magic, some have vehicles. Some have conversation systems and some don’t. Some have questing, some don’t. Some are mission driven, some are open world. Most are first person but some are third person. And so on.

I’ve always disliked this label. Immersion is too broad and too subjective a term to define a category of games. I’ve found myself completely immersed in real simulation games like racing sims and flight sims. On the other hand, I don’t find open world sandbox type games to be immersive, but plenty of other people do. The other thing I don’t agree with is calling these simulations.

For most of my gaming life, the word “simulation” meant a game designed to simulate a real world process or activity, where the player’s progress through the game is based on player skill and mastery of the simulation. Therefore, I would argue that any game with RPG elements should be automatically disqualified from being called a simulation. When gaming outcomes are determined significantly or primarily by the player’s (arbitrary) character building decisions rather than skill at some game mechanic, it isn’t a simulation.

I could agree that Thief is part sneaking simulation and part first person fantasy game. I could argue that STALKER has simulation elements. But what exactly is being simulated in Deus Ex? Not shooting, that’s stat driven. Not augs. Not sneaking. Deus Ex gives the player freedom to choose between two or more routes to each objective, usually a frontal assault route and a stealth route depending on their character build and playstyle. And it allows the player to accomplish objectives in different orders, and to skip some objectives entirely e.g. running away from boss battles. That is just good non-linear level design, it provides the illusion of freedom, but freedom doesn’t imply or require simulation. Also, it’s often stated that one of the primary goals of this approach to game design is to allow for creative gameplay, or even emergent gameplay. But when people talk about emergent gameplay in Deus Ex, they're usually referring to things like exploiting the AI programming to get them to do something like blow themselves up or shoot cleaner bots, or things like stacking cardboard boxes to go over walls, grenade climbing, damaging Anna Navarre just enough to get her to open the door out of UNATCO without killing her. Stuff like that is the antithesis of simulation.

Another argument is that the Deus Ex and Dishonored games are immersive simulations because they allow you to explore virtual environments that are populated with non-essential places you can visit and characters you can talk to, stuff to read, toilets you can flush, flower pots you can throw around, booze, cigarettes, and basketball courts. I guess you could call this the virtual tourism argument. I enjoyed the rich, dense game world locations of Karnaca, Prague, Dunwall, and Hengsha. But these are carefully constructed fictional game levels, not simulations of actual places. What real world environments are littered with loot laying around for the player to collect, oversized ventilation ducts, datacubes with door codes and passwords, where every computer and security system is hackable, the world is full of people wanting to give you quests, and nearly every conversation you have is story or quest related?

One of the things that all these games have in common is non-linear level design, at least at the intra-level scale but up to open world. And usually that involves giving the player freedom to choose between multiple objectives, some of which are optional, and multiple ways to accomplish the major objectives. Another thing that they have in common is that they are designed for exploration, with lots of opportunities for optional interaction with NPCs or the environment. So I think a more appropriate blanket term is to call them action-exploration games.

Sulphur on 4/1/2017 at 19:22

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Yeah, no. This is a lot of jawing over something that doesn't require this much deliberation. I say the folks who mentioned the ImSim as a design ideology got it right. The basic idea is to create autonomous systems in the game world that create complexity and emergence out of the way they interact with each other. The 'immersion' of the immersive sim comes from how you as the player character get to interfere with or manipulate these systems to get to whatever objective the designers have in mind: the design ethos has to also work towards slotting you, the player, seamlessly into the world it's created. The subjectiveness of what constitutes immersion isn't really something the games have to worry about - for instance, the question of whether to go first person or third person. It's a matter of individual preference; the camera perspective does not really impact the design ideology on a systemic level.

The best examples of how this works are Thief and MGS 5, where the NPC routes and patrols are regulated, regimented, and you're given the tools to manipulate them, work around them, or remove them from the equation; it's not a surprise to see a lot stealth-based games work this way. Deus Ex has its smoke and mirrors, but its combat and stealth models let you figure different routes around obstacles to some degree, so it counts.

Nameless Voice on 4/1/2017 at 19:58

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I'm going to have another go at the "two aspects" thing I talked about before.

I can imagine games as having two axes - a simulation axis and an immersion axis.
Immersive sims are games that score highly on both axes, though of course games can fall anywhere on either axis, and may be more or less immersive sims.

The simulation axis is about a philosophy of simulation instead of scripting.

As an example, in Thief there is a place where there is a pedestal that needs to be weighed down, with some fragments of a broken statue next to it. In a standard game, it might be fairly normal to just script the situation so that when the pieces of the statue are placed upon the pedestal, it activates. In a simulation game (such as Thief), the designers instead build a system to simulate pressure plates, which are activated based on the total weight applied to them. Rather than creating a once-off scripted system, the developers now have another simulated system that they can re-use, and which players can use as they wish.
In the scripted scenario, there's only one correct solution, while in the simulated scenario, the player is free to wander off, find a large rock, and put that on the pedestal instead.

A simulation-oriented game always tries to answer questions that way - by introducing a new simulated system and using that to create the desired scenario.


The immersion axis is about creating a realistic, coherent and believable world, and to fit the player into that world.
The higher up this axis a game falls, the fewer "gamey" systems it should have, and the fewer things that take away from the feeling of you actually being in control of a person in the setting.
Things like health piñatas and nonsensical bonuses/perks (such as getting a larger wallet by taking photographs of enemies) land you lower on the scale, while having everything that you can do make sense in the context of the gameworld lands you higher.
I'd even argue that minor things like the user interface count here - giant quest markers, QTEs, prompts, intrusive HUDs, etc., take points away from immersion. On-screen markers are more acceptable in something like Deus Ex, where you might realistically expect your character's cybernetic systems to have such a function built into them, but certainly don't fit in a fantasy game.


When a game scores highly in both of these areas, they often overlap with each other. A realistic game might allow you to interact with a larger variety of simulated objects and systems that have no purpose towards the game's primary gameplay, but help to make the simulation more realistic, and can also be used to create emergent gameplay.
For example, Thief has tons of interactable objects that serve relatively little purpose - useless / valueless items that you can pick up, crates and barrels that you can move and push, gizmos and levers that you can interact with for no particularly useful purpose. None of those are directly related to the core gameplay of stealth, but they both help to flesh out the realism of the simulation and can be used for ad-hoc gameplay, such as throwing bottles as distractions, or stacking crates to climb up to hard-to-reach areas.

In brief: That area where high levels of immersion/realism and a heavy emphasis on simulation come together and start to interact with each other is what I consider to be the immersive sim genre.

Judith on 4/1/2017 at 21:34

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Wow, that Thief example of simulation is a bit too convoluted... Why not use something that is actually working in all thief games?

The example of player improvisation:

(https://postimg.org/image/4q8o4doq7/) https://s27.postimg.org/4q8o4doq7/image.jpg

And this is possible due to various systems "listening" to each other: the physics system responsible for collision and both player tools and minor objects, which are not scripted to affect some narrow subset of other objects:

(https://postimg.org/image/v17eevo3b/) https://s23.postimg.org/v17eevo3b/image.jpg

But connected with more general category of stimuli:

(https://postimg.org/image/j6beru1z3/) https://s27.postimg.org/j6beru1z3/image.jpg

Everyone who ever opened DromEd or T3Ed knows this system.

Judith on 4/1/2017 at 21:48

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That shouldn't be much of a surprise, since games are art + science.

On the other hand, this thread's walls of text perfectly illustrate something I read on the Ask a Dev Tumblr page the other day: "gamers talking about game design are like people who enjoy cooking saying that they know how to run a restaurant" ;)