Renault on 4/1/2017 at 22:54
Also, I think if I'm personally making a checklist for Immersive Sims, these two are at the top of the list:
1) First Person
2) Real Time
I don't see any way around that.
Sulphur on 5/1/2017 at 07:31
If we're all done with the navel gazing, here's Spector's (
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131523/postmortem_ion_storms_deus_ex.php?print=1) Deus Ex Postmortem which is sufficiently vague enough about immersive simulation
except what it's supposed to entail, which is the removal of gamey tropes to allow a player to interface with the gameworld in a way the gamer feels is 'interesting'. This of course means that Deus Ex, arguably, wasn't able to succeed on its own terms.
This ensures you lot can keep arguing about 'But
I think it's...' until the cows come home, but at the end of the day, the distribution and approaches to game design are such that
Mark of the Ninja and
Alien: Isolation subscribe to the immersive simulation ideology in ways far more than a lot of people would care to admit or attempt to categorise. At the end of the day, forcing yourselves down a funnel of definition makes for a fun argument (I guess?) that's irrelevant in practical terms.
As Jean-Luc Godard once said, the only valid way to criticise a movie is to make one of your own.
heywood on 5/1/2017 at 13:55
Brethren already posted that.
Quote Posted by Warren Spector
It's an immersive simulation game in that you are made to feel you're actually in the game world with as little as possible getting in the way of the experience of "being there." Ideally, nothing reminds you that you're just playing a game -- not interface, not your character's back-story or capabilities, not game systems, nothing. It's all about how you interact with a relatively complex environment in ways that you find interesting (rather than in ways the developers think are interesting), and in ways that move you closer to accomplishing your goals (not the developers' goals).
The first part of that quote is pretty much the definition of immersion (“in the game world”, “being there”, “nothing reminds you that you're just playing a game”).
The second part of that quote defines a sandbox game (“interacting... in ways you find interesting, rather than in ways the developers think are interesting”, “your goals, not the developers' goals”).
Sulphur on 5/1/2017 at 14:08
Exactly. Hence this entire thread. It's vague enough you could fit a fair few games into it.
Here's what has no doubt happened in the past and will continue to happen: lacking a specific set of objective characteristics to fall back on, purists will trawl the oeuvre of LGS/IS to define what an immersive sim is to themselves and use that as a baseline. People who prefer to explore the boundaries of that definition will take a broader viewpoint, which will be at odds with the purist contingent. And then you'll have everyone else. This thread is the sound of all of that coming together.
Maybe someone should e-mail Warren and get a definitive answer for once and for all.
heywood on 5/1/2017 at 17:11
I've enjoyed reading other people's perspectives in this thread. I've already heard what the LGS & IG alums have said on the topic, and I think some of the points raised here are more thoughtful.
I'm interested in NV's two-axis idea. It works well to categorize Thief. But I don't know how to reconcile a game like Deus Ex with it. Scripting drives much of what makes DX immersive. The consequences for your actions. The conversations. A lot of the NPC chatter, and in general the individuality of the NPCs. There was also a fair number of plain old AI triggers in it too. I think most of what made Deus Ex more immersive than the average FPS of the day was the world full of individual characters and the believability of your interactions with them. It certainly wasn't the graphics, or the physics simulation, or the comically poor AI.
Sulphur on 5/1/2017 at 18:02
The point, I suppose, is that you don't have to reconcile it with any definition. It's what it is, which is a game with a lot of moving parts. If video game tech were at a level where clock cycles were unlimited and AI was sufficiently advanced, we wouldn't have to script anything, it'd all be procedural. Just slot different personalities into NPCs that have the power to improvise and emote, put them in a level with an overarching theme and strands of individual motivation, and let the players go wil...
...hmm, I guess Westworld was a bit ahead of this discussion.
Anyway, Deus Ex's depth of interaction was, to me, a function of its authors' worldbuilding talent. They scripted it up the wazoo because they were obsessive enough to account for the details when the systems couldn't get that detailed.
The game's always been a fascinating paradox IMO because of the things it does well while simultaneously borking something else. NPC chatter and conversations were alternately hilarious and interesting because of the quality of the VA, and the writing went to some interesting places while the story was... well, cyberpunk sci-fi pastiche. Deus Ex didn't have as high an impact on me as it did you and others, but I can't deny that it was ultimately a product of a lot of thought, elbow grease, and plain old attention to detail.
Does that make it a pure immersive sim? The answer is, if we take Spector's definition for what it is: we don't know. In the quest to ascribe meaning to something as loosely defined, the real question is, if the game nails the intended experience down for its audience no matter what the tricks are, does it matter either way?
heywood on 6/1/2017 at 00:05
I agree with pretty much everything you said in this post ^.
Starker on 6/1/2017 at 00:06
Immersiveness can be understood simply as how engaged the player is with the game -- in this sense Tetris is extremely immersive -- but I think that here it goes beyond that. In immersive sims, the focus has been on creating a "real place", a world that looks and behaves in believable and consistent ways to evoke a feeling as if you were really there. And for this purpose, first person games are maximally atmospheric. Just one example illustrates it perfectly -- when you are in third person, the NPCs look at your character, but when you're in first person, the NPCs look at you.
Chade on 6/1/2017 at 13:28
I wouldn't get too hung up on trying to apply some binary "is it or isn't it an immersive sim" criteria. More interesting to see how the definition fits and doesn't fit, and how the immersive sim parts of the game contribute to the overall experience.
I think there's three ways that simulation contributes to immersion. It can force the player to pay close attention and think deeply about what is going on around them, give them more of a "stake" in what they are doing (because it's a plan they have some ownership of), and can help make sure the world doesn't behave unexpectedly. Actually having a complicated simulation and allowing the player to make crazy chained effects is not especially important to immersion in my experience (e.g. thief, where you don't actually do very much of that in normal play).
Regarding Deus Ex, I don't think the entire game has to look like an immersive sim before you can start talking about the many ways in which all Deus Ex games benefit by acting like an immersive sim. In all the games there's a consistent underlying model to most of the gameplay, and you are definitely encouraged to pay careful attention to your surroundings and think about and take some ownership over your strategy. I think it falls down a bit as an immersive sim when the levels are full of fairly self-contained small areas, and Adam Jenson isn't much of a cipher (nor do I always want to "be" Adam Jenson).
Yakoob on 6/1/2017 at 21:51
Hmm perhaps there are multiple types (or just dimensions) of immersion? Perhaps I am getting unnecessarily granular, but reading the above few posts I could see a difference between:
1) Atmospheric immersion - i.e. feeling the place / scene you are immediately in is engrossing and engaging, regardless of the overall game context. Things like visual effects, audio, ambiance etc. all factor into it
2) World immersion - feeling like the whole game world is believable. You know it's when you stop questioning what doesn't make sense (suspension of disbelief) and start caring about the outcomes and NPCs.
3) Simulation (?) immersion - feeling like the world physics and design rules are consistent and logical. I'm borrowing this from (
https://www.amazon.com/Game-Feel-Designers-Sensation-Kaufmann/dp/0123743281) Game Feel I read recently which makes an interesting point that an abstract but consistent ruleset is more engaging than realsitic but inconsistent one. For example, Mario 64 onwards is physically believable even tho it's a gross simplification of our physics, as compared to another realistic-looking racing game (which name I forgot) that does not handle car crashes in a realistic manner thus leading to a dissonance that breaks the immersion.
4) More?
Thoughts?
