the immersion paradox

Okay, I shall save you from my walls of text by breaking this post into sections, and therefore even if you choose to ignore it you can pander to my vanity by pretending you read it (“oh, yeah, Tam I think you totally nailed it when you introduced the idea of immersion from your perspective in part 3″)

1) In which I reference Spinks
2) In which I reference Murray in order to erroneously suggest I know what the hell I’m talking about
3) In which I meanderingly introduce the idea of immersion as I see it
4) In which I talk about Morrowind (including the knights do not not pick flowers anecdote)
5) In which I talk about WoW (with brief mention of the Tam Ironforge Dorf Streaking Incident)
6) In which I fail to conclude anything

1. In which I reference Spinks

There’s been a couple of blog posts knocking around recently on the subject immersion in MMOs and video games more widely. Spinks, in particular, articulates the tension between the storytelling and the mechanical aspect of games – specifically the idea that if one is “immersed” in the world and the story, one doesn’t want to be jumping through gameplay hoops:

If I’m immersed in a story, the absolute last thing I want to do is stop and min-max my character stats (or worse, be forced to go back to a previous save point, redo my gear/stats and play through some of the story I have already seen). If I’m immersed in a game, I don’t want to have to sit through seventeen cut scenes and have to care about which option would give me the best reward. If I’m immersed in exploring an area, I don’t want to have to fight through some scheduled event or be forced to grind out reputation just to be allowed to enter the next zone. And if I’m immersed in a solo resource management game, I don’t want to be forced to group.

I’m not thinking about immersion in quite these terms anyway but, for me, this potentially antagonistic relationship between story and mechanics doesn’t quite work – I mean, when I play single player games you may be assured I will quote ‘story’ as one of my main motivators but ultimately if a game has decent gameplay and a shite story, I’m more likely to play it than if a game as shite gameplay and an amazing story. And I think that’s pretty much the way it goes – although a good story can keep you going through the occasional dull section of a game, there’s nothing more miserable than playing a game with a lousy control system.

I think, when you look at games, ‘story’ is best seen as one reward among many – the equivalent, if you will, of 100gp and a +1 sword. For many players, myself included, it is possibly the preferential reward – I would rather get a bit of story over that +1 sword but basically I want both, because the +1 sword allows me to better engage with the world (albeit in a stabbing it in the face kind of way) and the story allows me to better engage with the plot. It’s possible that I am simply too analytical to get “immersed” in computer game stories: I don’t think wanting to know what happens next necessarily constitutes immersion, I think it merely suggests an everyday curiosity. This, again, highlights part of the problem: immersion means many things to many people. And INVESTMENT is not the same as IMMERSION.

2. In which I reference Murray in order to erroneously suggest I know what the hell I’m talking about

I think immersion is loosely defined as the act of losing yourself in a text (in the broadest sense of text) to the extent that you have the impression of being somewhere you’re physically not. This is an old-as-the-hills quote from Janet Murray (Hamlet on the Holodeck – I can’t be arsed to find the bibliographic data):

Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same thing from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or a swimming pool – the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality – as different as water is from air – that takes over all of our attention – our whole perceptual apparatus.

Apparently, building on Murray, there has been some attempt to articulate different types of immersion because the sort of academics who work on videogames are seemingly physically and psychologically incapable of analysing anything without trying to break it into constituent parts.

3. In which I meanderingly introduce the idea of immersion as I see it

But ultimately, to me, all this banging on about immersion is basically distraction: a sense of immersion is just a manifestation of the willing suspension of disbelief that is a necessary part of successful engagement in any fictional text. Yes, you may enter a temporary space when watching a movie that narrows your focus entirely to the talking moving pictures, yes you can weep over the fate of a fictional character as if you really just lost your lover, yes can read a book and say to yourself “ah hah, this is not merely the story of an elephant who lost a balloon, it is a metaphor for living in post-soviet Russia” BUT even though you may react to something AS IF it is real, you never truly believe that it is. Is immersion, then, merely a measure of the success of the illusion? Equally the word that tends to get knocked off the front of “suspension of disbelief” is “willing” – we are always aware a text is a text, but we choose to ignore its limitations in order to open ourselves to the experience it can offer us.

And getting “immersed” in the story or sensual aspects of a game strikes me as dead end, since this type of immersion belongs just as readily to other media. The reason, despite being about as interested in first person shooters as I am in Polish showjumping, I played Bioshock was because I basically wanted to piss around in Rapture, going oooh and aaaah. I interacted with it basically as if it was an annoying movie in which I had to occasionally stop the picture in order to fumble about shooting shit and eating little girls – which again seems to underscore Spink’s argument that gameplay elements very often hinder immersion. However, I think the problem was NOT the tension between the story and the mechanics but primarily the fact I was unwilling to suspend disbelief appropriately (or get into hitting splicers in the face with a wrench) and also that the sense of immersion on offer was largely cinematic. What I’m getting at here, very very slowly, is that for videogame immersion to be valuable or meaningful it has to be unique to videogames themselves: it has to be the whole package, not some Frankenstein’s monster created of bits and pieces of other media.

This naturally got to me thinking about the times I have felt “immersed” in video games, and immersed in a way that I could ONLY have got from the game itself, not from reading a book and caring about the characters or from watching a film and liking the pictures. And the best example I could come up with was Morrowind. Now, the Elder Scrolls games continue to intrigue me because Bethsoft are kind of like the Anti-Bioware. I guess when you look at cRPGs and what people want from them, there are two routes you can go down: you can down the meaningful story route and you can go down the living world route, but due to the limitations of each you can’t have both.

4. In which I talk about Morrowind (including the knights do not not pick flowers anecdote)

Now Morrowind is, in many ways, a stupid and frustrating game. The main plot is shudder-inducingly linear, to the extent that the Big Bad invites via dream to come his to his Dark Tower of Evil to have a nice chat and if you rock up there to take him up on the offer his gates are sealed and barred. So you were just kidding were you? Now I have to walk all the way back to Balmora, you fucker. I know evil exists in many forms and that it was highly likely a “you have triggered into my cunning trap, bwhahaha” kind of offer anyway but making you take a long, unnecessary walk is a pretty specific kind of evil. And it has none of the streamlining adjuncts that are nowadays are considered pretty much considered essential: there are very few fast travel mechanics (unless you’re counting giant bugs and one lousy teleport spell), the maps are terrible, there’s no handy green arrow to tell where you go, the whole quest journal system is incredibly rubbish (WTB secretary plox) and the NPCs all give you quest directions like “follow the river to west until you come to a forked tree and then go north until you find the cave.” Quite frankly, playing Morrowind is a bit of a chore. But it does offer, if you ask me, an unparalleled sense of being part of a world.

To this day, I am still desperately allergic to alchemy in Elder Scrolls game. You start Morrowind arriving by ship to some pissant little town in a swamp – and I think you end up getting some random quest to collect bits of swamp plant for some guy. Now, I know I should have spent the night in an inn room but for some reason I charged off enthusiastically into the swamp at about 11pm. Needless to say it was very dark and the map I had was small, shitty and mostly Fog O’War. And not long after I’d lost sight of the village it started to rain: and not just rain, proper “you are in the middle of a swamp in the middle of the night” pissing it down. Cue: the next 5 in-game hours spent floundering around in the dark and the wet, falling into swamp water in full platemail, fending off minor pests with a rapidly disintegrating sword, unable to find either the plants for the village. And as the virtual dawn broke over my very disgruntled head, I remember saying aloud: “Fuck it, I’m a fucking knight, I don’t pick fucking flowers.” I was genuinely grumpy as well – as if I had spent all night flailing around in a swamp, not my avatar. And I never did the quest and I never have. Moreover I have never again taken the alchemy skill in an Elder Scrolls game. This wasn’t a pleasant gaming experience. I was frustrated and pissed off and it’s a wonder I didn’t turn the game off – but actually I look back on it and smile to myself. Don’t get me wrong, I’d never want to experience it again. But, like hiding cross continentally across Morrowind, even though it’s not something I enjoyed playing, it’s something I enjoy remembering.

5. In which I talk about WoW (with brief mention of the Tam Iron Forge Dorf Streaking Incident)

Just to bring this back to WoW because it was, actually, WoW that got me thinking about this – despite all the faffing about and preamble. Playing old-WoW versus nouveau-WoW is genuinely eye-opening, especially if you compare somewhere like The Barrens to say, Dragon Blight. There’s no getting around the fact that The Barrens is stupid. It’s this vast vast zone with three towns in it, and load of extremely poorly designed quests (the triple Harpy trip anybody? Manrik’s goddamn wife) and it’s extremely unforgiving to new players. Moreover, you can expect to trog the length and breadth of those arid, dusty plains in search of the 7th chicken beak or the 9th raptor head or the 23rd pigman appendix. Nowadays, when you get a “bring me n shoveltusk organs” quest, you get on your horse, trot along to the Place Where The Shovelltusks are and kill them. In The Barrens, the wildlife roams far and wide. To hunt down the relevant beasts you literally have to hunt them down.

A lot of the time, I have to say, it’s not … fun. Since a lot of the pleasure in WoW comes alongside change and novelty, improving your character, seeing new places, collecting new animal organs, The Barrens is essentially a survival gauntlet for noobs, and a patience test for more experienced players. If you can get through The Barrens you’re set for life, and it’ll never be that hard again.

But here’s the thing: I also love The Barrens. And now I’m actually not trying to get anywhere and it’s all about the journey I love levelling in The Barrens because they feel like what they are: the plains of the Serengeti, as inhabited by a bunch of big, sentient cow people. I don’t like having to make three trips to the northern most tip in order to kill harpies for a quest giver with Alzheimer’s (oh I’m sorry, dear, I mean THESE OTHER TYPE of harpies) but I do like the fact that if you want to kill chickens you have to weave through hyenas and zebras and giraffes, there isn’t just a little chicken spawning pool in some corner of the map.

The other thing I’m loving at the moment is the Lunar Festival. Everybody around me seems to be whinging about the grind but Tam is having a blast … well I say a “blast” he’s on a very serious pilgrimage to honour the ancestors, apart from his naked zerg through Ironforge which was a bit less serious… It’s the first holiday I’ve done that feels like something that would genuinely happen in the world. This isn’t a criticism of the other holiday events, by the way, far from it. But the Lunar Festival gives you a wonderful sense of geographical scale and history; and, yes, it does feel like a pilgrimage of sorts. It’s also, admittedly, a bit boring – this thought crossed my mind as we galloped endlessly across Tanaris which, like, the Barrens is another one of those “exactly as it is” zones (a big empty desert which is both big and empty). But I liked the ways in which the Lunar Festival is boring – if that makes any sense at all. Next time I will try to take a bunch of other pilgrims of varying professional backgrounds with me and maybe we can tell stories since pilgrimages are canonically obviously a pretty dull deal…

6. In which I fail to conclude anything

This leads me to the following conclusion: that for something to create a sense of truly being part of a world (immersion if you like) this often runs counter to what would seem to be essential design principles – i.e. not making things boring and frustrating. To take another example, I’ve recently finished Mass Effect II which I loved, by the way. However: despite there being a huge galaxy to play about, the sense of immersion in the world you get is pretty much negligible. One of the cited problems with the first game was the tedious mocking around planet surfaces with the bloody mako (agreed – but I saw some fabulous moonrises) and the fact that Citadel was huge and empty and hard to navigate and included some of the longest elevator sequences known to man or God. It’s true: Citadel frustrated me, and some of the quests requiring multiple elevator journeys were enough to make a grown man cry. But its sense of scale contributed to a genuine sense of awe and zomg when you first set down, and actually having run bloody miles to get anything done – although at the time was painful on the analogue stick – also made the place feel like what was it: a vast space station constructed by unimaginable aliens. In MEII every area is, and feels, about the size of your bedroom. It’s super-quick getting around, don’t get me wrong, but there’s no sense of place or grandeur there. And it’s weird because although I appreciate the convenience, I miss the inconvenience.

I don’t have an answer by the way – these are just my thoughts. Immersion runs counter to game design, not because immersion is the provenance of story not mechanics (that’s merely investment) but because the things that immerse us are simultaneously the things that bug the crap out of us.