Hello readers of Lusipurr.com. I am Nathan ‘Reetin’ Spruth and this is my very first editorial. I thought hard on what I wanted my first post to be and I finally decided that I would comment on an area which all gamers and even the general population are subject to: Immersion. As a little note, I would like to point out when I say “they,” I am referring to people I have spoken to in real life and do not want to divulge their names. Without further ado let us get into this.
Immersion: State of being deeply engaged or involved, absorption – Dictionary.com
Tasty ghosts.
Immersion in games is a very difficult subject to discuss and it is much harder for the game companies to nail down what we, as gamers, want in our games. The companies have to take into consideration three mediums nowadays, combining them so that the game will make the player feel as if he is absorbed into the game. Associated with these areas I see three types of gamers, each of which prefers one of these areas over the other.
We have, as people, been playing games since nearly the beginning of time, it is logical that we start there when talking about immersion in video games. Ever since the beginning of the video game industry, companies have tried to capture the gamer’s attention by having fun gameplay elements. In the days of old all we had was gameplay, with games like Pac-Man and Galaga, there was no storyline to get in the way, only the gameplay. Sure, gameplay has evolved throughout the years, but it still remains as the primary source of immersion for video games to this day. The feeling of “I must get a higher score than my friend” or the desire to play through a game of Peggle, when it has no real value other than the gameplay. We end up becoming immersed into the game, devoting hours of our life and countless quarters feeding the machines. One staff member prefers gameplay elements over the other two to the point that he thinks Final Fantasy X-2 is a good game.
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Storyline is another area that gamers can get immersed into and is possibly the second oldest form of immersion that human beings have been exploring. As I touched on earlier, storyline was not really able to be developed in older games, which consisted of just gameplay. It was not until the eighties that games really started to have storyline built into them. With the advent of games such as Final Fantasy and Ultima, video games were finally able to capture the minds of the people who did not want just the high score; they wanted a deep and compelling storyline. I think of a good storyline in a video game like a good book, they must contain characters that are well developed, a fantastical world for which those characters interact, and a clear ending to the game. With these elements in the game, the player is abled to be hooked into the game, devoting hours upon hours, investing into the characters to the point where, if someone dies, we literally weep. The greatest example of this is Final Fantasy VII. Spoiling games is not my job at Lusipurr.com so instead I will just say that I know gamers who have played through this game multiple times and when the scene comes up, their eyes still tear up, because they became so connected with these characters. That is immersion.
The third and final area for which game companies have to capture the player’s attention is not exactly what someone might think of when they think of an immersive game: graphics. As gamers, we might call someone who cares about graphics so much “graphics junkie.” However, we all think this way to a point. Using the Final Fantasy series as an example again, let us look at how certain graphic styles can take away from a gamer’s view of the game. In Final Fantasy IX, when the graphics took a drastic turn from the previous two in the series, many people did not like this change. The game technically had very good graphics for the time, the textures were amazing, the landscape was beautiful, but the character models were incorrectly proportioned and a lot of people were unaccustomed to this, so ignorantly some people thought it was a bad game. Of course with graphics we must take into account when the game was made, because hardware of previous eras just could not support what we might nowadays consider amazing graphics.
Is someone’s preference better than another when it comes to the type of immersion they prefer? No, it is clearly not. A game can have one or two of these three concepts and be a good game. Team Fortress 2 is a good game, but it lacks storyline, though it does have hats. Final Fantasy XIII is a good game (yes I said it), but the gameplay is not up to part with others in the series. Crysis, when it was released, was a graphics masterpiece, but the gameplay and storyline were not. What makes a game truly great is when all three of these areas are brought together and we get an amazing game like Final Fantasy VII, which is considered by many to be the best game of all time.
Which area do you look for in a game? Please comment below with which of these you care about, or please comment on what you felt I missed.
