Yaaay for "immersion" (Destiny)

by Leviathan , Hotel Zanzibar, Monday, March 31, 2014, 13:55 (3889 days ago) @ electricpirate

I'm a big fan of immersion, but that does not equate to realism. Nor am I interested in 3D/VR of any kind. A good book still tends to be the most immersive experience I can find, and it's just black text on a white page.

I've found many video games in my time to be immersive as well, and what that usually implies is that its consistent in its design across the spectrum. So then the things that break the immersion are usually the poorly executed game elements. A clunky menu in a RPG is going to break my enjoyment and immersion because it is poor design and annoying, not because menus don't exist in the real world. Bad AI is breaking the immersion not because it isn't realistic, but because it's just not fun or challenging.

I find Bungie's Halo games extremely immersive for the most part, because there is a unified design sense gracing the art direction, UI, story, and gameplay. It's cohesive. That's what allows me to get sucked in. I'm never thinking about how I'm flying up ladders or magically rotating Warthogs without my hands moving, because the game design is so good, my imagination can extend it outward.

I guess that's what immersion means to me - the ability of something to inspire my imagination to create the world around me, whether I'm looking at a page in a book or a limited field of vision on a screen.

And I do think a lot of games pushing for extreme realism actually makes it harder to be immersed and imaginative, because they're doing all the work for our brains, instead of just giving us the seeds to make it much more wonderful in our heads. That's how a good comic works - it's not about depicting everything in photo realism, it's about being good and consistent enough that you forget you're reading bubbles or that your vision into the scene is bound to the panel's dimensions. You're just THERE, watching it happen. Similar explanations can be applied to paintings, theater, film, photography...