Against "immersion" (Destiny)

by electricpirate , Thursday, April 03, 2014, 20:41 (3885 days ago) @ Cody Miller

To start with, watch Frank Lantz's great rand from GDC 2005, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JzNt1bSk_U
So why is this, why is the strive for immersion harmful? Because it obscures what video games are and what they are capable of.

I listened to this, and this man is a hack and an idiot. What he doesn't realize is that every video game is a simulation. The better your simulation, the more immersive it is. However, this does not mean you have to be simulating reality. In fact, simulating reality is a pointless endeavor, since a perfect reality already exists and we are in it. Game simulations are fun precicely because they simulate something that is different than reality.

I know Frank, He's far smarter, and understands games a deeper level than just about anyone around. Certainly more than you or I.

But pithy personal attacks aside, you are stretching the word simulation to mean something that it doesn't. Simulation is a specific thing, it's an attempt to create a model of some kind of existing (or very near to existing) process. IE, physics, or traffic flow through a city. Simply looking like something, or being a procedural representation of an idea isn't a simulation.

It sounds a little like you are mixing the concept of a formal logical system with that of a simulation. Chess is a logical system. Halo is a logical system containing a physics simulation. All games are logical systems, very few games are simulations.

Incidently, your post here, totally undercuts your argument about why multiplayer games are bad. Managed to get you to prove yourself wrong again. I'll take it.

Video games communicate in symbols, that gun in Halo? It's not so much the simulation of a gun, but it's a set of symbols we interpret to function like our understanding of a gun. That's a crucial difference, because in that difference we experience a huge part of the game. It comes from the guns having impossible properties, (ie: hitscan, zero recoil, etc), it comes from how we understand them (IE, learning how the spread pattern of the AR works, or the burst of a BR pulls up).

Refuted above in three sentences. It is 100% a simulation of a gun, albeit a gun with no recoil and hitscan.

If it's a simulation of a gun, then it's terrible. A gun in halo is basically just a fancy pointer, it's no different than marking a dude in battlefield, but we don't call that gun. Even if you say "But it doesn't have to be real" it's a terrible simulation, since all possible places where it's simulated are replaced by pieces of game logic. It's an object, which changes the state of a thing that it's over when you press a button. However, it's shaped like a gun, and it sounds like a gun, so we call it a gun, the definition of a symbol.

Here's a good test, "Is this thing trying to accurately represent some element of this beyond the visuals, and is that representation the overriding goal." In the case of a gun in Halo, no. The over-riding goal is to have a thing that works well within Halo's other systems. On the other hand, Halo's physics are designed to actually simulate how physics work, so they are a simulation.