Just what is "immersion"?

I am compelled to put forth a tiny little rant after reading this in an email in my SoTA inbox..

"Removing or reworking systems that sacrifice fun in favor of immersion, "

I can't help but feel that "immersion" is greatly misunderstood as something that isn't "fun". Put simply.. if it's not fun.. it's not immersive.

By definition.. immersion in this context is "deep mental involvement"

It is NOT defined as "a sense of realism". While a certain amount of "realism" can aide in immersion, it only does so as much as it draws the player into the game. In truth neither is defined by the other.

Immersion is your friend people! I find the above statement to be contradictory at best and yes.. the term always getting a bad rap has become a little pet peeve so I hope y'all will pardon me for going off on what is otherwise not that big of a deal. But I kinda feel like there are so many past (and future) discussions gone awry over not understanding what this "immersion" thing is.

What it SHOULD have said.. was in favor of tedium.. or even realism (though I think that latter is really down to implementation than anything else).

[/rant]

 

You're 100% right.

They should have put immersion in quotes, because the things that were originally thought to be "immersive" were absolute not.

Here, I'll fix it for em. "Removing or reworking systems that sacrifice fun in favor of bad design choices that went the way of the dodo in the late 1990's."

Ironically, now that those are out of the way, people are probably experiencing a lot more immersion.

 

I didn't get this email. Where did this rant come from?

 

May have been a selective mailing. I have a slew of active email addresses and actually got this email twice. I'm pretty sure at least one of them isn't attached to an account and I'm scratching my head right now wondering how it's in their system. I think it's one of those "please come back" emails. It reads like one. Of course, I never actually left and I've no plans to go anywhere.

 

I guess it must be for a "select" few since my two accounts never got one. Guess I'm not with the in crowd, go figure.

Can you at least copy it to the forums for us low people, unless it gives trade secrets that only those chosen can read.

 

Ah well I didn't want to force folks to read bits not terribly relevant to what I was talking about but.. I'll do just the first bit up to that point. It's really just all about change of hands to Chris and all the planned upcoming changes and stuff. It's not really anything new.. I imagine if you've logged in recently you wouldn't have got it. I only got it cause I have emails lurking in the system not tied to an active account. (Working theory anyway)

Or here.. I'll put in a "spoiler"..

Spoiler: Have you heard about the HUGE changes for Shroud of the Avatar?

As many of you may have heard, Shroud of the Avatar is headed in an exciting new direction and with new leadership! Chris “Atos” Spears has stepped up to become the new CEO of Shroud of the Avatar. While all the good things players have loved
about the game will remain the same, we now have a renewed focus on improving
the quality of life for players in all areas and dramatically expanding the
ways players can create their own content!


While lots
of changes in direction have already started, there will be many more things to
get both old and new players excited. More details can be found in the posts on
the official forums (www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/) and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/catnipgames). The following is a very brief list of some headlines for
Shroud’s new direction:

• More player-created content
  • Player-created NPC dialog trees and quests
  • Player-created dungeons, Live NOW
  • Player-created outdoor scenes
  • Client-side scripting in LUA, on QA this
    release
  • Ability to allow temporary and limited GM
    powers to specific players to allow for the creation of even better
    player-run events
• More focus on improving the quality of life
  for players
  • Heavier focus on reducing overall bug count
  • Removing or reworking systems that sacrifice
    fun in favor of immersion, or use arbitrary or dated design concepts
  • Increased performance work (Release 71 saw
    another 10% boost in overall frame rate and decreased hitching)
  • No more Real Money Transactions (RMT) in the
    official Shroud of the
    Avatar forums
  • Eliminating high-cost pledges from web store
    by the end of the year
  • Reducing prices on many store items and
    making them no-trade to discourage secondary market and speculators
• Even more focus on community
  • New dedicated customer support team member
  • New customer support ticket system
  • Constant updates and interactions through
    Twitter
  • More live
    streams from the developers focused on answering questions
  • Active player run streaming community
  • More interaction with other like games and
    their communities

Shroud
of the Avatar is closing out 2019 on a high
note with a number of new systems and maps coming on line. 2020 is on track to
be the best year yet! In 2020, Shroud
of the Avatar will be moving into
Episode 2 content. We will be adding dozens of new skills, at least 1 entirely
new skill tree (BARDS!), lots of new higher quality scenes, a new quest system,
and much more!


For
those who have taken a break from the game, NOW is the time to return. Come get
your monthly login reward and get ready for an awesome Shroud of the Avatar holiday season!


Thanks from
the Shroud team for your continued support and we hope to see you in the game!

 

@Bowen Bloodgood

Well broadly that's what it means.

I think when talking about role-playing games I think it has come to mean something you can specifically call "world immersion", which I think is the gaming equivalent of storytelling. If you're writing a book, you build up all sorts of storytelling elements to make the reader to feel involved in the world of the book; if you're making a movie, you do the same to make people feel involved in the world of the movie. This naturally uses some degree or other of realism, because realism is helpful to storytelling.

Although, in a larger sense, "realism" is just a stylistic choice, and is not necessarily bad anymore than "immersion" necessarily is bad. Saying realism is bad is like saying Blade Runner is worse than Avengers because the style is more realistic. Its just different.

But the whole debate is annoying to me because the games can be made many ways, and it just comes down to balancing good design and art decisions that meet the needs of the game you're creating.

I mean, there are a lot of other possible tensions in game design:

- Balance vs. fun. Sometimes if game mechanics are too artificially balanced, the game feels predictable and its not fun anymore.
- Convenience vs. fun. Sometimes if its too convenient to accomplish things, the game becomes mindless and its not fun anymore.
- Rewards vs. fun. Sometimes if you get too much rewards for too little work, the game starts to feel pointless and its not fun anymore.
- Action vs. fun. Sometimes if you give the player a payoff too soon, it doesn't keep him the game very long and it becomes boring. By this I would mean a kind of storytelling that cuts out 'exposition' and cuts straight to the 'action'. Its not a good way to create movies, because you're giving the audience the payoff right away, and its not any better of a way to create games.
- Sandbox vs. fun. (Or Freedom vs. fun) Sometimes if you let players do whatever they want whenever they want the game world starts being completely unappealing place to play in and its not fun anymore.

So there are a lot of ways games can be made unfun. And I specifically focused on mechanics that are argued for by people who are against "immersion," to make a point. Not that any of these things are not necessarily bad in their proper context. Balance can be fun. Convenience can be fun. Rewards can be fun. Action can be fun. Sandbox can be fun. Freedom can be fun. So can immersion be fun.

What I really wish that the devs and players would focus on are questions like what made the Ultima games fun, and what makes role-playing games fun. And honestly, I think a big part of that answer is immersion, because role-playing -- and specifically Ultima-style role-playing -- is essentially about storytelling at its heart.

There are sometimes unrealistic ideas about immersion, yea, and sometimes people will push these. So will they push unrealistic ideas about rewards, or sandbox content, or action, or convenience. But nobody every mocks these people as saying "muh balance" or "muh rewards" or "muh sandbox" or "muh action" or "muh convenience." There is kind of a persistent controversy over immersion and or/realism, though, over all those other game design factors, and I've found it disappointing because we're talking about something that's always been important for Ultima games, and the devs and players dismiss it IMO at the expense of the game.

 

So far, in this discussion - no one has given any examples of specific "activities" that qualify as "immersion".
I'm not talking about broad categories like RP, but specific examples of current "immersion" that most see as mere tedium.

 

Yea, you say "most people", and you have every right to have that POV, but I'm still predicting the more the devs share that POV, the more players will leave, without enough new players making up for the ones lost.

 

I'm a firm believer in the notion that words mean things and we can't just go around redefining them as we see fit. "Immersion" is one of those words, and because we do this it causes confusion and people associate it with the wrong things.. like.. too much realism badly implemented becomes annoying and actually non-immersive because it's not fun. If we're talking about story craft.. let's call it what it is.. story craft. Good story, good mechanics.. good balance.. generally good design etc.. creates immersion.

Was never the intent of the thread.. but rather you couldn't point such a thing out in the first place as it's a contradiction. Tedium is not immersive. What folks who don't like "immersion" don't seem to get is what they are calling "immersion" is quite the opposite of it. It's also about as subjective as "fun". So there's not a lot of point in giving specific examples. If you think it's "fun" than for you 'it' is something that you engage in and if you're engaging it, it's immersive for you. If it's not fun (ie it's tedious, dull what have you) it's not immersive since you want to disengage. You can give your own examples of what those things are for you. I don't particularly care to turn the discussion into argument over it.

 

Reading this I get the idea of mining and things like that as tedium.

Seeing that it takes crazy amounts of stone to make dungeons if the amount of stone is easier to gather maybe more people would participate.

 

The important point though is what people who use words, use them to mean.

So, when someone says "I want SotA to be immersive", what specifically does that mean? Is it immersive like being involved in a game of Solitaire is immersive?

OK. Since you're getting into the language issues, lets go there... Immersion more generally speaking means you're drawn into something to the point that you feel that you're totally absorbed in it -- and I think that's the most accurate and broadest sense of the term. Like if you go into a pool and swim down to the bottom, you're immersed in water. You go down in a quicksand pit, and you're immersed in sand. Its not merely a synonym for "engaged" or "involved", though it can be used that way. "Immersive language learning" means you go to an environment where you're surrounded by the everyday use of that language. I might buy a book to learn French and be really engaged and involved in learning French, but when I go to France and talk to French people, that's an immersive experience. Same way, I can be engaged in a game of Solitaire, without feeling "immersed."

Possibly, there are many ways you can feel immersed. But if I'm reading a book, it means immersed in the story and the world the story is trying to create, right? But its not specifically "storycraft" because we're not talking about the narrative elements. When you're talking about storytelling in a movie, for example, you're not just talking about the dialogue, for instance, but also using images to do storytelling, using the sets to do storytelling, etc. There are means ways movies use to tell a story. Relying on dialogue only will make for a pretty boring story, and any good filmmaker knows this.

So the question with games has always been, how do you apply this to concept to gameplay? Is it just the quests? Or is it how the game world is designed? The game mechanics? The UI? "Storycraft" is not enough to describe what we're talking about here. And possibly you can carry over the "storytelling" description from movies to games, but this always gets misunderstood because it seems to describe only quests. And that's why IMO people choose a different term.

So, lets get back to the beginning. When people say "Ultima VII was really an immersive game! I want SotA to be immersive like Ultima VII!", doesn't it mean what exactly I'm talking about?

 

I don't think it's a matter of easier so much as it needs to be more fun.

Let's not confuse definitions here by mixing contexts. Being physically immersed is not equal to mentally or emotionally. Though the root concept is essentially the same.

If it is I question the use of language. I read that question/statement and I see "Ultima VII was really a fun game! I want SotA to be fun like Ultima VII!" I don't read specifically "UVII had really great mechanics and story telling and design and..." You can read all those things into it and the end result could be called immersive. It's like saying "that steak was a great meal" but a great meal isn't necessarily always a steak. If that makes sense.

 

@Bowen Bloodgood

Yea, I think the point is still what people mean by "immersion" when they say "immersion" and that's all that matters.

I'm just trying to use a lot of examples to challenge you on meaning because I think you're using a pretty broad definition, when people are using a more narrow meaning. So, again, look at the example of "immersive language learning" setting. But travelling to France is not more immersive than learning from a book, you say! I can be equally immersed learning French from a book!

Anyway, it's also why I said "world immersion", because its a specific type of immersion that people are referring to.

 

C'mon guys...
@Bowen Bloodgood
You began this thread by saying:

We have no idea what "systems" are going to change.
Until we know that, we have no idea what THEY/CHRIS sees as having sacrificed fun in favor of immersion.
We could debate what constitutes immersion with no end in sight, since to a large degree it's very subjective.

But I'm still not understanding what you feel the need to "rant" about, when we as yet don't know what Chris is referring to......

 

And part of my point is so many people don't understand what people mean by "immersion". Like if you say UVII was a very immersive game. Depending on who you talk to that can mean it was a lot of fun to so realistic it must be really tedious.

 

The whole point was the misuse of the word "immersion" based on misconceptions of its meaning. It had absolutely nothing to do with whatever changes are going to be made. What constitutes immersion isn't the point either. I've already said it was subjective and didn't want to debate specifics. We're talking use of language here.

 

@Bowen Bloodgood

I think people are using a specific, rather than broad meaning of immersion, and that's OK.

And I don't really think its commonly used as a synonym for fun -- nobody describes Solitare as an "immersive" game -- so I don't see the room for confusion there that you do. It can often involve elements of realism -- as UVII definitely did -- and if people automatically associate realism with not being fun, that's their choice; but to me, it just means they haven't played enough games. Its IMO, like I said, describing Blade Runner as a worst movie than Avengers because its more realistic.

 

Most people don't describe games as "immersive" in general. My whole gripe is the word being misunderstood in general as something it's not and then used that way.

 

@Bowen Bloodgood

They do describe certain RPGs (like Ultima VII, Skyrim, Witcher, etc.) as immersive

Anyway. Slightly related to the topic, also something I really dislike is the way different segments of players have always been set against each other on these forums. "PvE vs. PvP." "Multiplayer vs. single-player." "Social vs. solo." There isn't really a reason to think all of these are competing gameplay elements and can't work together. I'm a real believer that they can, and I saw that as one of the promises in Kickstarter, right?

But then we get forum politics saying these things can't co-exist, because PvPers and PvEers are mortal enemies. Anything for PvP is against PvE. Anything for PvE is against PvP. People fight over the forums like two armies locked in battle.

I see the "Immersion vs. fun" being another one of these unnecessary debates. There has always been one camp on the forums saying things should be immersive. Another camp saying things should be fun. I really think there's no reason one side has to be set against each other; that the game can be both immersive and fun. You just have to work out the solutions to get there. Its about making the right game design decisions, and I think both camps can be pleased.

But I also see Chris as taking sides in that, and that's what's most disappointing. It would be like "PvE vs. fun"? "PvP vs. fun"? Seriously.