on Immersion

[razielim]

Have you ever dreamed you could fly? That you could up and just climb a fucking building, no sweat? Could run on all fours and pass cars on the road, moving in an easy springing rhythm, your whole body enjoying the movements involved? And then woken up with that same feeling of lightness, freedom, and possibility, only to have it gradually dawn on you that, as easy as it might still seem to simply push off and be free of mundane physics, now that you’re awake, you have to get around while firmly rooted to the earth?

Now that’s immersion. That’s cool.

I think the coolest games in the world are the ones which stick with you after, games which are a fantasy for the body as much as the mind, games whose weightless possibility is craved viscerally.

I see “immersion” as early Assassin’s Creed, early Tomb Raider. Spyro, even. Games that don’t break evenly between “Here you will fight, and there you will use your movement set to get around.” Games that break your head, and as you move about the real world, get you to think, “Hey look at that ledge! I bet I could leap to it!” before remembering that in the waking world, your body is neither that light nor that strong. Games that allow you to cover so much ground in one smooth sprint that you’re left feeling you have all of real Venice memorized.

Putting these games down is like waking from a weightless dream.

You don’t need high-res details for immersion. A general suggestion of the environment is all you ever get in dreams and yet that’s powerful enough for piercing nostalgia when back in the waking world. The first Tomb Raider was able to deliver fantastical settings never before seen all with one-size-fits-all basic building blocks and, I don’t know if you remember this, but upright 2D representations of items. I still have TR1-related brain damage to this day - noticing game-typical platforms out in the real world which I would climb if I could only live by dream-physics. More than twenty years later, I still think back to TR1′s locations, down to individual rooms, and feel intensely curious about them in a way I don’t feel about the locations in TR: Anniversary. The details TR1 devs could include with the technology of the time had atmosphere and character, and that’s what mattered in the end.

You don’t need realistic physics and proportion for immersion. Limiting jump height and run speed while stretching out maps doesn’t make the game more captivating to the imagination. In fact, it dulls the ability to feel the game’s physics in the body. What difference does it make to me if I’m dreaming or awake if the physics are the same in both? You can wake up, shrug off the dream, shrug off the game, and go about your day without the body pulling you to stay in bed a little longer, feel a little lighter, fly a little higher. The body has its own appetites and it craves good stretches and ease of movement. Making characters slower, heavier, more down-to-earth doesn’t create something in which I want to be immersed. If the body can’t feel the threshold of difference between life physics and game physics, it can’t feel the game. The game exists only in the mind and not the body. Dream-games introduce you to new physics, laws which are delightful to the imagination of your muscles and bones, all while making so much sense, logically and viscerally all over the body, that you can’t help but wonder when you wake, “Well, why can’t it be real?”

In these dream-games, you use your fantastical and wonderful movements everywhere always. There isn’t fantasy happening as a spectacle on the stage around you while limiting you in your ability to participate in the fantastical with your given avatar. It’s an ailment if a game forces you to watch fantasy but doesn’t allow you to be fantasy, and it should be diagnosed as such. Immersion in dream-games means being part of the fabric of the fantastic. The fantastic world around you exists because you are fantastic and moving through it in a fantastic manner. You’re on the stage, watching yourself participate in magic, and flight, and lightness, and freedom.

Immersion is a quality of being dream-like, and as such, owes its very existence to viewing the creeping ingress of the waking world into games with suspicion and hostility.