Does anyone know when the term "immersive sim" was used for the first time?

[Cassar]

Does anyone know when the term "immersive sim" was used for the first time over here, in conversations ? When was it more widely adopted while talking about the types of games this term indicates ?

 

[Latelistener]

Does anyone know when the term "immersive sim" was used for the first time over here, in conversations ? When was it more widely adopted while talking about the types of games this term indicates ?

I can't say you when, but emergent gameplay has been adopted by many games and game series by now that helped to popularize the term.

 

[Cassar]

Does anyone know when the term "immersive sim" was used for the first time over here, in conversations ? When was it more widely adopted while talking about the types of games this term indicates ?

I can't say you when, but emergent gameplay has been adopted by many games and game series by now that helped to popularize the term.

The thing is, i can't quite remember exactly when i started using the term as well. Even though Spector coined the term imediatelly, in 2000, i remember reading some forum back in 2005 about the codex best rpg list of that time and people were definitely refering to Deus Ex as a fps/rpg hybrid. But then, i think after Bioshock came out in 07 the term immersive sim started gaining more ground.

I was reading some thread recently on reddit and something about this subgenre came about, and some segment of people react histerically about this. Most console gamers and even younger pc gamers have never in their life either played the classics or heard of immersive sim until a few years ago, Dishonored 2, Prey. And the reaction a lot of them have is vitriol and hate. Like, if some playstation tard who only knew gaming though the lens of sony and playstation didn't know what an "immersive sim" is until today, then it must not exist.

I did manage to find a bunch of articles from 2010 when Deus Ex had its 10 years anniversary with various interviews with game devs and they all had immersive sim in the title. So at least 2010 it was used and people knew it. But how about earlier ? 2007 ? 2008 ? Some articles from then, forum talk. I'd be interested in some links if anyone has some

 

[octavius]

Can't find the term being used on Usenet (comp.sys...RPG or...Action).

On the Codex the oldest message seems be one from Infinitron in 2014

 

[Cassar]

Interesting. This article from june 2010 can't be the first one though

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/dark-futures-part-1-randy-smith


I feel this name just kinda slipped in our lexicon at some point without realising it.

 

[Wesp5]

Most console gamers and even younger pc gamers have never in their life either played the classics or heard of immersive sim until a few years ago, Dishonored 2, Prey. And the reaction a lot of them have is vitriol and hate.

I rather liked Dishonored except for the chaos level which was kind of punishing players for not doing the sim aspect exactly like the developers wanted it, but Prey really broke the straw with its endless backtracking!

 

[Latelistener]

I was reading some thread recently on reddit and something about this subgenre came about, and some segment of people react histerically about this. Most console gamers and even younger pc gamers have never in their life either played the classics or heard of immersive sim until a few years ago, Dishonored 2, Prey. And the reaction a lot of them have is vitriol and hate. Like, if some playstation tard who only knew gaming though the lens of sony and playstation didn't know what an "immersive sim" is until today, then it must not exist.

It's somewhat interesting what caused them to go nuts about it, because Sony themselves have already adopted the philosophy. Instead of movie-like experience they did 10 years ago with Uncharted, Last of Us and Detroit, they moved to open-world play-as-you-want types of games, like Tsushima and Days Gone. Nintendo always had Zelda, but Breath of the Wild has even more of emergent gameplay. So it's not like consoletards didn't experience anything related to it.

 

[Morenatsu.]

The ‘immersive sim’ experience that consoletards had was Skyrim.

 

[Cassar]

This is what i meant on the previous page. They made a thread on reeera about vague genres. All these scream so hard of console retard of the highest order who never knew or played pc games and found himself exposed to previously pc only genres just last week. And they're now having a hard time with it. "he hates that it caught on". He probabably thinks this was used since last week or something. But why does he "hate" it ? This weird reaction from console idiots is the thing that doesnt make any sense. The hate part. The cant stand it. Why are they foaming at the mouth because they found out a new subgenre of games ?

 

[Butter]

This is what i meant on the previous page. They made a thread on reeera about vague genres. All these scream so hard of console retard of the highest order who never knew or played pc games and found himself exposed to previously pc only genres just last week. And they're now having a hard time with it. "he hates that it caught on". He probabably thinks this was used since last week or something. But why does he "hate" it ? This weird reaction from console idiots is the thing that doesnt make any sense. The hate part. The cant stand it. Why are they foaming at the mouth because they found out a new subgenre of games ?

Underworld-like might have been more apt, but it is what it is. These people are 100% clowns who never heard the term before 2 years ago, and probably think it applies to Bethesda games.

 

[Latelistener]

They made a thread on reeera about vague genres.

This is not a genre and a game of any genre can be an immersive sim, so it doesn't belong in that thread.

But I can't say I disagree with them, as immersive sim is a really bad name for this set of design principles. It has nothing to do with "sims" or "immersiveness", but rather emergent gameplay that arise from in-game systems colliding with each other sometimes in an unexpected way.

Regarding your earlier question, I read somewhere recently that the term has been used more frequently since ~2010. Can't say why, maybe because of Arkane. I do remember that Bioshock was never advertised as an immersive sim.

 

[Dave the Druid]

I know this is a bit late for the discussion of where and how the term 'immersive sim' came to be but I did some digging and I think I found the earliest ever reference to it: it's from this old DOS gaming magazine called Game Bytes, issue 8, apparently published December 28, 1992. It's got an interview in it with Doug Church and Paul Neurath about their upcoming game, Ultima Underworld II.

It it Doug Church calls Ultima Underworld 1 a 'first-person dungeon simulation':

And while talking about insane technological advances (like the then-new and exciting CD-ROM technology that was about the sweep the industry) he calls Looking Glass's future games, 'flight simulators and other "reality" simulators.'

Technically he's not saying they're 'immersive' sims just yet, although Warren Spector himself has said multiple times that Doug Church actually coined the term, 'immersive sim.' What's interesting is that Looking Glass's future games would almost all be either flight simulators, like Flight Unlimited, or games like System Shock, Terra Nova and Thief, which we seem to call immersive sims now rather than "reality" simulators.

Admittedly that's not when it started being used in common parlance, that seems to be sometime post-2000, I'm merely making a point about just how far back it was actually coined. It was probably first used around the Ultima Underworld days. Oh, and that anyone who posts on ResetEra has absolutely no idea what they're talking about as per usual.

Whole interview's worth reading, real blast from the past. Tons of other quotes too that come within a hairs' distance of saying 'immersive sim.' Plus it came with this screenshot of Looking Glass's internal Underworld editor which I'm pretty sure hasn't been seen by human eyes since 1993.

 

[Dave the Druid]

Okay, so we've split the thread now but the last post was almost a month ago now so the new thread's already on page 4. That's fucking dumb.

Ah well, I might as well effort-post. Here's another Doug Church interview from Game Bytes. This one's from issue 17 published March 26, 1994 and this time he's talking about Looking Glass Technologies' upcoming game: System Shock. By this point they were calling their games 'simulations' as well as 'immersive role-playing realities.'

Still not quite 'immersive sim' yet but we're getting closer. It's really amazing what you can find on the Internet Archive.

 

[Roguey]

Look it's not hard.

Immersive sim IS a real term that was used historically at Looking Glass Studios and by figures such as Doug Church & Warren Spector all the way since the late 90s.

For most of the time since then, it was NOT widely recognized or used by actual gamers. They usually called these games "FPS/RPGs" etc as Jasede says.

The term came into common use when Arkane Studios made a bid at explicitly reviving the Looking Glass legacy with Dishonored & Prey, which sent game journalists looking through history books to find terms to describe the genre.

 

[Dave the Druid]

Look it's not hard.

Immersive sim IS a real term that was used historically at Looking Glass Studios and by figures such as Doug Church & Warren Spector all the way since the late 90s.

As far as I can tell that's actually slightly wrong. Going through Looking Glass's old website and old interviews from the late 90s they were using the term Immersive Reality rather than immersive sim which they were using at least as early as December 1996. In fact that 1994 Doug Church interview I linked above where he refers to Looking Glass's games as immersive role-playing realities might be the earliest use of it in print. And then just to make it even more confusing they were also calling their games first-person simulations right from the beginning as well. Immersive Reality generally referred to their design philosophy (short version: systems-driven emergent gameplay allowing for player agency) whereas they referred to their games generally as 'simulations.' Once you figure that out and stop looking specifically for the term 'immersive sim' you can find tons of references to it going back all the way to 1992.

This is just speculation but I think Warren Spector might've just conflated the two in his Deus Ex postmortem and that's how we got the word-salady, rather shit term, immersive sim. Cause as far as I can tell no one at Looking Glass ever actually used it.

 

[Roguey]

This is just speculation but I think Warren Spector might've just conflated the two in his Deus Ex postmortem and that's how we got the word-salady, rather shit term, immersive sim. Cause as far as I can tell no one at Looking Glass ever actually used it.

Doug Church seems to have embraced it. https://flylib.com/books/en/4.479.1.135/1/ This book is from 2005, so before the Dishonored-driven "immersive sim" zeitgeist.

Was there ever a worry from Origin that the Underworld gameplay was too much of a departure from the previous Ultimas ?


I would say for the first year they didn t really think it was ever going to get done. They didn t pay any attention at all, frankly. We had two producers , one of whom quit without anyone there telling us. We called the switchboard after two months and asked, Hey, we haven t heard from our producer in a while. Oh, he doesn t work here anymore. Awesome. I m sure that s good news for our project. And then the next producer didn t really get it either. I think we were very lucky to find Warren who was like My God, first-person 3D immersive play simulation indoors!

How did System Shock originate? Did you have more of a formalized plan than with Ultima Underworld ?


Probably a little . Underworld II was initially going to ship in February, but then we all tried to pull it in for Christmas. So inevitably we signed off on December 30th with everyone working overtime over Christmas, in that classic, genius game development way. So we shipped that in January, and I actually went down to Origin in Texas for a couple of weeks for that, while the guys were still up in Boston. And finally the final two guys in Boston and I would get on the phone and make sure I had all the new code and modem it back and forth and all that kind of excitement we had back then, reading hex checksums of all the files over the phone to make sure we were building the same thing. There s nothing like, three in the morning, reading off two hundred sets of hex numbers . Awesome, totally awesome. Underworld was at zero bugs for a week and a half, Underworld II actually was at close to zero bugs for a while but there was actually one bug in it that we failed to catch, so we were all embarrassed by that. Back then, your final couple of weeks there really were almost no bugs, you were trying to be at zero bugs for several weeks in a row with no new bugs found. So you had a fair amount of time, and you d try to play your game to break it, but really, with your own game, there s only so many hours you can spend a day playing it before you completely burn out. So we started talking then about doing an immersive simulation game but taking it out of the fantasy space.

 

[Dave the Druid]

Doug Church seems to have embraced it. https://flylib.com/books/en/4.479.1.135/1/ This book is from 2005, so before the Dishonored-driven "immersive sim" zeitgeist.

Was there ever a worry from Origin that the Underworld gameplay was too much of a departure from the previous Ultimas ?


I would say for the first year they didn t really think it was ever going to get done. They didn t pay any attention at all, frankly. We had two producers , one of whom quit without anyone there telling us. We called the switchboard after two months and asked, Hey, we haven t heard from our producer in a while. Oh, he doesn t work here anymore. Awesome. I m sure that s good news for our project. And then the next producer didn t really get it either. I think we were very lucky to find Warren who was like My God, first-person 3D immersive play simulation indoors!

True. Here's Doug Church saying it out loud in 2002:


I'm merely pointing out that you can't find anyone at Looking Glass using the term pre-2000. Meanwhile if you just look for 'immersive reality' or any LGS member using the term 'simulation' you'll find fucking mountains of material going back all the way to 92.

Also do we have any evidence that Doug Church is even still alive? Seriously I've looked and there's virtually no trace of the dude post-2005ish.

 

[Siel]

Doug Church seems to have embraced it. https://flylib.com/books/en/4.479.1.135/1/ This book is from 2005, so before the Dishonored-driven "immersive sim" zeitgeist.

Was there ever a worry from Origin that the Underworld gameplay was too much of a departure from the previous Ultimas ?


I would say for the first year they didn t really think it was ever going to get done. They didn t pay any attention at all, frankly. We had two producers , one of whom quit without anyone there telling us. We called the switchboard after two months and asked, Hey, we haven t heard from our producer in a while. Oh, he doesn t work here anymore. Awesome. I m sure that s good news for our project. And then the next producer didn t really get it either. I think we were very lucky to find Warren who was like My God, first-person 3D immersive play simulation indoors!

True. Here's Doug Church saying it out loud in 2002:


I'm merely pointing out that you can't find anyone at Looking Glass using the term pre-2000. Meanwhile if you just look for 'immersive reality' or any LGS member using the term 'simulation' you'll find fucking mountains of material going back all the way to 92.

Also do we have any evidence that Doug Church is even still alive? Seriously I've looked and there's virtually no trace of the dude post-2005ish.

He is credited as 'Special Thanks' on Weird West. Probably played the game and made feedbacks as he is a close friend of Raf.

https://www.mobygames.com/person/4965/doug-church/

 

[Zarniwoop]

Does anyone know when the term "immersive sim" was used for the first time over here, in conversations ? When was it more widely adopted while talking about the types of games this term indicates ?

I don't know but I do know the person who came up with it, should die slowly and painfully.

They're not "simulating" anything. And all games are immersive to some extent.

 

[Dave the Druid]

Meanwhile if you just look for 'immersive reality' or any LGS member using the term 'simulation' you'll find fucking mountains of material going back all the way to 92.

Okay, yeah like this: I found this on Google Groups Usenet archive (specifically it's from comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action). It's a thread from December 1998 where everyone was arguing about what to classify the newly released Thief as (is it an action game? A simulation? An RPG? and so on) as was customary whenever Looking Glass released a new game. However because Usenet was awesome a bunch of actual game designers from Looking Glass joined in the debate including MAHK (a.k.a. Marc LeBlanc, a LGS veteran who'd designed the Object systems, most of the game systems, UI and that fucking rad Act/React Stimuli system for Thief.) Here's his thoughts, from December 7, 1998 literal days after Thief's release, about why and how Thief is closer to a 'simulation' while directly comparing it to Metal Gear Soild:

*** Warning: possibly pedantic rant ahead ***

There's no such thing as a "pure" simulation game. All games are a mixture
of "simulation" and "emulation."

"Simulation" is used to describe systems, usually analog, that are rich
models of object behavior. The physics system in Thief (and most FPS games)
is a simulation, the way the Thief AI sees and hears objects is a
simulation. Simulation really has little to do with "realism;" You can
simulate unrealistic concepts like Superman or a fire-breathing dragon.

"Emulation" describes special-cased or rules-based behavior. A button that
opens a door is an "emulated" behavior in most games; there's no simulation
of the physics of the button depressing on a spring and making an electrical
contact, or of the electrical signal travelling along a wire to the door
actuators. (I can't speak for Trespasser )

Simulation is good because it provides open-endedness; simulations are
likely to have interesting emergent behaviors and interactions. When it
works, it's a powerful tool for creating immersion. Emulation is good
because it provides predictability; once the player learns the rules, he can
reason within them.

I really think the difference between these two extremes is well represented
in the difference between Thief and Metal Gear Solid.

Thief is much more simulation-y: The player drops a vase and makes a noise,
the sound propagates through the level. If it's still loud enough when it
reaches a nearby guard, the guard takes note and starts searching in the
general area.

In Metal Gear Solid, only a few specific events make noise (hitting the
"make a noise button", walking through a puddle, etc). A nearby guard will
immediately beeline to the source of the noise. Simple and rules-based.

Both are valid strategies for designing a game, and both are good games
IMHO. But I think that Thief feels more immersive, and MGS feels more like
a video game. And to a certain degee, Thief's immersiveness is it's biggest
weakness.

Look back at the gameplay criticisms that Thief gets on this and other
newsgroups. "I can't destroy a lantern with my sword," "Guards don't pay
enough attention when X happens," etc. Why doesn't Metal Gear Solid get
similar complaints? "I can't blow up a security camera with my gun," "I
can't use my cigarrettes to blow smoke in a guard's face and stun him," etc.
Because Thief is a "simulation" and MGS is a "game," Thief begs the
questions, and MGS doesn't.

At their hearts, both games are trying to be *fun games*, not accurate
simulations.

- MAHK

The whole thread's worth taking a look at btw. And seriously that Act/React Stimuli system in Thief and System Shock 2 is fucking genius still and MAHK's the guy who made it.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

MAHK is a fucking genius. I bet that modern developers aren't able to understand what he was saying more than 20 years ago anymore.

 

[Dave the Druid]

Bethesda blown the fuck out. Source. That's Greg LoPiccolo talking about Thief (then just called The Dark Project) in March 1997.

 

[Cassar]

These are some awesome findings. So it seems they were thinking in terms of sim since before these games even came out. Since before some of these modern detractors were even born

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Bethesda blown the fuck out. Source. That's Greg LoPiccolo talking about Thief (then just called The Dark Project) in March 1997.

Dang. This simple comparison would probably be seen as a borderline hate crime today, probably even by the guy saying it himself. It also perfectly describes the core problem of Bethesda's design.
By the time System Shock 2 was announced, people were worried that the Thief engine would be too small and simple for it. Those were the days I guess.

 

[Dave the Druid]

These are some awesome findings. So it seems they were thinking in terms of sim since before these games even came out. Since before some of these modern detractors were even born

Yep. All the way back to 1992 (okay UW2 was technically released in January 1993 but the manual was probably already finished well in advance. Plus wasn't it supposed to launch in December 1992 but got pushed back because of bug issues?)

And just to give credit where credit's due the manual was written by Austin Grossman and Warren Spector so one of them probably wrote this. Or both. And just to highlight:

In designing the Underworld system, one of the things we attempted to do was to merge traditional fantasy RPG elements, such as quests and combats and explorations, with a sophisticated three-dimensional simulation of a sensible and believable world.

We feel that one of Underworld’s strongest features is its capacity to generate situations and strategies that we did not script, but that arose from the scenarios we created.