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

[Dave the Druid]

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.

The Deus Ex design document from November 1997 (written by Warren Spector? I think? It's certainly got tons of annotations by him) also takes shots at Daggerfall.

Methinks Looking Glass/Ion Storm weren't the biggest fans lmao. (It's worth noting that while they mention that the Ultima games size/scope is an issue they actually praise Ultima elsewhere in the doc, calling them, "the best roleplaying games.")

There's some other good stuff in here too:

Worth reading the full thing. There's a ton of info in it about cut missions like the space station finale or the Cheyenne mountain mission.

 

[Tweed]

Someone should bring this up to gaming journos and see if we can't get some people cancelled over this. Besmirching the beloved name of Daggerall like that, shameful.
Games like Daggerfall are places where AI could really shine. Thousands of NPCs who can actually have dynamic dialogue with the player would help with the illusion of a living world.

Original Deus Ex was going to tie into System Shock, but then they shitcanned the space mission, probably for the best.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I wonder if they took potshots at Daggerfall because it felt like the next big thing in rpgs. Maybe it was somewhat personal, considering how early TES was mostly a continuation of what Ultima Underworld had set in motion.

 

[Dave the Druid]

I wonder if they took potshots at Daggerfall because it felt like the next big thing in rpgs. Maybe it was somewhat personal, considering how early TES was mostly a continuation of what Ultima Underworld had set in motion.

Or possibly it was because both of those were written in 1997? As far as 3D RPGs go what else was even out around that time? Strife, I guess? Descent to Undermountain was still in development hell (where it should've fucking stayed.)

Plus Daggerfall did have a somewhat mixed reception back in its day. Anyone remember Charlie Brooker's review? I do. He gave it a 6.5/10. I even found that 'handy table thing' from it:

And let's face it, while Daggerfall/Arena were clearly inspired by Ultima Underworld, Bethesda's design philosophy for them couldn't have been more different than Looking Glass's philosophy for Thief/Ion Storm's philosophy for Deus Ex. Honestly it's still completely different even once you get into the Todd era with Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim.

My main point isn't that Daggerfall's bad by the way. My point is that, just for example, if you ever hear some Youtuber call Daggerfall an immersive sim, in some 4-8 hour long retrospective designed to waste your life away, you can laugh in their faces because they clearly have no idea what the fuck they're talking about.

 

[Dave the Druid]

*** 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

A new challenger approaches. I found this thread on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg from December 1998 where everyone's speculating on what Thief even is. Pretty much everyone in the thread thinks is more of a 'simulation' than an RPG and it certainly isn't an action game or a shooter. When suddenly Sean T. Barrett (another Looking Glass alum who wrote a lot of the intial Dark Engine stuff although he didn't actually see the project to completion) swoops in and argues that calling Thief a simulation is stupid and will confuse people. His point is that it's actually closer to an RPG although CRPGs have basically stolen that term to mean 'game with stats and numbers that go up.' He thinks maybe a new term is needed (and this is just a wild guess on my part but he probably would've preferred that this new term didn't have the word simulation in it.)

I really think this is an unfair and way to categorize Thief,
which will only hurt it. The RPG group thinks it's not an RPG;
the action group things it's not an action game. Clearly it's
not a shooter, and clearly it lacks RPG elements that many
people think are important for considering a game a CRPG.
Calling it an 'action game' is still probably fair, insofar as almost
any hand-eye-coordination game is an 'action game'--but as you note
above, Ultima Underworld had just as much 'action'.

Anyhow, the problem with calling it a 'simulation' is that
that's essentially devoid of content. Ultima N is an 'avatar
simulator'; Baldur's Gate is a fantasy-combat-and-adventure
simlulation. Tetris is a 'falling block simulator'.

I think what people are trying to get at by using the
word 'simulation' is simply the idea that Thief is trying
to *immerse* the player into a situation where s/he *feels
like* a Thief. (This identification between player-and-avatar
is not inherent to 'simulation'--e.g. football simulators,
or any number of simulators where there's no 'avatar'.)

Thief is a game that tries to deliver to the player a fun
experience of what it would be like to be a D&D-style thief--
hiding in shadows, moving silently, backstabbing, etc.,
in the context of a larger narrative. For many members of
the team, they see this experience as much like the experience
had when playing pen-and-paper RPGs; however, it's clearly
lacking much relation to today's 'CRPG's (i.e. what I could
stereotypically refer to as "Stat Commander Hack'n'Slash").

"Simulation" is a really bad word to mean "role-play"; it's
unfortunate that CRPG's have coopted the phrase "role-play"
such that people are unwilling to apply it to games like Thief.
Perhaps a new term needs to be invented. We may have trouble
getting the pen-and-paper and live-action "role-players" to
switch to the new word, though.

Sean (ex-Thief team, opinions my own)

Clearly this thread's on the wrong board. It should be on the RPG board instead.

Sorry that I keep bumping this thread - I just keep finding new shit everytime I look on places like Usenet, internet archive or Wayback machine. Also I gotta say looking up information from the last 6-7 years brings up utter nonsense. I can see why people who never heard the term/have no idea Looking Glass even existed get so confused and even irrationally angry. The Wikipedia article is a fucking mess that cites Youtube video essays as sources while that GiantBomb article/list is utter bullshit that lists proto-visual novels as being the 'real' immersive sims and tries to argue that Richard Garriott was inspired by The Legend of Zelda to create Ultima.

 

[Cassar]

Sorry that I keep bumping this thread - I just keep finding new shit everytime I look on places like Usenet, internet archive or Wayback machine. Also I gotta say looking up information from the last 6-7 years brings up utter nonsense. I can see why people who never heard the term/have no idea Looking Glass even existed get so confused and even irrationally angry. The Wikipedia article is a fucking mess that cites Youtube video essays as sources while that GiantBomb article/list is utter bullshit that lists proto-visual novels as being the 'real' immersive sims and tries to argue that Richard Garriott was inspired by The Legend of Zelda to create Ultima.

Don't be sorry, these are awesome finds. Keep posting if you come across something new

That Giant Bomb article initially said something else, for many years.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150219214329/https://www.giantbomb.com/immersive-sim/3015-5700/

Somewhere over the years, some console retard edited that and tried to rewrite history, as they often try to do. Computers gave birth to near every gaming genre we have today and influenced near everything we play today. This doesn't go well with expecially console only gamers, who are offended at the notion of computer gaming.

Also, yeah, the creator of Zelda has something else to say about his influences.

 

[Theodora]

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!

Not gonna argue that Prey doesn't have a fair bit of backtracking, but it's not exactly in the typical meaning of the term given how dramatically the situation on the station shifts over the course of its narrative.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

"Thief is a game that tries to deliver to the player a fun experience of what it would be like to be a D&D-style thief -- hiding in shadows, moving silently, backstabbing, etc., in the context of a larger narrative. For many members of the team, they see this experience as much like the experience had when playing pen-and-paper RPGs; however, it's clearly lacking much relation to today's 'CRPG's (i.e. what I could stereotypically refer to as "Stat Commander Hack'n'Slash")."

He might as well claim that an action game based around hitting enemies with a sword is a pen-and-paper RPG "experience" because this is what a fighter does in D&D. Or that a FPS offers the same experience as a pen-and-paper RPG in which the players are mercenaries, commandos, secret agents, or suchlike in a contemporary setting where they rely on shooting enemies. The actual gameplay of such videogames are entirely different from pen-and-paper RPG gameplay, just as the Thief games are entirely missing character customization and progression, barely have equipment and inventory, have combat that is entirely action-based and deterministic, and even have stealth dependent on the player's skill at maneuvering Garrett into walking silently and hiding in shadows; the closest link to an RPG is in the excellent level design that bolsters exploration, but even for this aspect there are no logistics, no puzzles, and only a fixed sequence of self-contained missions.

 

[Dave the Druid]

Don't be sorry, these are awesome finds. Keep posting if you come across something new

I swear I'm not even trying to find shit at this point. I just keep stumbling onto new stuff by accident. Case in point: the Jurassic Park: Trespasser Postmortem from Gamasutra, written by Richard Wyckoff and published May 1999. I'm just gonna post the first section since it's the relevant bit:

"One seldom hears the true story of what happened at the place where the world changed. How it began. What were the reasons? What were the costs?" -John Parker Hammond

This quote from Trespasser’s intro movie serves just as well to open the real story of a game development team’s struggles to develop a breakthrough dinosaur game as it does to open the fictional story of Hammond’s struggle to develop a biotechnological breakthrough and clone dinosaurs. The parallels between the Trespasser project and Hammond’s cloning project were numerous: ambitious beginnings, years of arduous labor, and the eventual tragic ending. Hammond’s diary, as related in the game itself, dwells on the past and never attempts to explain Hammond’s future direction now that he has failed so grandly - this postmortem is intended to be much more forward-looking.

Trespasser was begun by two former employees of Looking Glass Technologies, Seamus Blackley and Austin Grossman. By the time the game was rolling, two more ex-Looking Glass employees would join the team, and our common background was instrumental in setting the direction for the project. Looking Glass’s most distinguished products, Underworld I and II and System Shock, are games which in some ways are still ahead of their time, specifically in the areas of object-rich, physics-based environments and emergent gameplay.

Quake did not even ship until after coding on Trespasser had begun, and to the Trespasser team with its founding in Looking Glass’s design-focused philosophy, it represented the stagnation of 3D games rather than the step forward it was proclaimed in the press. Quake did nothing to extend the basic first-person shooter game design standards of "find weapons and keys" which id had first created in Wolfenstein 3D, and replaced the fairly-consistent atmospheres of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom with a bizarre mishmash of medieval and science-fiction themes. Trespasser was intended to be a high-technology game where game design and world consistency came first.

The Jurassic Park license was inevitable from the start, for a couple reasons. The obvious reason was that Lost World was on its way and expected to be a gigantic hit, and standard Hollywood thinking dictates that all projected hits be exploited seven ways to Sunday. The less obvious reason was that Seamus had been working on a physically-simulated biped model originally intended for Terra Nova, and had been shopping it around to several movie animation groups working on dinosaurs before ending up at DreamWorks Interactive.

The pie-in-the-sky concept for Trespasser was an outdoor engine with no levels, a complete rigid-body physics simulation, and behaviorally-simulated and physics-modeled dinosaurs. The underlying design goal was to achieve a realistic feel through consistency of looks and behavior. Having an abandoned island setting was a useful way to exclude anything which did not seem possible to simulate, such as flexible solids like cloth and rope, wheeled vehicles, and the effects of burning, cutting, and digging.

The game would play from a first-person perspective, and you would experience the environment through a virtual body to avoid the "floating gun" feeling prevalent in the Wolfenstein breed of first person games. Combat would be less important than in a shooter, and dinosaurs would be much more dangerous than traditional first-person shooter enemies. The point of the game would be exploration and puzzle-solving, and when combat happened, it would more often involve frightening opponents away by inflicting pain than the merciless slaughter of every moving creature.

"Limited but rich" was a phrase which was used often early in Trespasser’s development. This phrase describes a game design philosophy consisting of choosing a reduced feature set, but putting more sophistication into each feature. Although solid-body physics based entirely on box-shaped solids might seem like only a rough approximation of the real world, the thinking was that a perfect simulation of solid boxes would be so much more flexible than the emulated physics of previous games that our gameplay would be deep and absorbing.

Likewise, though we would only have a few different types of dinosaurs, the dinosaur AI system would allow them to react to each other and the player in a large variety of ways, choosing appropriate responses depending on their emotional state. Sophisticated, fully-interruptable scenes would occur spontaneously rather than requiring large amounts of scripting, and observing the food chain in action would be as absorbing as playing the game itself. Interacting with the limited but rich features would lead to "emergent gameplay," the grail for many of Looking Glass’ best thinkers since Underworld I shipped and fans began to write in describing favorite moments - moments which had not been specifically designed or even experienced by the team itself.

The original plan for Trespasser certainly seemed like a good one. It was very ambitious, but the team had made tradeoffs for implementation and execution time from the very beginning, such as not attempting to do multiple or moving light sources or Quake-style shadow generation in order to accommodate arbitrary numbers of moving objects and long, wide-open views. Unfortunately, there is a difference between having a plan and successfully executing it, and the product that we eventually shipped was as disappointing to us as it was to the great majority of game players and game critics.

And if you can't be bothered reading all that here's the really important bit as far as this thread goes:

"Limited but rich" was a phrase which was used often early in Trespasser’s development. This phrase describes a game design philosophy consisting of choosing a reduced feature set, but putting more sophistication into each feature. Although solid-body physics based entirely on box-shaped solids might seem like only a rough approximation of the real world, the thinking was that a perfect simulation of solid boxes would be so much more flexible than the emulated physics of previous games that our gameplay would be deep and absorbing.

Likewise, though we would only have a few different types of dinosaurs, the dinosaur AI system would allow them to react to each other and the player in a large variety of ways, choosing appropriate responses depending on their emotional state. Sophisticated, fully-interruptable scenes would occur spontaneously rather than requiring large amounts of scripting, and observing the food chain in action would be as absorbing as playing the game itself. Interacting with the limited but rich features would lead to "emergent gameplay," the grail for many of Looking Glass’ best thinkers since Underworld I shipped and fans began to write in describing favorite moments - moments which had not been specifically designed or even experienced by the team itself.

And then the rest of it is about how Trespasser utterly failed as a piece of design, systems, AI, coding, physics and general game management/development. Still, interesting stuff. And with all that said, Trespasser's still very different with how it was trying to achieve "systems-driven emergent gameplay" to what Looking Glass were doing at the same time with Thief, or to what Spector/Ion Storm had just started working on with Deus Ex. But it's clearly part of the same family tree.

 

[Cassar]

Yeah, Traspasser seems to be an unsuspecting influence for a fair number of devs and studios, despite its failure

 

[Maxie]

ive been calling this type of games 'system shock clones' for as long as i can tell
i advise u to do the same

 

[Dave the Druid]

ive been calling this type of games 'system shock clones' for as long as i can tell
i advise u to do the same

Well that's rubbish since Ultima Underworld came out first and it's far more influential on the genre than System Shock. I've recently taken to calling them Action/adventure Underworld-inspired Tactical Immersive SIMulations. Or AutiSim for short.

 

[Maxie]

ive been calling this type of games 'system shock clones' for as long as i can tell
i advise u to do the same

Well that's rubbish since Ultima Underworld came out first and it's far more influential on the genre than System Shock. I've recently taken to calling them Action/adventure Underworld-inspired Tactical Immersive SIMulations. Or AutiSim for short.

leave you're basement and look around, who the fuck remembers unironically remembers ultima, especially in non-anglo countries

 

[Ryzer]

"Immersive sim" is a term related to every Ion Storm/ Looking glass games, people like. Underworld Ascendant was qualified an "immersive sim" before its release and then got ditched because nobody likes it. You don't understand, it's different!!!!!! They didn't have super-heroic dev who worked at Looking glass to make that game!!!?? REEEE
It's a buzzword for marketing, many so-called "immersive sim" games are in fact not very good like 2017 Prey for example, nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

 

[Hagashager]

I believe the very first invocation of the "Immersive Simulator" was the creator of Shenmue.

 

[Spukrian]

that GiantBomb article/list is utter bullshit that lists proto-visual novels as being the 'real' immersive sims

Well, this thing has been bothering me for a while now, so I had to look into it.

The proto visual novel that's been hailed as the first immersive sim is called Portopia Serial Murder Case. I haven't played it myself but gameplay consists of interrogating suspects, questioning witnesses and gathering evidence. The original version of the game used a text parser but the version most people have played probably is the Famicom/NES version, which uses a menu/keyword system. Some elements of pixelhunting is present and there is apparantly a 3d maze inspired by Wizardry at some point.

Now, where does the claims originally come from? I don't know, but it might be Tvtropes. If we look at Tvtropes Immersive sim page it states:

It was a first-person adventure game with an open world, character AI, choices and consequences, non-linear game design, open-ended narrative told through notes and diaries, interactive environments, emergent gameplay, allowed multiple ways to achieve objectives, and lacked fail states.

Now that sounds all fine and dandy, but I wouldn't consider this game an immersive sim. Why? Because it seems to forget that you need actual simulations. To me it seems like the game just consists of abstractions. That said, I haven't played the game myself, only watched a bit of gameplay of the NES version on youtube, so I could be wrong but I doubt it.

Also, if this game is an immersive sim, are then all visual novels immersive sims? The original had a text parser, so are all games with text parsers immersive sims? If so I guess Colossal Cave Adventure is the first immersive sim.

Oh, one last, funny thing: they recently made a remake with an AI-fueled text parser which was a trainwreck.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Thinking about it. The most ancient "immersive-sim" that I have played was "The Hobbit" a text adventure.

Relevant text:

The game has an innovative text-based physics system, developed by Veronika Megler.[8] Objects, including the characters in the game, have a calculated size, weight, and solidity. Objects can be placed inside other objects, attached together with rope and damaged or broken. If the main character is sitting in a barrel and this barrel is then picked up and thrown through a trapdoor, the player would go through.

Unlike other works of interactive fiction, the game is also in real time, insofar as a period of idleness causes the "WAIT" command to be automatically invoked and the possibility of events occurring as a result. This can be suppressed by entering the "PAUSE" command, which stops all events until a key is pressed.

The game has a cast of non-player characters (NPCs) entirely independent of the player and bound to precisely the same game rules. They have loyalties, strengths, and personalities that affect their behaviour and cannot always be predicted. The character of Gandalf, for example, would roam freely around the game world (some fifty locations), picking up objects, getting into fights and being captured.

The volatility of the characters, coupled with the rich physics and impossible-to-predict fighting system, enabled the game to be played in many different ways, though this would also lead to problems (such as an important character being killed early on). There are numerous possible solutions and with hindsight, the game might be regarded as one of the first examples of emergent gameplay.

 

[Dave the Druid]

Now, where does the claims originally come from? I don't know, but it might be Tvtropes. If we look at Tvtropes Immersive sim page it states:

Nope! I looked into it a while ago using Wayback machine and it seems to actually originate from the Giant Bomb page. It was added to there sometime between June 30, 2015 and September 5, 2017 and looking at the edits it was most likely by a user called HardcoreGamer99 (although there are a few other suspects: Joris_Weerts, BeachThunder, AssInAss and Mmmslash however HardcoreGamer99 is the prime suspect due to his sheer number of edits.) It wasn't added to the TvTropes article until sometime between January 4th, 2018 and May 31, 2018 (I could probably narrow down the time-frame even more but I can't be bothered right now.)

Now that sounds all fine and dandy, but I wouldn't consider this game an immersive sim. Why? Because it...

Stopping you right there. IT'S BECAUSE IT ISN'T ONE! It's got nothing to do with immersive sims whatsoever! It's just bullshit, wrong information by some random rude called HardcoreGamer99 (although to be fair, it may have been AssInAss, we don't know for certain) that has been cited by some moron who doesn't know any better, and then that gets cited by someone else and it slowly spreads and spreads until it gets accepted as a fact/common knowledge. There's tons of information on the internet like this btw, there's plenty of "facts" that people here believe (including myself probably) that are complete rubbish if you do the tinniest bit of digging. Look, it ended up in a video essay a month ago:


And people are going to hear that and believe it's true and they're going to spread it further. That guy has NO idea what he's talking about.

It's like the nuclear Gandhi thing. Someone made that up and added it to TvTropes, that then got cited by the Civilization fandom wiki page and then it slowly spread further and further and further until everyone just accepted it as fact. No one had bothered to check the actual game to see whether or not that glitch actually existed. And it turns out... IT DIDN'T EXIST! IT NEVER EXISTED! It was always bullshit! There's tons of "facts" out there that are exactly like this.

 

[Spukrian]

Thinking about it. The most ancient "immersive-sim" that I have played was "The Hobbit" a text adventure.

That looks incredibly cool!

Now that sounds all fine and dandy, but I wouldn't consider this game an immersive sim. Why? Because it...

Stopping you right there. IT'S BECAUSE IT ISN'T ONE!

Hey, calm down, I was just being a bit of a devil's advocate.