"Most people on this forlorn little planet are willing to accept that games, through interactivity, offer unique opportunities for immersion.
Immersion and narrative are often thought to be one and the same, but I believe achieving real immersion is really about every element of a game working in harmony; it's something that seems to be ebbing away from game development as feature lists bloat and franchises are built.
I've recently been playing one of the most immersive games ever made: Chris Roberts' original Wing Commander. It's often held up as a great example of storytelling, but there's quite a lot more going on than a simple space yarn.
Consider the opening: you crash and burn the training simulator and are asked to enter your name; immediately after this, you're transported to the bar on your space ship, the Tiger's Claw. Now, we've seen similar "home base" or hub-type structures in countless games since, but there's a certain elegance to this one: the simulator reminds you of the consequences that might befall you in a "real" mission, and the other characters in the bar will be at your side in combat. Your actions will have implications for your future.
Wing Commander's immersive strategy wasn't just a few gimmicks thrown together, either - everything was designed to keep the player within the world. The copy of the "ship's magazine" bundled in the box, the fact that the story adapts and even continues when you lose a mission (rather than forcing you to replay it until you win), the offhand comments made about the state of your ship when you arrive back at base - all this and more convinced you of your signifigance within the world. It's no wonder that developers Origin Systems' slogan was, "We Create Worlds."
I think there's a key lesson in Wing Commander for today's developers, and that had to do with focus. Modern action or roleplaying games tend to offer a the player a vast array options and opportunities to interact with the game world, but in doing so they often lack this all-important quality. In Mass Effect, for example, the player can do everything from micromanaging armor to negotiating with powerful leaders; Shepherd is kind of a one-person intervention.
In my opinion, creating a world relies not on a huge range of opportunities, but on the suspension of disbelief. This is often accomplished by limiting the actions available to the player. Wing Commander made me feel like the pilot of a space fighter by allowing me to perform only actions appropriate to that role.
How many strategy games have you doing things like managing a budget, building bases and figuring out your troop formations? In the desire to be feature-rich and let players do everything and anything that they could want, the actual role that is being played is completely diluted.
I believe this is why some games which are very short on story tend to be the most immersive: they create a defined focus for the player. This isn't intended to be a criticism of certain kinds of game design (I do love Mass Effect, despite not feeling particularly immersed when playing it); it's more a call to developers to start thinking about the players role specifically.
It's not always fun to be the center of attention; sometimes the real immersion happens when you're made to feel like a cog in a much larger machine."
of PC Gamer.
