The Immerser Report

During my visit to Montreal for Ludicine’s Thinking After Dark conference, I had the opportunity to speak on formations of avatar in horror video games. Specifically, I spoke on immersion - specifically, the sensation of feeling ‘inside’ games during play.

If there are two things that need clarification about these ideas, they are that immersion is both more specific and more simple than common usage suggests. Being part of a grab-bag of about a dozen words people use to describe videogame play, it often does double-duty as a catch-all term that describes any merit of any game.

Is your gameworld sprawling and expansive? Immersive. Do you care about your characters? Immersive! Do you spend the greater portion of your game actually immersed in some fluid? You better believe that’s immersive.

"The Wettening" was a great game. But I could never defeat Wa-wa Wawinski.

Ultimately things begin to stretch out thee limited elasticity of the term. If everything is immersive, nothing is: It begins to mean nothing more than ‘good.’ Thus an ‘incredibly immersive experience’ is doubleplusgood.

Actually, there’s a simple trick to using the term with clarity and purpose. Immersion is always physical. Thus a kid bobbing and weaving while playing a game is an example of immersion. Being sad that your dad is the dream of a ghost’s memory, or whatever, is not.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly: Immersion is easy. Forget suiting up like Tron. You don’t need any Captain N shenanigans to obtain the experience that you’re ‘in a game.’ Often it’s as simple as hitting a button.

There’s a reason for this, and that reason is locked away deep in your brain. Now, my more… penetrating experiments in the catacombs beneath Bedlam Hospital have revealed to me mysteries dark and glorious, but apparently neuroscience knows a thing or two about your thinker as well. Very well. I shall have my day yet!

Here’s a great, if enthusiastic, piece on the current research that’s being done in the field. Elsewhere on these selfsame tubes, neuroscientist Steve Novella explains the phenomenon in detail: The experience of being in one’s body is not automatic – it is a deliberate function of the mind, some feat of evolution, and can be meddled with through any number of tricks and sleights of hand.

I find this to be incredibly revealing, and one reason that games may affect us the way that they do, operating at the some physiological level. Just as this sense of posited self is more complex that flinching from negative stimuli, so too we may navigate games with a more complex presence of mind than “spikes bad, coins good.”


Though, I do think it bears repeating: Spikes baaaaaaaaaaaaad.


- Rook

Jump, man, jump!

At the dank, cryptic arcade I frequented when I was young, there was one machine that towered above the rest: An original Donkey Kong. Set apart from the other games, it loomed monolithically, promising dark portents to any who dared plumb its depths. I’m talking real “hit a monkey with a bone” stuff, folks. Serious business.

"Huh.. it says 'insert quarter.'"

Despite my fascination, I never touched it. There was always a line of dull-eyed teenagers barring my way, menacingly clutching their cans of New Coke. Instead, I would gaze longingly at the art on the side of the machine, where a lumpy Mario-before-he-was-Mario was shown mid-spring. Underneath was a helpful protip, one as curious as a zen koan: “PRESS A TO MAKE JUMP MAN JUMP.”

It seems like we’ve been making Jump Man jump ever since. Since their inception, there have been video games about navigating space. Even pre-graphics classics like Adventure and Zork have a layout and a sense of motion - so much so that the ultimate threat is for your light to be extinguished, giving you no idea of where you are going. But with the platformer came the final ingredient to the recipe.

There is something supremely satisfying about jumping on a goomba. The way it remains squashed down, comic in defeat, while you spring upward and onward. It has a consistency: elastic, spongy, slightly al dente. (I have always suspected that they would be delicious in an omelet.) Though a lowly peon, one to be stomped with impunity, it has substance in a way the soulless blips of previous games never did.

The moment that physics are brought into the equation, the simple acts of running and jumping conjure a experience of the heft of the game: not simply the presence, but the experience of mass. In learning to move, we are not only learning to control a character but experiencing the scope of the world, the tactile sensations of bashing blocks and kicking about turtle shells. In coming to intuit how a character will jump, swim, fly, we encounter one of the first immersive experiences in gaming: the sensation of existing in a internally-consistent world.

Le saut-homme original.

In these cases the physics represent the grammar of these games, relating a language of motion. How Mario moves about the screen is not merely a character trait, but his essence. Compare to other 2D platform figures like Sonic the Hedgehog, Samus Aran, and Kirby: The way that the characters are defined relates directly to how they navigate their respective spaces.

King mentioned Cave Story in an earlier post, in tandem with Metroid. At first glance they seem to have nothing in common, due to their drastically different visual tones. But in beginning the game, the physical parallels are immediate and unmistakable. In both games you don’t so much jump as glide through the air, drifting in a way that is both crisp and surprisingly graceful. The connection is a kinetic one, as is the realization: “I have moved this way before.” They may not resemble each other, but they speak the same language.

So now we have a slew of 3D platformers, whose successes and failures have hinged upon how well they have provided navigable spaces. We have games like Portal, which translate first-person experiences into experiments with movement and space. We have Little Big Planet, which follows through on earlier experiences of tactile physics. We have Braid, which meta-textually examines this whole “jumping about from ledge to ledge” business we’ve busied ourselves with for decades.

So jump on, Jump Men and Jump Women. O’er pit of spikes, o’er lava deep, jump on. Jump on, Jump ever on, into the future. Because the one thing that we haven’t jumped yet?


THE SHARK.


- Rook

p.s. For an immediate and simple example of what I call heft, consider: Space Invaders don't got none. Asteroids does.