Dreaming Of Another World

[droqen]

Regarding Doc Burford's
"Dreaming Of Another World"

via ezra s
keywords - immersion, immersive, immersiveness, immersive sim, escapism?, engrossing, engrossed

[droqen]

To be engrossed in something is to have your attention completely arrested by it. To be immersed . . . you are literally, physically inside of it. You are a part of the [thing], as much as you can be. . . . When a game is immersive, it might not grab your attention, but it's doing its best to create a living, breathing world. . . to represent a cohesive reality.

[droqen]

Something felt off. . . about the conversation surrounding immersive design.

. . . we're making a mistake when we assume that immesive games must be stealthy ones. . . . Stealth is a verb. It is not the genre.

. . . a lot of these newer immersive sim type games seem focused on [this] kind of immaculate design. Walk into the bank in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and you'll se The Person You Can Talk Your Way Past If You Have That Skill, you'll see The Lasers You Can Sneak Past If You Can Turn Invisible, . . . the best games will give you a dozen tools . . . but someone has figured out what all those tools are and designed each level to perfectly accommodate every. Single. Tool.

[droqen]

I can see you, designer. I know you're there.

[droqen]

I couldn't see the designer in STALKER.

. . . if there was one word I'd use to describe my ideal immersive game, "natural." Would be that word.

Burford describes what are things perceived through the lens of story, through natural human reality processing. Particularly, there is a distinct pattern of considering the people in these worlds to be real people, a real focus on them.

"I woke up in a bunk. I met Sidorovich. He asked me to run a job for him."

". . . there were dead animals and a wounded Stalker. He asked me for a med kit. I gave him the med kit. He became my friend."

"In STALKER . . . a man named Edik Dinosaur passed by. He and I had met on occasion on the road. Edik Dinosaur fought valiantly alongside me, because he hated bandits and he liked me."

"[Breath of the Wild's] people are alive."

By comparison...

"When I play Far Cry 2, I am playing a Designed Game. This is the Friendly NPC Zone. . . . Make sure to go to the safe house, which looks exactly like all the other safe houses (and has the exact same supplies plus one unique bonus gun) to engage The Buddy System™. . . This is how it always happens. It will never deviate."

[droqen]

. . . when I hop into a Bethesda world, it feels relatively real. . . you're never walking into a fight and seeing Five Specific Tool-Driven Routes and deciding which tool is The Best One For The Job. . . [there are no] immaculate designer-driven puzzles that give you a dozen different tools to use How You Want (but, hint hint, there are a few very clear routes).

Bethesda games give you a billion tools and let you loose in the world. . .

Bethesda games let you play how you want in the moment.

. . . It feels more natural than most immersive sims because it's trying to be a real place, rather than an artfully designed one. . . . They're bringing a world to life and letting you live in it.

[droqen]

These are games that prioritize something narrative-ish (setting, character) over some other thing (interaction design?)

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there is a seed in there of expressing a place or some imagined thing rather than giving someone an agentified experience?

As always, what I'm interested in is not what is it? but how do we get there? More on that someday.

[droqen]

Regarding, also, Doc's
"#playthis: days gone. let's talk about open world games"

[droqen]

In a game like Breath of the Wild, when you stumble upon your 142nd "put the magnetic cube into a series of cubes" puzzle, it's lost its luster. The game is practically screaming at you "hey! none of this is real! it's just a bunch of arbitrary puzzles designed to pad out the world!" Every single one of those maps above is the same way.

He talks about suture here more in depth than he does in Dreaming.

[droqen]

[For Days Gone,] Sony Bend didn't just create 50 identical bounty missions and hope that the randomness of its systems would make them feel different, it gave every single bounty unique locations, conditions ([various example conditions that i can't really get the feel of, difference-wise, not having played the game]), and dialogue to really make it stand out.

The missions create interesting setups, and the systems create interesting outcomes.

I'd have to see it myself to believe it, I guess, but it sounds neat!

[droqen]

Days Gone's world blends that bespoke/dynamic approach in a way that brings its world to life, and Breath of the Wild's feels like a toybox where the limitations of the AI are readily apparent.

Feel that.