Academia: Immersion Through Narrative

Immersion in video games doesn’t necessarily have to mean hyper-realistic graphics and virtual-reality hardware. Immersive games can keep their players hooked and engaged for extended periods of time with simpler technologies, with well crafted stories and narrative, thought out perspective and narrative distance within those stories, well-done and consistent visuals, audio effects and music that match well with the visuals and the story, and integrated menu and user interfaces. In this context, we’re using Jamie Madigan’s (2010) definition of immersion as follows, “The idea is just that a game (or any other media from books to movies) creates [immersion] when the user starts to feel like he is ‘there’ in the world that the game creates. People who experience immersion tend to only consider choices that make sense in the context of the imaginary world.” The breaking of this immersion occurs when, “when there's something different between what you see and what happens, then the brain notices,” (Richard Bartle, 2010). Then the question becomes how do we create an immersive experience for players, and create enough consistency within the game world to avoid breaking this immersion?

One study by Yaman Terzioglu (2015), which used data from eye tracking during gameplay and combined them with a post - game immersion survey in order to figure out how immersion affects players, seemed to find that, “Providing an objective and a narrative dramatically increased the overall immersion.” A game with an engaging narrative is more likely to keep players immersed for longer periods of time. Marie-Laure Ryan (2010) describes two kinds of narrative immersion that are most closely linked to the narrative or the story of a game, epistemic immersion, “the desire to know”, and temporal immersion, “curiosity, surprise, and suspense,” both of which have the most potential to be present in games with strong narrative and/or story elements. One example of this concept is in What Remains of Edith Finch, a critically acclaimed “walking simulator” which guides the player through a series of intertwined stories. One review of the game by the New York Video Game Critics Circle states, “I’ve never been so deeply immersed and impacted by a story in my entire life... I wasn’t focused on how sharp the visuals were, or if the player’s animations match the shadow. None of that mattered. I was entirely hooked on the story, and I appreciated the atmosphere in which the narrative took place,” (2017). There’s isn’t very much gameplay to speak of, and yet What Remains of Edith Finch keeps players engaged and immersed almost exclusively through story and narrative elements.

Evan (2013) posits that players “want to feel directly involved with the narrative” and expect this quality as part of their immersive experience, however, this kind of close narrative isn’t necessary for a game to be immersive. Michel McBride-Charpentier (2010), in his critical analysis on Earthbound, adds to a concept quoted from Darius Kazemi, “In a comment on his blog, Darius Kazemi links EarthBound‘s self-awareness of being a game to hypermediacy, a concept first developed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin which suggests that ‘experience of the medium is itself an experience of the real.’ The breaking of the fourth wall, in effect, does not harm our immersion, but enhances it.” Therefore, increased narrative distance can also work in games with a stronger emphasis on story and character, by encouraging players to exercise empathy, a kind of narrative immersion called emotional immersion (Ryan 2010). Alternatively, a game may employ a very close narrative and put the player in the position of the character. “Black Ops is an interesting case. Its narrative never becomes exceptionally engaging, and its characters are true to type, but never truly interesting. That said, in nearly every mission it seeks to transport the player into their avatar's body at least once... Perhaps there alternative methods of attaining equal or greater empathy with the character, but this method (allowing a player's actions to correspond to a character's actions in a dramatically important sequence) is completely unique to video games, and can result in a qualitatively different empathy than that produced by film or text.” (Matthew Schanuel, 2011). This type of narrative closeness and direct interactivity within the progression of the game seems to be what players are looking for when they ask for more immersion (Evan 2013).

“Completeness of sensory information,” and “Multiple channels of sensory information” (Madigan, 2010) are other elements of immersion, and refers to the diversity and completeness of the information provided about the game world, including narrative, as well as visual and auditory. Bioshock is one instance of a game using those same strategies, as Steven O'Dell writes in his review, “It is easily one of the most atmospheric and immersive games I have played... The attention to detail in the game is amazing. It can be something as big as seeing buildings of the city outside as you look through the windows, or it can be something subtle like a small stream of water running down the wall because of a crack in the ceiling. It doesn't matter what it is, everything as a cohesive whole draws you into the city of Rapture and there really is no other place you would want to be while playing the game. Every room, hell, every corner of every room seems to tell a different story which only further draws you in. You are, after all, seeing Rapture dying,” (2008). On top of well designed and carefully executed visuals, 2K Marin audio lead Michael Kamper, “created the background space that the character were in and had that help tell the story... We wanted this very lonely feel to it, but it also the sense of 'the place is falling apart', I mean, this is Rapture 10 years later. It's even more in shambles, no one's been doing any upkeep to the place, so there's creaks and cracks and stuff falling over, so I really wanted the sense of dread from the environment, like you could be walking down the hallway and all of the sudden it could collapse on you,” (2010). The Bioshock team worked in tandem to create visually stunning pieces that also integrated well with gameplay, and audio elements that supported the themes present in the visuals, thereby achieving “completeness of sensory information” and “multiple channels of sensory information” and giving their players a more immersive experience.

Another key feature of immersive games identified by Madigan (2010) is, “Lack of incongruous visual cues in the game world,” such as, “heads up displays, tutorial messages, damage numbers appearing over enemies’ heads, achievement notifications, friends list notifications,” and general user interfaces that break game fiction. “Your JRPG hero doesn’t carry around a menu to organize his party, or cast healing spells out of combat, or upgrade his character — but that’s how, you the Player do it. At that point we’re drawing a line between you as the character you’re playing and you as the player. So there’s a potential loss of immersion with this, and so ‘menus are bad’,” (Joe Tortuga, 2010). However, there’s not always an easy way to avoid menus entirely, and potential workarounds can cause more harm than good by forcing the player to take extra steps to perform the same task. Yu-Chung Chen writes in his review of Okami, “To draw, you press and hold the R1 button and activate the painting quasi-mode, where the game world is being shown on a paper scroll and your left analog stick becomes the brush tip. Since it’s a quasi-mode, the whole process of going into the drawing mode, doing the brushwork and finishing it by letting go the R1 button feels like one action. This is a significant improvement upon its item-based model, The Legend of Zelda series, because you no longer have to go into a menu (mode), do the item management and go back to the game world and – finally – do what you wanted to do in the first place: use the item.” (2007). Other games give the main character a “journal” where the main character keeps their logs of the day. While some games succeed completely uninhibited by a menu, it’s also possible to have an interface that’s integrated within the game fiction and therefore doesn’t break immersion, while streamlining gameplay and making the best of a player’s play time.

As game developers, we have an entire toolkit within our grasp through which to create an immersive experience for gamers, such as story, narrative, visuals, audio design, user interface, and so on. Basic strategies like carefully selecting narrative distance and coming up with a menu that reasonably fits within game fiction can do a lot to add to the experience of playing a game. The entire industry is excited for the development of virtual reality software and hardware, and within those circles terms like “immersion” and “realism” are thrown around frequently, but having a virtual reality based game won’t do any good to maximise immersion if the developers don’t already know how to avoid common immersion breaks with the tools we currently have. Imagine a player playing a virtual reality game, and they’re having a great time and are fully embedded in the illusion of the game world, until an unusual enemy pops up and they have to get through four different menus to get to the tool they want, or a companion in their party is absolutely terrible at not running into things and has the most two-dimensional dialogue and motivations, or the player somehow obtains a quest item for a quest they haven’t received yet. Common problems with consistency, design, and presentation in games that break the immersion of the players will just be even more glaringly evident in the context of a virtual reality game, therefore, developers should strive for an overall better immersive experience, first, and jump at the virtual-reality gear second.

References

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N. (2017, May 17). The Insight: Edith Finch Made Our Teen Intern Tear Up (She Did Not Cry, Though). Retrieved March 20, 2018, from https://nygamecritics.com/2017/05/17/the-insight-edith-finch-made-our-teen-intern-tear-up-she-did-not-cry-though/

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