How Deep is "deep"?

[More Fun To Compute]

I think that immersion is a very misleading word. When talking about it you are more likely to get stuck in semantics and rhetoric than talk what actually makes a good game.

There is a quality to games where all your attention is on the game. You don't notice anything else happening and you lose all track of time. This is different to believing that you are actually the character in a game world which is something that I don't think happens much outside bad movies about Dungeons and Dragons. It's more like, the game is so involving that you forget about your surroundings and the game becomes your main focus.

 

[phatty500]

i see immersion as voluntary. the game cant force you to be immersed you have to want to get lost in the fantasy. if you think about every little detail you wil never find a game that you can get into.

 

[Chrissyluky]

when i fell asleep after listing to myself what i was going to do 2moro in oblivion i knew i had become immersed.

 

[roboduck]

Of course we aren't really looking for a definition of immersion here we're just looking for contributing factors. Ambiance is an overused word in this situation however it does play an important role.

For example in say, Fallout 3, a game praised for its immersive world, and content, I felt a rather lack luster middle finger jammed in my face when I tried to get in to the game. The scenery had the all to familiar, "seen that a million times" feel to it.

To be fair Fallout three is based in a post-apocalyptic world so that "seen that a million times" feel helps with the immersion and gives the player an insight to the hopeless wastelands type thing, this is littered with landmarks and objectives though to keep it interesting though.

User input I feel is the most contributing factor in this argument, I don't get immersed watching movies I still remember it's a movie throughout. The Wii shows this quite well in some cases. Agreeing with Yahtzee I say that 3rd party developers hop onto the Wii bandwagon with a sorry excuse for a mini game game full of waggle-fests and quick time events. Wii sports has it's excuse for being a kind of "have a quick try with the new Wii motion plus" game and I confess I actually enjoy the game, ignoring the weaker sports however i have to stick with the topic and end this here before I talk about the Wii too much.

Going back to my early days of gaming I remember being very immersed in the Crash Bandicoot games. It has a very simple 3d platforming idea, but I still found myself getting the crystal in each level and going again if I didn't get the gem. Those were the times when I forgot about everything around me, whether it's a good thing or not XD

 

[Valiance]

I said I wanna be a champion...
I said I wanna be the only one...
I'll guard the world with my shield,
And defend it with my steel.

I wanna be a hero.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Games that give me the feeling of actually being useful, powerful, skillful, etc. Granted that's all of them since I'm so damn good, but you know what I mean? I don't know what you call immersion, but when I FC a song in guitar hero, when I go 50 kills 0 deaths in a free-for-all, when I S++ a map in Ikaruga, when I annihilate an Atlas in a Firemoth (Mechwarrior), that is when I am involved in the game, and feel I see it, feel it, breathe it...

Possibly on topic, is it odd that when I smell basil, I think of doing Sunwell?

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Games that give me the feeling of actually being useful, powerful, skillful, etc. Granted that's all of them since I'm so damn good, but you know what I mean? I don't know what you call immersion, but when I FC a song in guitar hero, when I go 50 kills 0 deaths in a free-for-all, when I S++ a map in Ikaruga, when I annihilate an Atlas in a Firemoth (Mechwarrior), that is when I am involved in the game, and feel I see it, feel it, breathe it...

I think that game designers call that Fiero, or triumph, more than Immersion.

 

[timmytom1]

I get immersed in the sense that i tend to care for the player character`s life unless it`s an unlikeable prick like neo ,then after a while i end up increasingly less immersed it`s wierd

 

[Zombie Badger]

My definition of immersive is a game that after playing it for a while, you are stuck, check Gamefaqs and it says that you are two-thirds of the way through the game. You think, 'wow, this is short, I've only been playing it for six hours', before you realise it's been closer to twenty. Or, basically, any game that makes me want to play it until I completely lose track of time. Thank you, Black Isle and Valve.

 

[The Rockerfly]

I understand what you mean but at the moment, technology is not good enough to display all the realistic features of a normal human being
Also looking at a screen is just not as immersive as actually being somewhere. For example if I shoot a gun on fallout, the controller vibrates but the controller still feels like a controller and not a gun while going to use a real gun feels much more manly
Also because games are short, stories have to be shortened and since it's not actually making a difference to you as a person, most feel very shallow
But I know I am asking too much out of video games, at least for a good 20 years

 

[Unknower]

I understand what you mean but at the moment, technology is not good enough to display all the realistic features of a normal human being
Also looking at a screen is just not as immersive as actually being somewhere. For example if I shoot a gun on fallout, the controller vibrates but the controller still feels like a controller and not a gun while going to use a real gun feels much more manly
Also because games are short, stories have to be shortened and since it's not actually making a difference to you as a person, most feel very shallow
But I know I am asking too much out of video games, at least for a good 20 years

On the other hand, there's this thing [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UncannyValley]:

Let's take Oblivion for example. It had much more advanced facial animations than Morrowind. However, Oblivion's NPCs felt much more unnatural and weirder than Morrowind's NPCs did. Oblivion's NPCs had fallen into the Uncanny valley. They looked like humans but they weren't like humans, you know?

Of course, the game zooming right into their faces when you talked to them and the bad voice acting by handful of voice actors didn't help in reducing that uncanny valley -feeling.

 

[Proteus214]

My definition of immersive is a game that after playing it for a while, you are stuck, check Gamefaqs and it says that you are two-thirds of the way through the game. You think, 'wow, this is short, I've only been playing it for six hours', before you realise it's been closer to twenty. Or, basically, any game that makes me want to play it until I completely lose track of time. Thank you, Black Isle and Valve.

I'm pretty much the same way. If a game can make me forget to do things like eat, then I would definitely call them immersive. Unfortunately, not many modern games have been able to do this other than Assassin's Creed and Half Life 2.

 

[Legion]

Perhaps you just lack an imagination?

I was immersed in Bioshock, Halo:CE, Half Life, Fallout 3 to an extent (I always play like I would in real life for example).

 

[Akai Shizuku]

May I suggest Morrowind? It's by far the most immersive game I've played, that really made me feel like I was my character and really got me into its world.

 

[Cargando]

I get very immersed in the Half-Life series. Really draws me in.