My favorite games are adventure games. That’s not to say that I’ve played very many of them, nor that I am particularly good at them (at best I am slightly above average). The strange thing about adventure games is that, more than any other genre; they are capable of making me feel like I am truly in another place, using real solutions. In fact, it is only when solutions to problems become incomprehensible that I would deem an adventure game truly bad.
First Person Shooters have often been hailed as very immersive experiences, and often times they are. The problem is that there is an inherent suspension of disbelief involved in an FPS. The solution to a problem is usually “Kill everything”. This can ruin experiences which would otherwise make you forget about the controller/mouse in your hand, the chair you are sitting in, the monitor you are staring at.
Let me use Call of Duty 4 as an example (though by and large this applies to the whole series). The game features immersive set pieces and action sequences, fantastic voice acting, realistic characters, a gripping plot…but the whole construct falls apart for a reason that I have touched upon earlier: the health pack paradigm. Actually, the game itself features regenerative health, not health packs (which I consider to be a good move, though some would disagree) but there is a second part of the health-pack paradigm which is far more destructive than unrealistic healing. I call this “Commando Design”.
Commando design is part of all action games I can think of. It consists of 2 elements. The first is copious enemies. Call of Duty 4 would feel extremely realistic, were it not for the number of enemies that must be fought through. The screen seems to be crawling with them at all times, with far more enemies dying than is even remotely plausible.
The second element is the player’s ability to singlehandedly defeats these enemies. In CoD4 the player rarely has more than 4 allies. Yet they are undefeatable, destroying the absurd number of enemies with nary a scratch. In some games this makes sense (such as Metroid, Halo or Crysis). But in CoD it doesn’t just prevent suspension of disbelief; it turns disbelief into a black hole which the games merits are helplessly sucked into.
In video games there is nothing more important than immersion. There are actually 2 strategies to take when trying to immerse the character in a world. The first is to adhere strictly to the rules of reality. The best example I can think of that adheres to this principle is Ghost Recon (forgive me; I have limited experience with tactical shooters). True, there are still a lot of enemies in that game, but the player is so realistically limited in potential actions (and potential bullets in the chest) that you cannot help but feel immersed in the game world. Assuming you don’t have to load so many times that you explode.
The alternative to hyper-realism is acceptable abstraction. This can be seen in many sci-fi games, such as half-life. As much as Gordon Freeman fights an awful lot of people, he is equipped with the legendary HEV suit. This suit is defined enough for us to accept its otherwise ridiculous nature (such as an infinite ability to repair itself, and its ability to provide oxygen when it’s user’s head is exposed).
The general idea to take away from this is that one of the secrets to immersion is keeping the game world consistent, but not so close to reality that differences become impossible to ignore.
