The curious case of Immersive Sims
What’s the best videogame ever? There are probably as many opinions of what’s the best game in history as there are people who play videogames, and, being frank, this isn’t far from the truth. People have tastes and preferences, and while I went and had fun with Bullet Witch for four intense hours shooting as stuff as an empty, featureless city fell to pieces, a lot of people saw that game in Steam and said “this looks old and terrible”. Conversely, it took me 15 years to play a Call of Duty game and I can’t stand World of Warcraft.
However, there are some games that people mostly hold in high esteem. On the PC gaming community, one name pops up often: Deus Ex. Released in 2000, Deus Ex was an FPS/RPG hybrid with an intriguing plot and an excellent, redundant design that allowed players to tackle situations and problems in many ways and with any paradigm, the world was a living, breathing element and character had their own agencies, but your actions would have consequences that were readily apparent. People could die, change their behaviours, react differently to you. It was produced by Warren Spector, a veteran designer that had worked in games that had similar emergent gameplay like System Shock or Thief, but it was Deus Ex’s atmosphere, sound design, thrilling story and ultimately freedom of choice that made it a critical hit. Unfortunately, it was released close to one game that pretty much changed PC gaming: Half Life, the epic adventure of Gordon Freeman. Deus Ex was a minor success, but it has a cult following that has made it a huge IP in gaming.
While we called it FPS/RPG, recently the press and gaming community has begrudgingly settled on calling these games Immersive Sims, a term loosely coined by Spector anyway, and that we will use throughout this article for the sake of simplicity. Other examples of the genre are the System Shock and Dishonored series, Prey and the earlier Thief games…. And there aren’t many more, to be honest. Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis and Strife can complete the entire catalogue of the genre, alongside the more vague examples like Pathologic and Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines. Most of those games are lauded by the press as some of the finest examples of gaming in history (and some of those reach legendary status, almost mythical), however they are often marginally successful at best and widely ignored by the public at large much to the dismay of the most involved video game fans.
Why does this happen?
Are they really “The Thinking Gamer’s Shooter”?
This is a question that arises from some people’s assessment of the situation: these games are too complex for the general populace.
I choose to color this as what I feel is the real issues: these games are just not for everyone.
Truth be told, Immersive Sims ask for a lot from the player to actually enjoy it. Otherwise, these games are often just mediocre shooters.These games offer an unparalleled experience in the gaming landscape, true freedom to do as you please. The first stage of Deus Ex, for example, is one of the most cleverly designed in gaming: you have to assault Liberty Island where some terrorist have captured an ally. And you can tackle the level as you wish, Guns blazing. Full stealth. Climb up one side of the place. Smash the door open or hack it. Or just pick lock it. And the options don’t end there: every option has ramifications: once you save Gunther, your ally, would you let him run amok with a weapon? Tell him to stay there? How do you deal with the terrorist’s leader? These are questions the game constantly asks and the player must answer, and if you design an interesting — for you — plan to solve a level, it’s immensely satisfying to see it paid off. Your ingenuity and creativity have a very real payoff, and the attentive and inquisitive player enjoys these games a great deal because he is free to choose his experience.
This is the brilliance of these games.
And their selling point.
I’ve played Deus Ex probably ten or so times. I actually had the tradition of playing it every year and try something new, and there are very few games I’ve played that allow me to try something new every time, and that’s including traditional RPGs and Open World games like Grand Theft Auto series. The Dishonored series is one of the very few games I actually played again once I finished them, because of how much I knew I could do I didn’t during my first playthrough. These games are ripe for exploration, inventive, try new things, fail and try again.
Some player just don’t have that desire, time, or even motivation to do this. This leads us to this:
Some Gamers Just Want to Have Fun
I consider everyone who enjoys video games to be gamers at the most basic conceptual level. At some point in history it might be the case that, like reading or watching a movie, playing video games will be something so embedded with society that people won’t be weirded out by the most mainstream branch of the gaming world, and we’ll get something like, I don’t know, “ludophiles”? like people talk about the most involved movie or music fans. It’s bound to be part of our sociology. I actually dislike the moniker but that’s neither here nor there.
A quick anecdote that comes to mind and that would be another entire article but it’s worth mentioning: I’ve never actually played a Call of Duty game until a few weeks ago (Black Ops, for whatever it’s worth). There is a reason for that but mostly is that vaguely realistic games mostly bore me: I enjoy ridiculous science fiction, spectacular fantasy, terrifying horror. Reality is out there, but that’s besides the point, I decided to try one since I bought a used Xbox 360 and I’ve been trying the exclusives and games I would never play. My girlfriend and I picked the one that had the coolest cover art, and I can tell you this: it was a riot. I had a lot of fun, the game was very entertaining and the plot was actually interesting, plus the production values were worth the money. I haven’t touched the multiplayer (and not being 20 years old and thus not having the reflexes of a 20 years old, I very much doubt I will), but the campaign was very, very cool. Shallow as a puddle, but very cool. I finally experienced in the flesh what Call of Duty was about: fun. Turn off your brain, shoot the bad guys, and have fun. And I had a lot of fun.
Follow me on this: I also had a lot of fun spending 15 minutes studying guard’s patrol routes in Dishonored before figuring out I could just randomly divert them and blink into a building using the light posts. But just jumping into the Vietnam scenario and shooting the obviously bad guys was not only fun, it was satisfying, and it even gave me a thing to reflect on when the explosions and the oppressive feeling of the moment made me think how frightening a war like the Vietnam was must have been. I know that, it’s just that rarely while playing a videogame I get to think about things like that.
I was also reminded that gaming is first and foremost an entertainment thing. A hobby. Something to have fun with it. And sometimes you don’t want to have fun spending fifteen minutes watching some weird looking guards talk about whiskey and cigars between patrols.
Sometimes you just want to have some quick and painless fun. I mean, I’ve treated Diablo 3 like that for years.
Is there a solution?
It’s hard to tell if these games will ever break the mainstream as the publishers wants them to. Immersive sims are expensive games to make, between the voice acting, motion capture, the technology, the throughout level design, the game design itself, these are probably a much bigger risk than the next Call of Duty, which is nearly guaranteed to sell if it’s a decent game and that’s something that might be hurting the backs of the would be publishers that could make a big enough marketing campaign to rival, say, Destiny or Battlefield. These games also tend to be be pushed into the less popular themes, such as Cyberpunk (Deus Ex), Steampunk (Dishonored) or Horror (System Shock), and some might be touching upon some abstract concepts that require more finesse than usual (Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s largely discussed commentary on the apartheid-like classism and racism had a very polarizing reception), and these are things that do not contribute to attracting the vast majority of the public.
I am not an expert on marketing or game design, but I can see two solutions to these:
- Streamline the genre:
They have already done this. While the Thief reboot is probably a heavier example, the most well known example of the genre being dragged kicking and screaming out of its fundamental basis is Bioshock.
I absolutely adore Bioshock. For me, it’s the poster child of a simple but extraordinarily interesting generation of games. People were trying new things, people were experimenting, but mostly people were making good games. Bioshock impressed me like very few games did, but I had already played System Shock 2, the game that Bioshock is more or less a remake of. I didn’t care for the twist (and I did not see it coming), but I did find it rather hilarious the game was so openly a new, much simpler version of a previous game. I, of course, soon enough found out that System Shock 2 was only big in my little, weird corner of the gaming world composed of Gamefaqs and little websites raving about them (because not even my real life friends had heard of it) because people and reviewers found it unforgivingly difficult, too scary, or too complicated, and Bioshock was the same game except less punishing, less frightening and more fun to simply pick up and play.
It’s clear that Bioshock is more than a simple remake and has its own identity — and, following the sequels, one that got worked on and improved — but the important part was that it was a smashing success and got two sequels that were smashing success plus some of the most fascinating DLC components in gaming, thanks to that receptive public waiting for them. The game’s still carry an almost absurdly complicated plot, the themes are strange, and the general design is freaky but instead of being that game heavy on inventory management with the constant worry that your gun was gonna jam at the worst of times, it’s a game where your concerns are limited to making sure the mutated thing in front of you stopped breathing while upgrading the correct powers. Bioshock 2 drove this point further home by making your powers usable at the same time as your regular guns, which was the obvious evolution of the paradigm.
This doesn’t make any of the games strictly better than the other. Their target demographics are largely related but one appeals to gamers that want something complex and the other to gamers that want fast, uncompromising fun, and it’s not a secret that the latter is much bigger than the former. Just like there is a piece of the video game public pie that read reviews, discuss, argue and research about video games, that piece is a vocal minority of the pie; that’s the same case of the players that play these complex video games, which are part of that small group.
This can be looked at as if these were movies: I am a huge David Lynch fan, and Lost Highway is probably my favorite movie ever, a cerebral, complex, multilayered movie with a haunting art direction and a brilliant soundtrack. I also enjoy watching the last The Fast and the Furious, which is (after the third one) largely composed of big, muscular bald guys beating the hell out of each other while making fun of the laws of physics in high speed chases. These two have their own merits, and while the comparison is a bit off (maybe Bioshock would be closer to something like Edge of Tomorrow), it serves to position how these two relate and how these two are enjoyable on their own, and most important, which one of these two movies are expected to perform at the box office according to their target demographics.
But this is not the ideal solution.
b) Accept these games are a niche genre
Maybe.
Just maybe.
Lost Highway is an extraordinary movie. But it’s fucking complicated. It’s hard to tell what’s happening, and much like a lot of Lynch’s filmography, part of the pleasure of watching the movie is challenging yourself to understand what’s going on. Is this Fred’s personal idea of what happened? Is Pete the mechanic Fred’s alter ego? What’s the significance of the creepy pale man with no eyebrows? It’s also sexually charged and very violent, almost uncomfortably so in both cases. The soundtrack is draining, and the movie is depressingly bleak. I’d still watch it again in a heartbeat, much like I’ve watched a bunch of really complex movies, with the fair share of that bunch being movies I didn’t particularly like (Barberian Sound Studio) or even ones I’ve downright disliked (Enter the Void).
But I’m a minority there. Lost Highway made less than four million dollars on a 15 million budget, which is the proof. The harsh truth is that nevermind the often abstract artistic values of movies, there is a very limited public for people who want to endure two hours of getting your mind played with with a tale that might be very well some dude’s twisted fantasies of why his wife has been brutally murdered. Lost Highway is still a very good movie. It just has a small public interested in it.
This is the case with Immersive Sims. There is a lot of people that want to spend those 15 minutes studying a patrol route, or to run over a damaging field over and over again until you manage to get out alive because your character can’t hack the control and you didn’t find the code, but there is a bigger amount of people who would rather go Doom on the control and watch the field disappear so they can continue ripping and tearing Hell a new one.
I think the gaming industry largely understands this. This is a very small, selective genre: the current amount of games designed within those values and include the most borderline examples must be under 50 titles. We’ve talked about the difficulty of designing and developing these games that require so much redundancy, and the money involved makes these games a risky undertaking. Unlike other more simple genres that everyone and their mother has jumped into (We could name every single fad in gaming ever, from FPS games to the recent Battle Royale ones), these games can’t just simply copy the formula from Deus Ex and run with it. Considering the small demographic it satisfies, it’s pretty much a case of QED.
The general gaming public just has a passing interest on these. They prefer the Battle Royale, the Zelda, the Mario and Hearthstones. And that’s fine! These are all great games on their own and have their own legacy.
All of this though begs the question: While Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was very aggressively publicized by Square Enix, said marketing campaign was widely criticized and probably ill conceived, would these game meet the success so many claim they deserve if they were marketed like Call of Duty or Destiny? As an additional, is video game marketing still so infantile that examples like Mankind Divided are common occurrences with games that might carry more delicate messages?
The Bottom Line
I’ve played most of the immersive sims ever made (and as I write, i’m starting up one of the few I haven’t, Strife) but after writing all of this, something strikes me as really, really awesome: I am not sure I really want Immersive Sims to break into the mainstream. Or, more to the point of how I feel, I don’t want the genre to be diluted. The awesome thing is how special they are, and if there are few of them, I can count on every single one of them being great.
Unfortunately, gaming is a business. A cutthroat one. Beloved series, studios and ideas get canned unceremoniously and names like Command and Conquer, at one time an IP juggernaut that rivaled Warcraft, just get wiped off after a big failure. We got the notice earlier this year that the Deus Ex series were on a virtual standby due to the admittedly unrealistic expectations Square Enix had for Mankind Divided, which could mean nothing considering we get one of those every five or so years but it unleashed a storm of depression and suffering wondering if we would ever get a new Deus Ex game, which is a big question to ask considering Mankind Divided ends up on a gigantic cliffhanger. The latest games in the genre (Dishonored 2’s stand alone expansion Death of the Outsider and the impressive Prey) weren’t smashing successes either, while well regarded weren’t any kind of breakthrough regarding the pop culture of gaming.
Final points: Maybe we are looking at it the wrong way.
The future looks uncertain, but it’s still kind of bright. Games like The Occupation look to bring the genre into new places and The Blackout Club incorporates multiplayer into the formula. Some undiscovered gems are being pushed like Consortium by the indie devs. A new System Shock and a remake are still on the books and the genre is open enough that people can easily build upon it at any time, and as a fundamentally based on the hybridization of FPS, which is probably the most enduringly popular genre, and RPG there will be always be people who will perhaps incidentally fall into the design ethos that make Immersive Sims so ridiculously engaging: Cyberpunk 2077 is being marketed as an RPG, but it can easily fill this niche’s demands if it holds its promises.
However this leads us to this conclusion: maybe it’s a better idea to consider the term “immersive sim” as philosophy of game design, rather than a genre. After all, while the same principles largely exists within Prey and Dishonored, both games are very different in their execution.
After all, we called them FPS/RPG back then.
By the way, the code is 0451.
