Immersion: Good or Bad?

Ease of access, is a term that comes up a lot in gaming, the ability for the average person to pick up a game and be able to understand and play it intuitively. Immersion, is the process when you forget when you are playing the game. As we move into the future, and reality versus cyberspace blurs, immersion becomes a key defining point in what is real and what isn’t. As discussed in my other blog post, the Matrix was in itself just a game world, and that none of the normal people knew they were playing in. So why is immersion so important to gaming?

Immersion happens when you connect with a game to the point where things outside the game don’t seem real. Immersion stems from the fact that game are so well made nowadays that the player’s imagination is left to wonder why something is out of place. A fast paced story, a well-designed world, these things lend the player to forget about outside interference and focus solely on what’s in front of them.

Interactivity drives immersion, the ability to physically interact with the game world, contributes a lot to the aesthetics of the game. The Fallout and Elder Scrolls Series by Bethesda, have been heralded as some of the most interactive and immersive games ever. In actuality these games are filled with bugs and loopholes, but the ability for every single item, character, and enemy, to be interact with on some level changes the scope of the game, to feel like are there in person doing the actions.

Game companies strive for their games to be so entertaining that you lose yourself in them. Unfortunately this isn’t always a good thing, some TV shows, demonstrate why immersion can be a detriment to regular life. In the anime Sword Art Online and Accel World, characters are implanted in these cyber worlds, where reality and the games graphics are nearly identical. In Accel world, the players are able to basically speed up their minds thanks to technology, one second of natural time is equal to about twenty minutes of in game time. Thus some players may look in their teens, but in actuality their minds could be hundreds of years old.

This is a real life problem, not on the scale of the TV show, but the lost sense of reality is very real for some people. As time passes we are creating technology to make immersion more and more imminent in our lives, virtual reality is fast approaching as the next great technological step, and I worry how many people will lose touch with the outside world when it becomes more mainstream.

Recently Pokémon Go has been announced, this is one of the first immersive first person Pokémon game. The premise is that you use your phone like a lens to see various Pokémon out in the real world and capture them. This experiment is on the cutting edge of immersion, the idea that the world is now being transformed into a game that you can play. Being able to actually become a Pokémon trainer has been many peoples dream, since Pokémon came out, but I wonder how far some obsessed people will go to catch them all.