Clint Hocking on immersion.

For the last three years I've been the creative director on FarCry 2. I'm not going to talk about my game, but I want to contextualize my talk in relation to it. One of our first tasks opn FarCry 2 was to figure out what the core of the game would be. After a couple weeks, we identified a number of pillars, which formed a mnemonic, FORMIDable

Freedom of Gameplay - play the way the player chooses with his own stragei
Open World - open continuous workd with no loading
Realism - set in a credible real-world location with believable challenges
Meaning - something to say. Not just escapist entertainment, but a way to examine something
Dynamism - As much as possible, aspects of the game will not be static

As for immersion - I was grinding pretty hard to get the game done, and I figured by now I'd be on vacation, and that I had a pretty clear undrstanding of immersion. But it is a complex multifaceted subject I know nothing about. It's also divisive.

Immersion - The Basics
What is immersion? It's not a property of a game, it' s a player state. We don't put it in a game, we evoke it in a player. It doesn't seem to have an analogue range. Either I am immersed in an experience or not... I don't believe that a player can be partially immersed, just like he can't be partially dead. So, if immersion is a state, what mechanics allow us to draw the player into that state? I think we can immerse the player by right or left brain. Left brain immersion we could call "Formal Immersion" (it's logical, rational). "Sensual Immersion" is sensory and emotional.

Sensual Immersion
This is a passionate emotionally charged immersion. In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray defined four properties of digital media (procedural, participatiory, spatial, and encyclopedic). Spatial and encyclopedic = immersion. Immersion, says Murray, is a metaphorical term for the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as if by water. This is a sensual experience. We imagine ourself being filled with our senses severed from the real world and getting that input from an imagined world. Any one of our senses alone seems to be able to enter this sense of sensual immersion.

Knowing what this is and how to achieve it in a game are two different things. I think what we're doing is trying to close the gap between the player, his avatar, and the game world. As soon as I say these things, I imply something about the kind of games this talk is applicable to, and I don't mean to do that.

The answer to this question can be found in the game Trespasser. Produced by DreamWorks Interactive as an expansion of Jurassic Park 10 years ago. The game promised to be the most immersive game ever made. There were many rendering innovations that took years to be standardized. It was the first game to offer features that are standard in games today. It boasted a needs-driven AI -- dinosaurs were autonomous agents. It promised a complete physical simulation where everything would be a physical object that could manipulate each other. More importantly, Trespasser used inverse kinematics driven animation and the complete removal of an on-screen HUD. These techniques illuminate what we are trying to accomplish. Trespasser's animation system was extremely sophisticated for its time. All animation was to procedural. Despite the failure of this in the game, it was another decade before this was really accomplished. Trespasser's animation system wanted to create a 1:1 relationship between player input and response. It is more procedural. The success of the Wii has a lot to do with the parallelism of response and action. When input is comparatively direct on the Wii, such as tennis, feel more immersive. Probably this is also the reason we have trigger like buttons on controllers given the popularity of shooters. Playing Guitar Hero on a gamepad is shittier than playing Simon.

The immediacy of response in the animation tightens the loop between input and action, and attempts to make that action correspond more to the input. The trespasser animation system was also trying to increase the connectivity of the animation system, making the player feel more like they are touching the world itself.

That's the animation system in Trespasser. What about removing the HUD? HUD is important in a shooter and provides a great deal of information. The amount of ammunition was updated vocally. The HUD removal attempted to close the gap similarly. Every game has to communicate the moment to moment state of the game. A game like Civilization reveals some of the game state at a given time. A first-person game is perhaps the most limiting game camera in terms of providing information about the game state. The idea is that the developers are trying to convert every meter in the game into something perceived directly by the player's senses, but without the mediating filter of a HUD. This strengthens the relationship between the player and the world.

Formal Immersion
What about the idea of immersion via the left brain? We might point out that Bioshock is immersive, but not in a way that is unique to games... this is games as film, the audiovisual aspects of games. A kind of immersion fundamental to games would be different. Sensory immersion is not fundamental to games. Chess doesn't take control of our senses, but it's still immersive in a powerful way.

What does our rational brain do? Brains are just sophisticated pattern matching machines, I think. They are really good at sorting things. We immerse by drawing our brains into different pattern matching routines. Games present problems that are larger and more complex as well as needing to be recursed... whenever we identify a pattern in a game, we need to find newer patterns nested deeper within it. Actively playing a game is a process of seeking "good" patterns ... the ones that persist. Standard openings in chess offer a comparison. Or think about Guitar Hero. It is a simple game with excellent and clear examples of recursive patterns.

In fact, all games use patterns that be found on three axes

Implication - the number of elements implemented in the pattern (in GH, the number of frets used)
Complexity - what it is the player must need to be able to do with the implicated elements (in GH, the sustains, chords, and combinations, the use of the fretboard up and down instead of just putting your hand in one place)
Tolerance - how much does the game allow the player to get away with (in GH, the requirement of precision and accuracy)

How do these immerse when well-used? When I am playing Guitar Hero, there are variations on a theme in a song. For the four or five songs in a given level, I get different themes with the same levels of implication, complexity, and tolerance. As I move through the songs,I get slight increases in complexity. The tolerance becomes harsher too. Increasing complexity, and implication and tolerance are immersing my left brain in the game. This sort of action seems universal in games.

Immersion Arena
Now we have two kinds of immersion: rational and emotional immersion. Which is better or more important? Critics of sensual immersion suggest that because it's not fundamental to games, it should not be a central aesthetic goal. Murray assumes that sensual immersion is what is critical. Critics of formal immersion suggest that the patters we experience in games are not mass-market, in the sense that grandma does not play Guitar Hero deeply, although you may get her to try it on Thanksgiving. Love and fear and doubt are different from pattern matching. People want to feel like a Rock God, not a Simon Expert. It's the skin (and the guitar) that achieve that.

Critics of sensual immersion suggest that this is the domain of film, and if we want to compete with them, we should not attack them on their home turf. Critics of formal immersion suggest that players get separated ... the ones who don't play are left behind. Games have to become decreasingly accessible to become more complex. Imagine if every mystery movie you watched made you better able to recurse through all the chains of alterations in previous ones. You'd need the mystery movie MMO with millions of possible murdered. Neils Bohr: the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth."

Reconciliation
I don't think we are stuck between these two kinds of immersion. I think we can get them to mix. Bioshock leverages sensual immersion to put us in direct contact with the little sisters and then dares us to pull out their hearts. We are always wondering what it means as we progress through the game. Love fear, doubt, and sacrifice can be modeled deeply in their systems. Once we can feel something like love while both sensually and formally immersed in games, we will be able to recurse them. The complex nuances of human emotion become the topic for recursion, not the mechanisms. Sensory immersion and formal immersion alone are insufficient... it is the fusion of them. I don't believe we are on the verge of edging out film. We have, rather, only just started, we will have totally overwritten the cultural landscape, and games will be to film, what film is today to radio. What immersion promises is the coming together of two powerful forces.

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