There are two distinctive game experiences that I consider truely “immersive”, for whatever loose definition of that word I’m going with at the time: racing games, and highly narritive driven experiences. In totally different ways, they give me a sense of “immersion”.
Racing games, perhaps unlike any other experience (probably even any other simulation experience) do a better job than anything else of putting me there, in the moment. Especially the more sim style games. I don’t have a big setup with a seat and wheel and pedals and whatnot, so I’m not talking about iRacing or R-Factor etc here… but over all of my gaming years I reckon the time I’ve clocked in various flavours of Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsports, Formula 1, and even non-sim things like Wipeout would outweigh the combined time of everything else. I can just load up a car, a track, turn on practice / time trial / whatever that game calls it mode and drive laps for a while. I probably enjoy practice / time trial mode more than normal races. That experience, at least for me, definitely would count as “immersive”.
Well written narrative experiences also count for me as “immersive” but in a different way. The driving games I just mentioned do so via the thrill of placing me there, on the track, in the moment. A well crafted narrative reaches “immersion” for me by pulling me in to the story. I find myself thinking about the edges of what has been described, filling in the blanks and mentally exploring the (probably deliberate) gaps. I’m “immersed” but not in a seat-of-the-pants moment way, but rather in the same way I can lose a few hours to a book without realising it. Often times, clunky attempts at wedging gameplay amongst the story being told actively works against this!
So,
esper What is “immersion” in video games?
I’m not sure I can provide a good answer to this other than perhaps “a style or method of presentation or gameplay that, one way or another, works to help you forget you are playing a game to some degree, and rather aids you in just having an experience”.
The pithy answer is “any underwater level”, zing.
