Think of a game that you consider very good, the one where you spent hours to finish, spent all night playing, cried, laughed and even messed up your routine a little so that you could play more. What is it about him that makes him so good and makes you want to play so much?
Some answers that might come up are graphics, story, gameplay, audio or all of that and more together, but how did these things manage to make you enjoy the game so much that you lost yourself in time during the game?
We have a keyword for this, and that is immersion. Sure, it sounds like a cliché and you’ve certainly used that word before, but in this article we’re going to demystify the concept of immersion a bit and what precautions we can take to make games more immersive.
But what is immersion exactly?
First of all, immersion can be misinterpreted as something that only happens in Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality games, since we are almost literally inside the game universe, or at least physically interacting with them, but the truth is that immersion goes far beyond of thousands of polygons in spectacular 3D or expensive virtual reality devices.
Immersion literally means diving, being immersed in some liquid, and when we bring that expression to games we can use that concept as well. When we are immersed in water everything changes: our vision, the way we move, we cannot breathe, our hearing is different, our perception of the world changes completely. The same happens if we immerse ourselves in a game. Our perception of time is altered (how many times were you surprised by the time you finally closed a certain game?), the way we interact with the world as well (after all, you move through the game’s inputs), even our identities are different when we stop using our names and refer to each other by game nicknames.
And how do we do this? How do we create games that get people immersed?
This must be a joint effort of all game production fronts: audio, art, game design and narrative. Your game environment should trick the player’s brain into believing that this is a plausible experience that allows the player to experience what he is playing.
In terms of audio, this means that it’s up to the sound designer to create the experience to lead the player to the desired feelings during gameplay: create the perfect audio balance between sound effects, background music and narration, use music that instigates fear, joy, sadness or any other feeling at the time the game wants to evoke that emotion. We often let the sounds of games guide our feelings without realizing it, which is a form of immersion.
As far as game art is concerned, it must be carefully crafted to visually transport the player to the world created by the devs. This includes a lot of research and references to the places and moments covered by the game. If your game is set in the 60s but the protagonist’s car only started to be produced in 1980, for example, this can annoy a player who knows a lot about cars and hinder his immersion process. The colors and objects used during gameplay must also have the careful process of inducing feelings in the player.
When we talk about narrative we usually think of an arc full of story, beginning, middle and end, great complications and an epic ending, but despite helping in the immersion process, the narrative does not necessarily need to exist that way. Many games, especially those that run away from the concept of great linear adventures, sustain themselves with emergent narratives or even non-apparent narratives, which hide during gameplay but exist only at the level of guiding the player. In Minecraft, for example, there is no real apparent and linear narrative, and yet it is an immersive experience precisely because it allows the player to create their own narrative.
The narrative and the game design must go together to build an even more immersive environment for the player, as the narrative will tell a story for him and the game design will make him live that story. Good games are those that marry narrative and game design. The narrative must be doable and consistent, avoiding continuity errors as much as possible, and should preferably be told by the player from the game’s experience, and that’s where game design comes into play.
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The game design of the game must be able to tell the narrative so that the gaming experience is as immersive as possible. This must be done through level design, which can tell stories along the player’s journey, and also through mechanics that reflect the main narrative of the game and the character.
One of the biggest challenges of game design in terms of player immersion is that too many design decisions can end up breaking this process. If the purpose of immersion is to make the player feel a part of the game to the point of taking it seriously, common things in games like HUDs, leaderboards, damage information, tutorials and even menus can lower the sense of immersion, however that they remind you all the time “this is a game and here we have a part of it”.
To avoid this, all these details must be thought of to also match the game mechanics and narrative, the more the information looks like the game world, the less break we have in immersion. The tutorials, as far as possible, should be integrated into the game design, teaching the player the controls and mechanics as he progresses, also creating a pleasurable difficulty curve for him, but that’s a subject for another post. The focus here is to create a stage that teaches the player what to do makes the experience immersive, as there will not be pop-ups with texts explaining what to do, but rather a journey of the player as a character.
For some games it is even possible to “camouflage” the HUD as part of the game environment, as is the case with Dead Space and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. This type of interface, which we call diegetics, presents essential information in a visible and intuitive way inside objects existing in the context of the game, such as Senua’s body becoming more corrupted with each death.
In this case, extra work is needed to make sure that all the necessary game information is available to the player at all times, such as damage, health, remaining energy or reloads of a weapon.
Do all partes work separated or just together?
None of these parts work alone in the game’s immersion process, one depends on the other to transport the player to a state of total immersion, where his perceptions have been changed to the perceptions of the game world. A magnificent audio work may not be enough to immerse the player if the game design doesn’t work right. The entire process needs to be intrinsically connected, so that all the work is coherent with each other and the team’s common goal is to deliver a memorable experience from their games.
It’s also important to point out that these tips are for hyper casual games, even if at first glance it doesn’t seem like it’s possible to immerse yourself in them in the same way, and the process of creating this game in an immersive way is the same. Sound, art, game design and script work differently in games like Candy Crush, but working them together is still essential to give the player a sense of immersion.
Although the text focuses on digital games, it is possible to observe and create the feeling of immersion in board games and even games, adapting the processes mentioned here as needed.
Imagens por Steve Buissinne and Oleg Gamulinskiy noPixabay
