How Game Gimmicks Break Immersion 228
The Moving Pixels blog has brief discussion of how gimmicky game mechanics often break a player's sense of immersion, making it painfully obvious that he's simply jumping through carefully planned hoops set up by the developers. The author takes an example from Singularity, which has a weapon that can time-shift objects between a pristine, functional state and a broken, decayed state. Quoting:
"The core issue with this time control device is that it's just not grand and sweeping enough. It doesn't feel like it's part of a world gone mad. Instead it's just a gameplay tool. You can only use it on certain things in certain places. You can 'un-decay' this chalkboard but not that desk. You can dissolve that piece of cover but not most of the walls in the game. The ultimate failure of such cheap tricks is that they make the game world less immersive rather than more compelling. The world gets divided into those few things that I can time shift, that different set of things I can levitate, and that majority of things that I can't interact with at all. ... I'm painfully aware that all that I'm really doing is pushing the right button at the right place and time. Sure, that's what many games are when you get down to it, but part of the artistry of game design comes from trying to hide this fact."
Re:Listen up, Peter Pan... (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, a game mechanic is not the same as a real life mechanic. In real life, adding a particle to a system increases the system's information processing ability, allowing it to keep behaving at the same speed and level of detail as before. In virtual worlds, the total processing power is (very) limited, so adding a part to the simulation slows it down, unless it switches to a higher level of abstraction; but that means that all those high-level properties that exist as a result of low-level properties are lost, unless the new level of abstraction is specifically defined to have them.
In other words, computers are nowhere near as fast to run consistent physics for any reasonable-sized world. Scribblenauts gets close, but as a result, the levels are very small.
Re:Misuse of the term "immersion" (Score:4, Informative)
First, Tetris has no narrative, while these games do. Immersion in a narrative is different than absorption in a puzzle. Just because they're both "games" doesn't mean you can successfully mix-and-match the fundamentally different experiences of narrative and puzzle. Narrative immersion isn't dependent on realism, but internal consistency. There's a willing suspension of disbelief, and if you break it, you've failed as the crafter of a narrative.
Second, even puzzle absorption can be broken by jarring inconsistencies. If Tetris had random blocks that couldn't be moved or rotated, or sometimes arbitrarily reversed the effect of a rotation, the change would break puzzle absorption, and the game would have been much less successful.
Re:Quick Time Events (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Half Life 2 (Score:3, Informative)
Then about an hour into it I find this room with a ladder where you have to turn around and jump onto a pipe then walk on it to get to the next room. Dang I did it once then fell back down... after 10 tries I decided to go to bed.
Press E. It automatically moves you onto the pipe.
I got stuck there for a while myself. One of the few failings of the game is how it never makes the mechanics of ladders particularly clear.