Immersion

          Immersion can be defined as the state in which the mind is completely enveloped in an experience. Take for example reading. When you read a good book, you aren’t just looking at the words on the pages; you are observing the actions of the characters and the events surrounding them. You feel as if you are in their reality and nothing else is real. It is only when something pulls you out such as an outside force do you realize it was only a book. You can even break immersion within the experience if something doesn’t seem right. This happens occasionally in good immersion inducing experiences and all the time in awful immersion inducing experiences. Why are some books boring? Because they don’t immerse you very well. But this sensation isn’t limited to just books. You can find it in all types of media.

            Until recently, we didn’t see games as an immersive medium. We’re still having trouble deciding if they can be called art or not, but that’s another article. As for games, the ability to not only imagine you are part of the world, but actually controlling the aspects of certain characters and events makes it all the more engaging. Let’s take Shadow of the Colossus as an example of an immersive game. You play as a young man seeking to revive his dead girlfriend and to do so, you must slay sixteen absurdly large creatures known as Colossi. Simple premise that anybody could make a game out of. But how did the developers at Team Ico get this to work so well? 

            Here’s what they did: they first imagined what fighting something of such a large scale would be like. In comparison, your character is basically a tiny ant to the behemoths. He’s so small he has to literally climb all over their bodies just to attack a weak spot! Not only that, the environments are all large scale and take you a long time to traverse. The movements of the Colossi appear slow, but pack an earth-shaking punch when they connect. All of this makes the game magnificent. 

            Now picture the game as a side-scrolling beat’em up on the 3DS where the Colossi you fight are tall enough to fit on both screens and your character is still small, but not ant sized. Doesn’t seem as epic, does it? The main reason would likely be in order to see everything from a 2D perspective, the player has to be visible at all times and the camera angle would need to be fixed. It’s hard to look up at who you are fighting. The developers made the game 3D for several reasons, including having a camera that lets the players truly appreciate the grand scale of these creatures.

            The thing about immersion is that it can be broken pretty easily. You don’t even have to consciously register it because your brain already does that. Wonder why that amazing looking film was only “pretty good” even though you can’t recall everything that happened? Because so many things went wrong such as plot holes, terrible acting, sound effects not matching up or sounding very familiar (i.e. the “Wilhelm Scream”), and not so subtle breaking of the fourth wall. Games do this often, usually in the form of mechanics. 

            True, the most important aspect of your game would be the mechanics, but if the plot has to be forced in order to work with the mechanics, you’re doing it wrong. Something minor such as a “Lives” system likely won’t break immersion, but if the explanation for being able to teleport to certain locations is explained as just “something you can do,” convenient mechanic, but how does it work in with the story!? It needs an explanation to work. It’s kind of like in Lord of the Rings where they spend three movies walking to Mount Doom when Gandalf could have just summoned those giant birds to carry them to their destination in the first place. 

            Also, being really obvious with explanations can break immersion. I’m going to compare Megaman X to pretty much any game with a tutorial system that stops everything you’re doing just to inform you of what this one button does. Megaman X has no helpful tips or advice, but you can just push a few buttons and find out what each one does. You don’t need a Youtube tutorial telling you how to play. You get attacked and lose some health. One can assume that you can make mistakes, but you have to avoid getting hit too often. As for other games (I dunno, Yoshi’s Story?) with tutorials that stop all gameplay, that gets annoying. Yes, that game is a kid’s game and the developers likely concluded that children can’t play and read at the same time, it infuriated me to no end. Players can learn through trial and error. That’s how we get so good. It’s like learning Photoshop; you don’t truly get how it works until you play with everything and mess things up horribly enough to maybe require some outside tech support.

            Immersion can be broken easily, but when it stays stable and we sink in, the experience lasts forever and we never forget it. Keep in mind that if you should make your own game or book or whatever, watch for anything that can break immersion and try to think with a bit of imagination. Sounds a little cheesy, but that’s what makes these things so wonderful. They spark our imaginations. If we can’t see your world, describe it and we can fill in the rest. If we can see your world, show us your creation and let us describe it to ourselves and to others.

Honing Your Craft

            Lots of people pursue a degree for the sole purpose of obtaining a job in a specific industry. The courses students take to earn that degree have plenty to do with the practice. Yet, I have the feeling that a piece of paper mounted on a wall isn’t enough to be good at a life-changing career. It’s like putting on a black belt and saying you are a master at martial arts. The item itself gives you no power. Only the lessons you learn from earning it are worth anything.

            How does this relate to your degree? Recently I learned that in order to truly learn something, you have to practice it. Let’s use the gaming degree as an example. Some of you want to be artists, some maybe want to get better at programming. In order to become good, you don’t just read the textbooks or the notes you write down; you improve by actually doing the work. 

            Want to be a concept artist, but your drawing is sub-par? Study other artists all you want, but that will hardly help you. You need to look into what concept art is, then try to replicate that kind of work. Search for examples of character or environment concept art. It can be for anything from games to movies to TV shows. Now, draw exactly what you see. Yes, you are imitating someone else’s work, but this is for practice. Once you fully grasp what it feels like to do concept work, you can start making your own.

            Now to make this a habit. Do something like this once per day for at least an hour. Over time it will become easier to do. It might become so easy that you hardly have to erase anything and can draw confidently without hesitation. They say that it takes over ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert at something. Well, at a rate of one hour per day, it will take you over thirty years to reach that level. Don’t worry about being an expert. Just be concerned with improving yourself in the present so that it’s easier in the future.

            Same goes for programmers. I personally don’t know how one would practice scripting, but a similar method to what I mentioned above will work. Heck, if you really like what you’re doing, spend more than an hour on your daily work. If you find that you don’t like the work you do, maybe this isn’t what you really want. As for me, I dislike programming and I can only stand to do two dimensional drawings. My concept work isn’t very good, but I would like to get better at it if only to be able to make one piece of work that serves as an example for an artstyle. What I really enjoy doing is writing stuff like this and writing out game design documents. Granted, I have only jotted down ideas and haven’t made a real game design document, but once I find an idea I can work with, I will build it into something presentable, thus why I try to write documents for one hour a day.

            All in all, no matter what your craft, practice makes perfect. Just because your skill level today is bad doesn’t mean it has to stay that way tomorrow. I’ll be writing more articles like this in the hopes that in the future that I too can become an expert.

Voice Acting or Subtitles

            Games are a visual medium for storytelling. Well, they are now at least. They don’t have to be strictly for telling a story, but should you want to make a game solely for that purpose, keep in mind that it’s just like a movie, only interactable. The most common advice I get for working with a visual medium is “Don’t tell me; show me.” That being said, which is better for games: voice acting or subtitles and text dialogue?

            Voice acting is a bit like regular acting, just less memorizing lines and more making your voice be heard. Having a unique voice helps, but being able to replicate a variety of voices is invaluable as an asset. Most big budget titles opt for voice acted characters to explain the plot through lots of exposition. For a complex plot, this is necessary. However, for a story that can easily be summarized without leaving out critical detail, there’s hardly any need to have characters speak. 

            Here’s an example: we have a hero of the story who is caught in a bind. The villain explains his plans in explicit detail and then laughs maniacally and leave the hero alone to escape. A scene like this may last well over five minutes. A better way to do this is to have the hero be bound, the villain maybe does a little interrogation, gets what he needs, attempts to kill hero, and then hero manages to avoid death and escape. A scene like this can occur in under three minutes. It’s all a matter of how much the audience sees and how much dialogue the characters speak.

            That example is more fitting for a movie rather than a game. But imagine if the plot was very complex and the characters had to say a lot of information so the audience can understand why the events of the story are happening. This is where text and subtitles come in. Most voice acted games have subtitles, but are by default toggled off. For a game that has only text for their story such as the early Final Fantasy games, players had to read everything. Coincidentally, the plots to these games were pretty complicated and reading the story just helped me understand it better. 

            How about this: which is easier for you as a person; reading words or reading faces? Faces convey emotion and expression. If you’ve seen enough faces, you can tell exactly what a person is feeling the moment their muscles contort into a frown or stretch into a grin. Connecting those faces with the surrounding environments and events happening can give you an idea of what is going on. Words give descriptions, but the scene can be imagined in your head. This is what makes books so entertaining to readers. They read the paragraph that describes a character’s appearance, the setting they are in, the events that led up to this point, and that character’s reaction to it all.

            Is there a clear winner here? I doubt it. Both are excellent ways to portray a story. I prefer text simply because I usually mishear what a voice actor may say or the acting is done poorly. Imagine Tidus doing his horrendous laugh during that one scene. Now imagine it without the actual laugh, but his body and face stay the same. You can still tell he’s laughing and you almost want to laugh with him. Now if acting is done great enough, you might not need to read the words as the facial expressions and the voice of the character say it all for you.