Getting Real: Three Parts of Presence
VERISIMILITUDE! REALISM! SIMULATION! BELIEVABILITY!
Those buzzwords and more on today's Bananagram. Come and feast mightily, my gaming monkey brethren. Within you will discover what SCIENCE says about why meta-mechanics, among other things, might make your game suck more (or maybe not!), and what things give your action within the game a high Significance (or maybe not!), and more (or maybe not!). Click on through (or maybe not!)!
Ah, “realism.” When we play games about supernatural investigators or fire-breathing dragons or city-saving superheroes or old-west zombie-slayers or whatever, it’s surprisingly high on the list of things that we look for in a game: is it realistic? Is it believable? Does it have what the polysyballic set might call “verisimilitude”?
It’s not a monolithic thing, of course. Much like balance or elegance or simplicity, we don’t want realism to drown out the other elements that make a game fun. We don’t want a game of Papers and Paychecks, but we do want to be able to believe in the fictional world where dragons fly or zombies walk the wastelands. We want to get lost in this world, to suspend our disbelief and enter it and make choices as if we are in it – as if we’re playing the role of a person in a world that is like this. That’s what realism does, at the end of the day: it provides a sense of presence, helping us to be more immersed in the fictional context of our characters. The world may not be real, but it’s real-ish. It’s believable, at least enough for us to imagine our characters there. It’s internally consistent. We can imagine what would happen if we do an action.
This immersion is important because it is one of the big reasons that people engage in any entertainment medium. It is the essence of what happens when a book or a movie “carries you away,” and you lose a sense of your own space and time. It’s possible to have fun without immersion – imagine the dumb fun of watching a mediocre action flick – but it’s a very valuable experience, and one of the big reasons people seek out entertainment.
In the world of tabletop RPGs, immersion has the potential to be especially strong. Part of the point of an RPG is to pretend to be another person, and everything about a character creation process primes us to imagine that person as something more than a collection of numbers on a page. It’s not just random number comparison, it is a person with a world. Your ability to act as that person would, to enter that world, is much stronger than it is in most forms of media, and many of the best game sessions out there are sessions in which you stop playing and realize “Woah. I need to come back to reality.”
Media psychology has been interested in this voluntary removal from reality. In fact, there’s a paper that seeks to synthesize a lot of research on the subject: http://academic.research.microsoft....the-formation-of-spatial-presence-experiences.
Here, it’s called “presence,” and though there are several kinds of presence, the most relevant for realism is probably “spatial presence”: when you feel like you are there, in the world that the media creates. Once you’ve got spatial presence, you tend to consider choices that make sense in the context of the world, and tend to enjoy the experience more than if you’re not present. A goofy action movie is fun, of course, but it’s not quite as fun as a movie that makes you feel like the world it depicts is a living, breathing place (rather than just a stage for explosions). When that movie involves aliens and superheroes, making the audience feel that it’s “realistic” can be a big challenge. When that story is instead given to an RPG group and people are talking in funny voices and using numbers on paper to try and feel that the world is “real,” this can be an even bigger challenge.
So, how do you make a game that encourages more “present” players? How do you make a game more “immersive?” What might weaken presence in a game you run?
Glad I asked!
Fidelity
The idea behind fidelity is the idea that the model of the game world you make in your head when you play is multifaceted. If the world is a high-fidelity world, there’s going to be a significant amount of sensory information given to you.
And by that, I don’t necessarily mean reams of pages of pointless, irrelevant history and world-building. Rather, the information is sensory – particular to what your character is actually experiencing. A player views the world through the lens of the DM, so in practice, this means that a DM should describe more than just what you see.
“What you see” is kind of the basic, fundamental information. A DM who wants an immersive game should also tell players what their characters hear, taste, smell, or touch. This can get overwhelming if you’re exhaustive, but you can get at it pretty easily by including one or two extra details beyond “what you see” whenever you describe something. Smells are obvious and useful, from musty, dank dungeons to the smell of old paper in a wizard’s library to the scent of blood after a battle. Sounds are a natural part as well: grunts and metal and footsteps. Tactile sensations can be the soreness from riding a saddle, or the satisfying crunch of an enemy’s skull or the slick, rubbery slime of an eldritch horror. Tastes might be the charcoal-taste of the campfire-cooked rabbit, or the savory spices of the inn’s best haunch. This information is especially valuable if its information the character wouldn’t have just from sight, because it adds more detail by its description. If you describe the sight of the orcs in the next room – and the sour odor of old ale coming from the casks in the corner – you’ve done more than just describe the orcs. This kind of information is ace “random generator” material, so it’s useful to have a list you can call from of descriptive words for any encounter or significant location the party visits.
Fidelity is weakened when a player needs to fill in gaps for themselves, so the extra information you’re chucking into your descriptions helps prevent that. If the player needs to get abstract and rely on thinly-veiled contrivances to conjure up the world, it becomes a Potemkin village, shallow and ultimately self-aware. The more you point at the game world and see it as a game world, the less you’re seeing it as your own world. The door the party stands in front of isn’t just a gateway to an encounter in the next room, it’s a door, with a texture and a smell and a heft and a handle and a gear mechanism and a history. Fidelity is strengthened by keeping the information complete.
We're a world of magic and adventure, NOT a game where grown adults roll dice and talk in funny voices
In this way, games that rely more on player input to construct their world have a bit of a harder time with immersion. If you’re the one making up what’s on the other side of the door, that is, by nature, filling in a gap for yourself, which means the information you’re receiving from the world is not complete which means, psychologically, you’ve got a much bigger challenge in imagining that you are in the world as opposed to playing a game about the world. There is strength in the DM-makes-the-world style of play that allows for greater fidelity, and thus greater presence.
Consistency
Not only should the detail of a game featuring great immersion be rich, it should also be as seamless as possible. Anything that breaks up the game or calls attention to the meta-game is something that breaks the stride and damages the immersion.
In practical terms, this means that intuitive, simple, elegant mechanics greatly benefit over complex, fiddly mechanics. The game should flow from one event to the next without interruption – without having to consult a chart or count up bonuses. As much as possible, the relevant bits of the game should be communicated to you without reference to mechanics or rules elements. Ideas like using “bloodied” to represent a wounded creature, or not switching between roll-low and roll-high, are all elements that reinforce consistency and encourage you to think about the game and the world you’re in as a seamless whole, because there’s not much that is disruptive.
Meta-game elements like positioning minis, consulting cards can harm consistency, because these things are representations of the game world, rather than game-world-relevant themselves. Complex rules or detailed charts also remove you from the game world, and into the details of the mechanics of the game. For optimal consistency, the rules of the game should be a silent companion, not something you pay active attention to. They should be like gravity, like electricity, like wi-fi: constantly around you, but not something you need to worry about the inner workings of very much.
Significance
Of course, all the purple prose and sensory descriptions you can throw into an encounter that runs smoothly won’t matter if the encounter is boring, safe, or irrelevant. In addition to high fidelity and smooth consistency, presence demands that the world described is also interesting and challenging and dynamic, so that there is always something to do, and a context in which it is done. Every time a player is called on to make a choice for their character, it should be cognitively demanding and contribute to a strong narrative. There should be an element of challenge in each choice, and an element of continuing the story as your character performs each action. If success is assured, or irrelevant, it’s not going to be something that captures the attention and lets somebody leave their normal life behind.
That element of being something that demands and rewards engagement is a quality we’re going to call “significance.” There’s a constant flow of events, and it’s a flow that, if you don’t pay attention, you’ll be “punished” for it (in the sense that your character dies, or fails, or goes mad, or whatever).
Here, games that are “safer” or games that use too much randomness suffer from significance issues. They are too languid, too still. While the random encounter with non-threatening kobolds might add a lot of detail to the world, if it’s not challenging and it’s not contributing to the story, it’s not something worth getting invested in, and it’s not something that’s going to take you out of your head very much. If you can just sit back, relax, and declare your actions, you’re not going to engage the game, and it’s not going to be very high-significance.
A Price For Immersion
So! Those are three things that you can pay attention to if you’d like an immersive game at your next session. They are likely to work, or so says Science, anyway, and it confirms a lot of general writing/acting/improve/etc. advice, too, so it seems like there’s something there.
Two footnotes.
First, this list shouldn’t be considered a prerequisite for immersion – it is just a demonstration of things that help and hurt, independent of the people involved. The people involved become a vital part of this, however, because, depending on the person, you might not need any of these to get them to be immersed in their characters. Some people take to a character or world easily, or more easily suspend disbelief, and you are a lucky DM if you have such players! You might be perfectly able to run a meta-heavy, player-input-driven, low-risk kind of RPG no sweat with a group that has no problem buying into an RPG world and acting as part of it.
You might additionally run such a game if your players aren’t particularly interested in immersion. It is a fair question about whether or not immersion is something you want – so many of us are happy with our RPGs being our dumb action flicks, and they don’t NEED to be anything more or deeper. They can be “just games,” too.
Ultimately, the data suggests that people seek out immersive experiences. They may do so because most entertainment revolves around getting you out of your own world for a while, and immersive experiences like stories and movies can do that in a slightly different way than games like Settlers of Cattan and Poker. RPG’s are a hybrid, a union of the flow of games and the presence of a good story. Because they are so flexible and interactive, they may be one of the best sources of presence in any form of media. That’s not something I think we should ignore.
At any rate, tell me what you think. What’s an example of a time that you became really immersed in a game, and what do you think was crucial or amazing about that experience? Tell me your stories, down in the comments!
VERISIMILITUDE! REALISM! SIMULATION! BELIEVABILITY!
Those buzzwords and more on today's Bananagram. Come and feast mightily, my gaming monkey brethren. Within you will discover what SCIENCE says about why meta-mechanics, among other things, might make your game suck more (or maybe not!), and what things give your action within the game a high Significance (or maybe not!), and more (or maybe not!). Click on through (or maybe not!)!
Ah, “realism.” When we play games about supernatural investigators or fire-breathing dragons or city-saving superheroes or old-west zombie-slayers or whatever, it’s surprisingly high on the list of things that we look for in a game: is it realistic? Is it believable? Does it have what the polysyballic set might call “verisimilitude”?
It’s not a monolithic thing, of course. Much like balance or elegance or simplicity, we don’t want realism to drown out the other elements that make a game fun. We don’t want a game of Papers and Paychecks, but we do want to be able to believe in the fictional world where dragons fly or zombies walk the wastelands. We want to get lost in this world, to suspend our disbelief and enter it and make choices as if we are in it – as if we’re playing the role of a person in a world that is like this. That’s what realism does, at the end of the day: it provides a sense of presence, helping us to be more immersed in the fictional context of our characters. The world may not be real, but it’s real-ish. It’s believable, at least enough for us to imagine our characters there. It’s internally consistent. We can imagine what would happen if we do an action.
This immersion is important because it is one of the big reasons that people engage in any entertainment medium. It is the essence of what happens when a book or a movie “carries you away,” and you lose a sense of your own space and time. It’s possible to have fun without immersion – imagine the dumb fun of watching a mediocre action flick – but it’s a very valuable experience, and one of the big reasons people seek out entertainment.
In the world of tabletop RPGs, immersion has the potential to be especially strong. Part of the point of an RPG is to pretend to be another person, and everything about a character creation process primes us to imagine that person as something more than a collection of numbers on a page. It’s not just random number comparison, it is a person with a world. Your ability to act as that person would, to enter that world, is much stronger than it is in most forms of media, and many of the best game sessions out there are sessions in which you stop playing and realize “Woah. I need to come back to reality.”
Media psychology has been interested in this voluntary removal from reality. In fact, there’s a paper that seeks to synthesize a lot of research on the subject: http://academic.research.microsoft....the-formation-of-spatial-presence-experiences.
Here, it’s called “presence,” and though there are several kinds of presence, the most relevant for realism is probably “spatial presence”: when you feel like you are there, in the world that the media creates. Once you’ve got spatial presence, you tend to consider choices that make sense in the context of the world, and tend to enjoy the experience more than if you’re not present. A goofy action movie is fun, of course, but it’s not quite as fun as a movie that makes you feel like the world it depicts is a living, breathing place (rather than just a stage for explosions). When that movie involves aliens and superheroes, making the audience feel that it’s “realistic” can be a big challenge. When that story is instead given to an RPG group and people are talking in funny voices and using numbers on paper to try and feel that the world is “real,” this can be an even bigger challenge.
So, how do you make a game that encourages more “present” players? How do you make a game more “immersive?” What might weaken presence in a game you run?
Glad I asked!
Fidelity
The idea behind fidelity is the idea that the model of the game world you make in your head when you play is multifaceted. If the world is a high-fidelity world, there’s going to be a significant amount of sensory information given to you.
And by that, I don’t necessarily mean reams of pages of pointless, irrelevant history and world-building. Rather, the information is sensory – particular to what your character is actually experiencing. A player views the world through the lens of the DM, so in practice, this means that a DM should describe more than just what you see.
“What you see” is kind of the basic, fundamental information. A DM who wants an immersive game should also tell players what their characters hear, taste, smell, or touch. This can get overwhelming if you’re exhaustive, but you can get at it pretty easily by including one or two extra details beyond “what you see” whenever you describe something. Smells are obvious and useful, from musty, dank dungeons to the smell of old paper in a wizard’s library to the scent of blood after a battle. Sounds are a natural part as well: grunts and metal and footsteps. Tactile sensations can be the soreness from riding a saddle, or the satisfying crunch of an enemy’s skull or the slick, rubbery slime of an eldritch horror. Tastes might be the charcoal-taste of the campfire-cooked rabbit, or the savory spices of the inn’s best haunch. This information is especially valuable if its information the character wouldn’t have just from sight, because it adds more detail by its description. If you describe the sight of the orcs in the next room – and the sour odor of old ale coming from the casks in the corner – you’ve done more than just describe the orcs. This kind of information is ace “random generator” material, so it’s useful to have a list you can call from of descriptive words for any encounter or significant location the party visits.
Fidelity is weakened when a player needs to fill in gaps for themselves, so the extra information you’re chucking into your descriptions helps prevent that. If the player needs to get abstract and rely on thinly-veiled contrivances to conjure up the world, it becomes a Potemkin village, shallow and ultimately self-aware. The more you point at the game world and see it as a game world, the less you’re seeing it as your own world. The door the party stands in front of isn’t just a gateway to an encounter in the next room, it’s a door, with a texture and a smell and a heft and a handle and a gear mechanism and a history. Fidelity is strengthened by keeping the information complete.
We're a world of magic and adventure, NOT a game where grown adults roll dice and talk in funny voices
In this way, games that rely more on player input to construct their world have a bit of a harder time with immersion. If you’re the one making up what’s on the other side of the door, that is, by nature, filling in a gap for yourself, which means the information you’re receiving from the world is not complete which means, psychologically, you’ve got a much bigger challenge in imagining that you are in the world as opposed to playing a game about the world. There is strength in the DM-makes-the-world style of play that allows for greater fidelity, and thus greater presence.
Consistency
Not only should the detail of a game featuring great immersion be rich, it should also be as seamless as possible. Anything that breaks up the game or calls attention to the meta-game is something that breaks the stride and damages the immersion.
In practical terms, this means that intuitive, simple, elegant mechanics greatly benefit over complex, fiddly mechanics. The game should flow from one event to the next without interruption – without having to consult a chart or count up bonuses. As much as possible, the relevant bits of the game should be communicated to you without reference to mechanics or rules elements. Ideas like using “bloodied” to represent a wounded creature, or not switching between roll-low and roll-high, are all elements that reinforce consistency and encourage you to think about the game and the world you’re in as a seamless whole, because there’s not much that is disruptive.
Meta-game elements like positioning minis, consulting cards can harm consistency, because these things are representations of the game world, rather than game-world-relevant themselves. Complex rules or detailed charts also remove you from the game world, and into the details of the mechanics of the game. For optimal consistency, the rules of the game should be a silent companion, not something you pay active attention to. They should be like gravity, like electricity, like wi-fi: constantly around you, but not something you need to worry about the inner workings of very much.
Significance
Of course, all the purple prose and sensory descriptions you can throw into an encounter that runs smoothly won’t matter if the encounter is boring, safe, or irrelevant. In addition to high fidelity and smooth consistency, presence demands that the world described is also interesting and challenging and dynamic, so that there is always something to do, and a context in which it is done. Every time a player is called on to make a choice for their character, it should be cognitively demanding and contribute to a strong narrative. There should be an element of challenge in each choice, and an element of continuing the story as your character performs each action. If success is assured, or irrelevant, it’s not going to be something that captures the attention and lets somebody leave their normal life behind.
That element of being something that demands and rewards engagement is a quality we’re going to call “significance.” There’s a constant flow of events, and it’s a flow that, if you don’t pay attention, you’ll be “punished” for it (in the sense that your character dies, or fails, or goes mad, or whatever).
Here, games that are “safer” or games that use too much randomness suffer from significance issues. They are too languid, too still. While the random encounter with non-threatening kobolds might add a lot of detail to the world, if it’s not challenging and it’s not contributing to the story, it’s not something worth getting invested in, and it’s not something that’s going to take you out of your head very much. If you can just sit back, relax, and declare your actions, you’re not going to engage the game, and it’s not going to be very high-significance.
A Price For Immersion
So! Those are three things that you can pay attention to if you’d like an immersive game at your next session. They are likely to work, or so says Science, anyway, and it confirms a lot of general writing/acting/improve/etc. advice, too, so it seems like there’s something there.
Two footnotes.
First, this list shouldn’t be considered a prerequisite for immersion – it is just a demonstration of things that help and hurt, independent of the people involved. The people involved become a vital part of this, however, because, depending on the person, you might not need any of these to get them to be immersed in their characters. Some people take to a character or world easily, or more easily suspend disbelief, and you are a lucky DM if you have such players! You might be perfectly able to run a meta-heavy, player-input-driven, low-risk kind of RPG no sweat with a group that has no problem buying into an RPG world and acting as part of it.
You might additionally run such a game if your players aren’t particularly interested in immersion. It is a fair question about whether or not immersion is something you want – so many of us are happy with our RPGs being our dumb action flicks, and they don’t NEED to be anything more or deeper. They can be “just games,” too.
Ultimately, the data suggests that people seek out immersive experiences. They may do so because most entertainment revolves around getting you out of your own world for a while, and immersive experiences like stories and movies can do that in a slightly different way than games like Settlers of Cattan and Poker. RPG’s are a hybrid, a union of the flow of games and the presence of a good story. Because they are so flexible and interactive, they may be one of the best sources of presence in any form of media. That’s not something I think we should ignore.
At any rate, tell me what you think. What’s an example of a time that you became really immersed in a game, and what do you think was crucial or amazing about that experience? Tell me your stories, down in the comments!
