Immersion?

[pemerton]

I was thinking in terms of what makes sense for the character as seen from a third person perspective. If you were watching a movie does it make sense for the character to do this? I submit that if you’re chasing story the action has to make sense.

I just want to elaborate on this a little bit.

The only time characters in fiction do things that "don't make sense" is (i) if the fiction is poorly written, or (ii) the fiction is deliberately absurd.

One feature of well-written fiction is that it communicates its context and presuppositions, and brings the audience along with it. An example I was thinking of yesterday evening (I can't recall why - maybe I was imagining myself being adventurous?) is from the early Tintin book King Ottokar's Sceptre. On p 52 of my copy, Tintin is running down a rocky, switch-back-y, mountain path, in pursuit of a villain who is about 5 metres below him. Tintin leaps off the path, over the edge, and lands on the villain, who is knocked unconscious as his head lands on a rock - while Tintin picks himself up and calmly reads a letter taken from the villain's wallet.

At the top of p 53 Snowy comments on Tintin's feat - "One day you'll break your neck with all these acrobatics!" - but Tintin doesn't, in this or future episodes.

Does what Tintin does "make sense" for the character? I've never felt that it spoils the story, or makes it absurd. The mode of communication - comic-book illustration - helps to convey it as plausible rather than outlandish.

Similarly, in D&D it is not absurd for a player to have their character choose to engage in melee with a creature like a giant or a dragon. Because the way the fiction is set up, and framed, and conveyed (including via the combat rules) all presents this as a plausible thing to do.

But that doesn't tell us anything about whether game play is "chasing a story" or "beating the dungeon" or whatever else the play of D&D might aim at.

And if the table can't agree on the shared fiction - for instance, one participant thinks that the PC trying to confront a dragon is obviously folly, and should just result in the PC being crushed to a pulp by the terrible beast - then there is a basic problem of "social contract": the participants can't agree on a method for collectively establishing, and generating over the course of play, a shared fiction.

 

[pemerton]

But shorn of all the real world inputs that affect such a perspective. Hunger, tiredness, social pressure, courage, desires, fears, etc. It's really the perspective of a coldly rational third party looking through the character's eye globes.

Right. The GURPs player doesn't actually feel any desire to drink alcohol. They're not playing an alcoholic. They're playing a rational optimiser.

 

[Pedantic]

But shorn of all the real world inputs that affect such a perspective. Hunger, tiredness, social pressure, courage, desires, fears, etc. It's really the perspective of a coldly rational third party looking through the character's eye globes.

I don't think that's relevant to the immersion question; the goal there has nothing to do with what the output of the character is, just the subjective experience of the player. Why should it matter to the player how well-modeled the character's mental state is, so long as they feel like they're in control of it? A better analog may well be worse for immersion.

 

[pemerton]

Why should it matter to the player how well-modeled the character's mental state is, so long as they feel like they're in control of it?

But being in control of an imaginary character's mental stat is just authorship. All RPGing involves players authoring characters. I take immersion to be more than just that.

I mean, in classic dungeon crawl play, the player controls the PC's mental state. But to me it would seem weird to characterise pawn stance, beat-the-dungeon play as immersive.

 

[dbm]

But shorn of all the real world inputs that affect such a perspective. Hunger, tiredness, social pressure, courage, desires, fears, etc. It's really the perspective of a coldly rational third party looking through the character's eye globes.

Speak for yourself. I have more empathy than that.

 

[Pedantic]

But being in control of an imaginary character's mental stat is just authorship. All RPGing involves players authoring characters. I take immersion to be more than just that.

I mean, in classic dungeon crawl play, the player controls the PC's mental state. But to me it would seem weird to characterise pawn stance, beat-the-dungeon play as immersive.

I don't think so. Having the same information as the character, roughly the same incentives as a player and the character and making decisions accordingly is as far as it gets.

Authorship does not imply shared incentives, and may imply information beyond what the character has access to. I can understand wanting some other modeling conditions on mental state or other restrictions on decision making....but that's intrinsically lossy, as losing any amount of decision making power is also detrimental to immersion as it immediately leads to diverging incentives.

 

[pemerton]

I don't think so. Having the same information as the character, roughly the same incentives as a player and the character and making decisions accordingly is as far as it gets.

Authorship does not imply shared incentives, and may imply information beyond what the character has access to. I can understand wanting some other modeling conditions on mental state or other restrictions on decision making....but that's intrinsically lossy, as losing any amount of decision making power is also detrimental to immersion as it immediately leads to diverging incentives.

But the GURPS player doesn't have the same incentives as their alcoholic PC. The PC craves alcohol. The player doesn't have any comparable or parallel craving.

 

[Micah Sweet]

These two things are often at odds with each other though. 'Cool monster to fight' is surely a more common roadside encounter in your games than 'Oh look more wheat fields'.

I agree you can lean more into one thing than the other, but there is a bit of both in all games.

Not often in my games (although not never, because I'm a human), because I don't invent the interesting things during play to goose the narrative, and every Interesting thing put into the setting in prep has an in-setting reason to be there.

No conflict.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But shorn of all the real world inputs that affect such a perspective. Hunger, tiredness, social pressure, courage, desires, fears, etc. It's really the perspective of a coldly rational third party looking through the character's eye globes.

Yeah, which is why I try to imagine the ones that don't have their own rules, and try to figure out how those things might impact my PC's choices.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't think so. Having the same information as the character, roughly the same incentives as a player and the character and making decisions accordingly is as far as it gets.

Authorship does not imply shared incentives, and may imply information beyond what the character has access to. I can understand wanting some other modeling conditions on mental state or other restrictions on decision making....but that's intrinsically lossy, as losing any amount of decision making power is also detrimental to immersion as it immediately leads to diverging incentives.

I'd argue it can represent incentives that can't be properly represented in the simulation otherwise. Its like a fatigue system; a player can't feel the tiredness his character feels even if he's immersed, but having something remind him regularly its the case can make it easier to connect with that fact.