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Is Immersion Important to You as a Player?
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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8811447" data-attributes="member: 6690965"><p>I'm defining immersion as a state where no tension exists between me as a player playing a game, and the character I'm portraying making decisions. Willfully ignoring that tension doesn't solve for its existence to begin with.</p><p></p><p>I would actually agree with this as the goal, but we're disagreeing, I think, about how this can be achieved. You're proposing this can be achieved through either force of will to overcome cognitive dissonance, or through ignorance, and I'm suggesting that any mechanic that breaks this state is a design failure from the outset.</p><p></p><p>I'm talking about something between the latter two examples you give here? Agency in the sense that a player gets to make decisions, and that those decisions matter. The easiest example of a game with agency I can think of is Tic-Tac-Toe. You decide where to place your mark, and it is significant to the outcome of the game where you decide to do so (though, one level up from there, the strategy of the game is trivial, so I would describe it as a bad game). A game with no agency is something Snakes and Ladders, where you don't make decisions, and the outcome is determined entirely by factors outside of your control, or something like the lottery, where you can make decisions (pick a specific sequence of numbers), but those decisions have no impact on the outcome.</p><p></p><p>The most extreme version of the example game you're describing is the third case where players do not have agency, where players make decisions without any information, so those decisions don't matter, because the game would be as well played by a random number generator as the player.</p><p></p><p>That's a caricature of the position, because you'd likely expect some information even in your scenario (i.e. perhaps a thief has a better chance to pick locks than a fighter, even if the odds are entirely concealed). More likely, you're describing a scenario closer to Tic-Tac-Toe, where the optimal choices are trivial, or a game that alternates between states of agency and no agency from decision to decision.</p><p></p><p>I would find such a game uninteresting, but not for reasons of immersion. If I don't have any agency as a player to make good decisions (or the agency I do have can only be used to solve trivial optimization problems) then I necessarily won't be at odds with the character I'm playing at any point. Such a design would arguably be very high immersion, but very low on other design goals I'd choose to prioritize.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 8811447, member: 6690965"] I'm defining immersion as a state where no tension exists between me as a player playing a game, and the character I'm portraying making decisions. Willfully ignoring that tension doesn't solve for its existence to begin with. I would actually agree with this as the goal, but we're disagreeing, I think, about how this can be achieved. You're proposing this can be achieved through either force of will to overcome cognitive dissonance, or through ignorance, and I'm suggesting that any mechanic that breaks this state is a design failure from the outset. I'm talking about something between the latter two examples you give here? Agency in the sense that a player gets to make decisions, and that those decisions matter. The easiest example of a game with agency I can think of is Tic-Tac-Toe. You decide where to place your mark, and it is significant to the outcome of the game where you decide to do so (though, one level up from there, the strategy of the game is trivial, so I would describe it as a bad game). A game with no agency is something Snakes and Ladders, where you don't make decisions, and the outcome is determined entirely by factors outside of your control, or something like the lottery, where you can make decisions (pick a specific sequence of numbers), but those decisions have no impact on the outcome. The most extreme version of the example game you're describing is the third case where players do not have agency, where players make decisions without any information, so those decisions don't matter, because the game would be as well played by a random number generator as the player. That's a caricature of the position, because you'd likely expect some information even in your scenario (i.e. perhaps a thief has a better chance to pick locks than a fighter, even if the odds are entirely concealed). More likely, you're describing a scenario closer to Tic-Tac-Toe, where the optimal choices are trivial, or a game that alternates between states of agency and no agency from decision to decision. I would find such a game uninteresting, but not for reasons of immersion. If I don't have any agency as a player to make good decisions (or the agency I do have can only be used to solve trivial optimization problems) then I necessarily won't be at odds with the character I'm playing at any point. Such a design would arguably be very high immersion, but very low on other design goals I'd choose to prioritize. [/QUOTE]
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