Tamrielo

I have a few game designer friends who visibly twitch at the use of the word “immersion”. It’s a word that’s thrown around a lot both among players and among devs, and it’s often not super well defined. At best, it’s used as a catchall word for being “in the experience”, that sense of feeling like you’re in the game world and not simply playing a game. At worst, it’s a vague descriptor for something someone doesn’t like but can’t really quantify or describe– it “breaks immersion”!

art by Romain Laurent

It’s a tough thing to pin down, like “fun”, because what one person finds immersive someone else can easily find laughable. Some people never get that feeling like they’re “in the game world”, and trying to describe an immersive experience to them is like talking to a brick wall.

I think a better descriptor would be “attention to detail”. Immersion is the effect, attention to detail is the cause. It’s something I’ve noticed a lot of while playing The Division… pretty much all week. What really stands out to me is the attention to detail throughout the game. Everything from materials making the sounds I expect as I climb over them or shoot them to the believable advertisements and fliers to the desperately-lived-in looking areas you move through adds to the experience. There’s a story, everywhere I go, and there are enough little details that I can interact with to make me feel like I’m jumping over cars and jewelry stores, not textured geometry.

As an example, a car is, functionally, just a piece of cover in the street. The streets are broken up with abandoned cars, very dense, like you’d expect of New York City traffic. A lot of these have been hastily abandoned, and the doors are ajar. You can close them by pressing up against them, and it makes a satisfying “car door closing” sound. It makes the car feel like a car, and not like just another piece of cover in the street.

This past evening, I went into the Dark Zone with a group of friends. The tension is very real in there, but not overwhelming– in a group, I felt safe, and backed up by my teammates. The game’s UI makes it very difficult to tell if a moving person in the distance is an NPC or another player, and our desire to be certain we weren’t shooting other players without meaning to meant we used various tricks (like scan pulses) to find out. It meant that we stuck together, always keeping an eye out in all directions, and moving as a group== just like we felt like we *should*. It’s made even more poignant by the plentiful high-quality drops that you only get to keep if you successfully extract them.

That feeling, that sense of acting within the game the way you feel like you ought to act, or that alignment between your expectations and what is actually happening in the game– that’s immersion. It’s the culmination of all of the little details that add up, and it’s why all of those little things are important. It’s why sitting in chairs in an MMO matters, and why ambient sounds and minor sound effects are vital. It’s why signs you can read are so much more compelling than signs you can’t, and why getting animations just right is so important.

As mentioned before, I’ve spent a ton of time in The Division this week, enough that I’ve been distracted from writing (whoops!). The game itself is much like games I’ve played before– it’s a good cover shooter, and I’ve described it as Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer, fleshed out in a different setting. What keeps me coming back to it thus far are all the little details. The sense of picking up the pieces of a shattered piece of civilization is strong, and it runs through everything from the visuals, to the enemy types, to the collectables (that offer me in-game story bits!), to the fact that I can close people’s abandoned car doors.

Thanks to a gift card, I picked up a copy of Bloodborne and loaded it up with Kodra this weekend. We put in about two hours and got to the first save point. Long story short, the game wrecked us solidly and unremittingly.

We did eventually admit defeat before reaching the next save point, but even so, the game was a lot of fun, just draining. Kodra and I traded off at every death, so roughly once every sixty seconds to ten minutes or so. We died a lot, maybe I mentioned. What keeps it fun, though, is that the game, while unrelentingly difficult, is entirely fair. The rules don’t change on you, and when new rules are introduced, it’s very clear. When I saw a random huge monster guy wandering through a place that I had to break a bunch of boxes to even access, it wasn’t precisely a surprise when it ignored my heavy attack and just grabbed me and squished me.

I think what makes the series of From Software’s games (Souls games, Bloodborne) really compelling is that it changes the philosophy on you. In a lot of games, especially narrative games, the story is the reward– get through this segment to get another bit of story, and keep on going to get more story. You beat a boss because you want to see what happens next, and as a result the game has a vested interest in keeping you on a forward trajectory, seeing more story so you don’t get bored. Victory is the default, and the narrative of the game is predicated on you winning and continuing on. It can safely be assumed that you’re going to win a given encounter.

Not so in Bloodborne. Story is incidental; it’s something you piece together, if at all. The reward is power, and the game makes you want power immediately by making sure you know how much it sucks not to have any. It’s a trope that you die more or less immediately in Souls games, to one of the first enemies you fight, but as above– the game is very fair. You CAN beat that first enemy, if you’re exceptionally skilled, and in general the game rewards you very well for doing so. You want to beat bosses because you shouldn’t be able to; success in the game is an act of defiance, one that the game respects.

It’s that respect that really seals the deal. If you find a cheap, easy way to bypass a nasty fight or exploit some terrain to beat a boss, the game won’t punish you for it. You owe the game nothing, and in return, it owes you nothing. If you swing at an enemy and miss, there’s no aim correction; you forgot to lock on (or didn’t lock onto the right enemy) and the consequences are on you. Play better next time. You found a ledge that the boss can’t reach and can shoot at it, and have enough ammo to take it down without reprisal? Good on you, you beat the boss, you were cleverer than it was. Grind an area until you’re stupidly overpowered before moving on? That’s your choice, do what you need to in order to win.

I really appreciate that in Bloodborne, especially given that there are generally multiple ways to approach each encounter. It took Kodra and I a solid hour to realize that we were playing the game like Bel, methodically fighting and defeating every single enemy in an area before moving on. It was taxing on our resources and took up a lot of time for little return. We quickly discovered abject cowardice and used it to flee further than we’d gotten with overt aggression.

The amount of game space we played in over the course of the day was about half of a Warframe level, or less. Maybe half of one of the smaller starting levels. However, that tiny amount of space was incredibly rich and nuanced, with lots of approaches and lots of things to see and learn. I never felt like we were punished unduly for experimenting, and resources were plentiful enough that we could use them regularly without feeling like they were being wasted. Sure, we died a lot, but we made a lot of progress as far as developing our actual skill at the game.

By the end, we’d graduated from getting murdered by a guy with a rake to dying to some kind of massive tree beast. Progression!

I just got through beating Sword Art Online: RE Hollow Fragment last night. Overall, I think it’s a reasonably solid game that suffers from being a bit too formulaic and not being quite responsive enough. There are some really interesting mechanics that you can more or less entirely ignore, because you start the game ludicrously overpowered and have very little need to get yet more powerful until very late in the game. The structure of the game is more than a little repetitive, with really predictable patterns.

The game has a lot of really detailed systems, like its damage types, weapon and skill trees, and other details that are almost entirely meaningless because, as Kirito, you start very nearly maxed out in a very strong, versatile skill tree, with just enough points spent in other trees to unlock the most useful stuff. As with a lot of the rest of the game, it’s very true to SAO’s narrative– Kirito is a relentless min-maxer, and when you’re put in control of him, you’ve already got a very nearly optimal character. As a result, there are entire weapon types and ability interactions that I never saw in the game because there didn’t seem to be a reason to bother.

Also in keeping with the series’ narrative, the other characters are scaled in power relative to what you’d expect, meaning that the obvious choice of partner — Asuna — is far and away the best party member to choose, especially because all of her skills more or less perfectly complement what you start with as Kirito. She has a lot of debuff power, which is exactly what Kirito’s dual-wield tree lacks. Because of this, there are entire weapons and partner character choices that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reason to choose, ever, from a gameplay standpoint.

All of this is largely irrelevant, however, because it’s not what the game is trying to deliver. SAO: Hollow Fragment is giving you the chance to play in the SAO world, and to some extent explore the parts of it that you’re the most interested in. It’s your opportunity, as a player, to break canon and try stuff out that you wanted to see in the show but couldn’t. I wrote about it a few months ago, but the game opens up with this message pretty quickly– Hollow Fragment starts where the Aincrad arc of the show ends, but keeps on going in Aincrad. It’s why you start with a ludicrously powerful Kirito and why you play through “new” content despite knowing what happens in the show; the game makes a point of breaking from the show’s story and writing its own.

What I like about it is that it’s very thorough in its parallel storyline. Bits and pieces that don’t make a lot of sense initially ultimately get revealed as part of a complete retelling of the story, including events that happen after the show’s first arc, but play out differently in Hollow Fragment’s parallel story. The end result is broadly similar, but the details change, and it’s very interesting to see how the various alterations to the “real” story affect the rest of the narrative. Hollow Fragment effectively kicks off a reboot of the series starting from the end of the show’s first arc, and I think that’s a fascinating approach. I only wish the game went a little deeper into that, because the story is fairly light.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that I love reboots, particularly ones that retain as few of the specifics of the original as possible while still keeping the overall essence of the story. My favorite retelling of Romeo and Juliet is the frankly insane neo-90s Leonardo DiCaprio version set in a stylized present-day but using Shakespearean dialogue. I like to see how things could have played out differently with the same pieces. I’m a big fan of the sort of parallel storytelling that Hollow Fragment does because it provides a bunch of new conceptual space to explore that isn’t weighted down by the existing narrative.

Probably my biggest critique of Hollow Fragment is how formulaic it is– it feels less like a game version of the show than it probably should, because the structure of the game doesn’t follow the structure of the show. As much as SAO is about “reaching level 100 and beating the game”, very little of the show’s time is spent showcasing each individual floor, which is entirely what Hollow Fragment does. It makes the game feel both repetitive and frustratingly unlike the show itself, and I feel like the game would have been improved by going all-in on the narrative portions rather than building out level after level of formulaic gameplay.

What frustrates me the most about the game is that it shies away from really exploring this cool alternate narrative it’s created. A lot of the story scenes start to poke at some interesting ramifications of the parallel storyline they’ve set up, but all too often what appears to be a neat story point instead morphs into sudden, cheap fanservice. In the meantime, the game introduces new characters who are supposed to be compelling (and, indeed, who the game’s story centers around to some extent) but are kind of shoved in your face without preamble. It feels, more than anything, like a new player joining a long-running tabletop campaign and being inserted awkwardly into the party. Hey, here’s this random person around town oh look it turns out they know your name NOW THEY’RE YOUR BEST FRIEND no questions asked STOP ASKING QUESTIONS.

You may note that I haven’t talked about the “Hollow Fragment” part of the game, the separate (entire game) that’s added onto what was originally just a climb through Aincrad. As much as the game develops a compelling parallel storyline, it completely failed to hook me on its massive bonus area. My connection there was a character who, right off the bat, doesn’t like me very much, and who I honestly don’t really care much about. She’s probably got a pretty tragic backstory, but quite frankly I have half a dozen other, more developed characters with tragic backstories that I’m a lot more interested in exploring the game with, and the Hollow Area seems to be focused on developing characters that I honestly am not that interested in.

That all having been said, I like the idea of using tie-in games as a springboard for parallel storytelling. If I wanted just a straight retelling of the story I already know, I could watch the show/movie again, but letting me alter the world in a “safe” alternate storyline is really compelling, even as relatively underdeveloped as it is in Hollow Fragment. There’s a really interesting Star Wars game where Kenobi seeks out Leia and makes her a Jedi instead of Luke– completely non-canon, but an interesting space to explore, and a lot more interesting than a game that simply straight retells Star Wars without the pacing and with a hundred times as many stormtroopers to fight.

Also, much like the show did, SAO: Hollow Fragment makes me miss the now-long-gone days of early MMOs, when it was new for everyone and the games were full of surprises, that you shared with everyone you played with.

I wrote up a fairly extensive report on my games for this past weekend’s Infinity tournament (here, if you’re curious) and got some interesting feedback. People seemed to like my turn-by-turn commentary about what I was trying to accomplish at any given point and how I planned to go about it, as well as how my plans changed on the fly.

I’ve talked quite a bit about strategy vs tactics, and I’ve also talked about how I have a “background process” planning ahead most of the time, but I think I rarely go into specifics. Infinity might be a good springboard into my usual day-to-day thought processes, how I stay organized, and possibly some other questions that people have asked me.

When I’m playing Infinity, I’m very focused on what wins me the game. When I suggest strategy, it’s always focused more about what scores points (and thus wins you the game) than how to  handle a specific problem. In general, I find that spending energy finding a specific solution to a specific problem isn’t a terribly efficient approach, and avoiding doing so is a good way to manage my time effectively. Sometimes, a specific solution to a specific problem is unavoidable, but at that point the goal (whatever “wins you the game”) simply won’t happen without that solution, and thus it’s almost not possible for that solution to be inefficient, because there’s no alternative. Efficiency is a relative thing; there’s no real objective baseline for doing something efficiently, just a set of comparisons.

In the tournament this weekend, I was faced with a couple of deeply entrenched enemy units hidden in a tower. Given the opportunity, these units could make my life very difficult, and an explicit goal of the mission was eliminating enemy units. As a result, the goal for my first turn was to neutralize those units as best I could. It was what I needed to accomplish in the first turn, and my planning centered on that. I had a couple of options– I could send a unit from my backfield up to threaten the tower, spending a lot of orders to climb it and then (hopefully) effectively attack both of the targets, or I could send my infiltrator up with a slightly broader toolset. The first option was cost-efficient but time-inefficient; it would cost me rather more orders to move the cheaper unit up safely than to move the infiltrator up. The second option was more expensive in terms of cost– the infiltrator was worth nearly twice as much, and losing her would cost me a valuable reactive toolset, but she would expend far fewer orders moving into position safely. Both would take a lot of focus on that turn, and success for either one was not guaranteed.

As a result, I focused on smaller wins first, to see how my turn would unfold. An apparently quick, easy set of small victories was more time-expensive (cost more orders) than expected, pushing me towards using the infiltrator. I debated scoring a valuable win (in the form of a secondary objective) right away, when I was less likely to be opposed, but I was concerned about being left open to a strong counterattack (in a mission where winning fights is key to victory) and had alternative options for securing that secondary objective in later turns. When I finally started committing the infiltrator, she was discovered almost immediately, forcing me to spend more orders moving troops around to cover her advance and allow her a stealthy approach. It wound up costing me almost as much time (orders) as using the other unit would have, but she was ultimately successful, whereas the other troop would likely not have been. Had I committed the other troop, I probably would have been stymied by various obstacles that the infiltrator was better equipped to handle, and I would have gotten fewer ancillary wins. It was also extremely valuable to focus on smaller wins first, so that I could ensure those were in hand before committing to the larger task.

I apply a lot of this same logic to my day-to-day. I know that I will need several hours to write a paper, and that I also need to run a handful of errands. If I wait to run the errands, they’re a lot more likely to get put off if I wait until the paper is done, and may not get done at all. It’s a quick way for me to get overwhelmed later by lots of little things adding up. Instead, I handle the smaller things first, the “quick wins”, so that they don’t pile up. Run to the bank, get lunch, pay a toll bill, clear out comment spam, send a couple of important e-mails. Maybe a couple hours’ worth of tasks, time that I *could* be spending on the paper, but it keeps my to-do list uncluttered.

I prioritize things based on the energy and time they take to do, and try to keep the total number of things I need to do down as much as possible. I keep track of little things that are nevertheless important to get done (and do them first), bigger things that require a larger time investment (do these once the smaller things are done, to ensure I’m doing that work with a clear head and no distractions), and other things that don’t require my attention right away. I finally picked up a TV remote this morning, while getting my car looked at, because it was a convenient time to get it done. It wasn’t a high priority (it’s been on my radar for months) but it was something I could get done in parallel with something else I was doing.

The less I know about how long it will take me to do something, the more I want to get that thing done last, after other tasks are complete. If I’m not distracted, I can more readily focus on involved tasks, and if it takes longer than expected to get done, I’m (usually) not sacrificing anything else. The nice part about it is that I can then adapt my planning to however long it takes to get things done, and prioritize based on what needs to happen that day. I’ve found that I very rarely have single large overwhelming tasks that are top priority– when they do come up, I can focus entirely on them because I don’t have a long task backlog (because I’ve complete tasks-of-opportunity all along the way).

It’s a system that works for me, and it keeps my day-to-day strategic planning organized and complete. I complete what I need to and don’t have to worry about “death by a thousand cuts”, and I very rarely forget to do things, because I get things done immediately as they crop up as opposed to waiting. To return to the Infinity example one last time, partway through one of my games this past weekend I noticed a nice set of opportunities– neither were part of my strategy for the turn, but they were valuable enough that I could deal with them immediately and return to my longer-term plan. Dealing with them made my long-term strategy easier and less stressful, and while it was a minor setback in terms of time, it brought me out ahead in the end.