We must go deeper: gaming industry and the quest for immersion
The first computers were created for utilitarian purposes, but since there is nothing we won’t do to avoid boredom, they also paved the way for the creation of a new entertainment industry. About fifty years later, video games represent an important part of mainstream popular culture, having published significant works of art, launched lucrative franchises, and moving enough money in its finances to rival Hollywood. Gaming is, in many ways, still an emerging field, but with the potential to be as defining to our times as filmmaking has been for the 20th century. Of course, by virtue of its origin, no other entertainment branch is as tightly linked to “common”, accessible technological advancements. The greatest annual event of the industry (the Electronic Entertainment Expo aka E3) not only showcases upcoming releases of major game developers, but hardware advancements – on a yearly basis. Gaming tech is developing rapidly, and major efforts in these developments have always focused on furthering the one advantage games have over any other forms of media: immersion.
Immersion, defined quite drily, is “a perception of being physically present in a non-physical world”. Less drily, if we consider escapism to be the point of entertainment, then it might be the peak form of escapism: becoming a different person in a different world. Good fiction strives to be immersive, but video games, due to their interactive nature, have an edge in this. You always control the actions of an avatar; you always have a medium to affect your agency on the world of the game. The more impactful one’s agency feels, the more immersive a game is. However, the medium that separates player and avatar will always be there – or will it?
Hardware innovation in the gaming industry has been trying to eliminate this barrier for years now – with varying degrees of effectiveness. A few years back – think 2009 – the buzzword all over the gaming scene has been “motion controls”. Nintendo has released its Wii console, and it felt incredibly futuristic. I myself remember encountering a Wii for the first time: I was about 12, and it was over at the flat of a friend whose tech-savvy father managed to acquire a console from abroad quite early. I’ve never been a sporty kid, but I couldn’t have been more delighted to play a simulated game of tennis: it really felt like jumping ahead into the future, holding a controller in my hand, waving it around like a tennis racket, and seeing the cartoonish figure react on the screen in tandem with my movement. I wasn’t the only one dazzled by the console’s capabilities: the press coverage on motion controls in general sounded incredibly optimistic on what possibilities these miracle machines have opened up. Other major hardware developers followed in Nintendo’s footsteps: Microsoft has brought out the Kinect, Sony introduced the PlayStation Move. However, if we take a look at the hardware market today, motion controls have failed to become the widespread innovation they hoped to be, and only a handful of software offers motion control compatibility. What happened?
What happened is that game journalism failed to do its job properly. Journalism in this field is oversaturated with shills, and thus, on aggregate, is mostly incredibly uncritical of major developers (this allows devs to ride uncritical waves of hype to success, and its utter lack of ethics might be the topic of a future post). Motion controls were indeed a fun development, but due to an almost complete lack of physical feedback, motion controls ended up not enhancing, but breaking immersion. Simply put, if your avatar’s hand is supposed to rest on a flat surface, it will be somewhat off-putting to have your hand raised in the air, with no physical support. These sort of minor annoyances all eventually added up and, coupled with the difficulty of developing for motion sensors resulted in the gimmick’s loss in popularity.
But if there is one thing that fuels the games industry, it’s cycles of hype: if motion controls were not the way to go, where else could we turn?
Enter VR.
Ever since computer-generated worlds became a concept, fiction writers have played with the idea of a computer simulating an entire world altogether. Early works in this topic include Gibson’s Neuromancer or Stephenson’s Snow Crash (which proved itself to be eerily good at predicting what sort of technologies we’ll be developing in the future, inspiring the creation of both Wikipedia and Google Earth). Snow Crash especially discusses virtual reality through the concept of the Metaverse: a piece of virtual landmass, accessible via network connection, which is important enough to warrant its own “real”-estate market. And, of course, you accessed the Metaverse via donning a special set of goggles.
This all might sound incredibly familiar if you’ve ever seen an Oculus Rift or any of its competitors. Virtual Reality headsets, as opposed motion controls, don’t change the control scheme of a game too much. However, they do bring the game world closer to you – the distance between you and the game is physically reduced. Moreover, the headset does account for your movements, allowing you to look around in first person, and observe the game as if you really were a part of it. Additionally, some forms of motion control can be incorporated into these experiences as well – although the wisdom of blindly stumbling around in a room can perhaps be debated.
VR is not without its drawbacks, though. For example, extended use of the headsets is known to cause nausea, which is something of an issue when the recommended length of a gaming session is usually somewhere between two to three hours. We, however, seem not to have learned from our mistakes, and the hype train rides on without much disturbance, criticism frequently drowned out by the cheering masses.
I don’t mean to sound like a spoilsport here. Ultimate immersion sounds as much fun to me as to anyone else. However, I can’t help but think that the point of escapism is very much to escape our physical constraints as well. Thus, I don’t think immersion is merely a question of hardware. One of my favourite games critics, Yahtzee Croshaw, once proposed that immersion is enhanced the most if the control scheme of the game is so intuitive that it effectively functions as an extension for your own nervous system. And, honestly, the most immersed I have ever been in a game has not been through any sort of fancy hardware, but sitting behind my own screen, controlling my character in Dishonored, jumping off rooftops and performing physical feats I never could, using very fine-tuned controls.
Hardware advancements will always be difficult to introduce, and I’m not sure the most of us would want to strap ourselves into overly complicated rigs to play our favourite games. In contrast, a well-crafted game can draw you in just by how great it just “feels” to play it. Perhaps the industry’s focus should be less on cluttering our living rooms with more and more advanced software, but on crafting more involving experiences – harder may that be to sell at E3.
But, hey, hell do I know, I’m just a nerd with an internet connection.