Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S2 Ep125: VGBD - Immersion
75 Plays5 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they reluctantly stop playing the games they get lost in to talk about those games in this week's episode!
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Exploring New Beginnings and Storytelling
00:00:02
Speaker
There's no going back. You can't do it. If anyone pushes away a world that conspired to cause so much suffering, there's nothing to go back to and worse to look forward to. Why don't you join us? Maybe you two have a part to play in this story.
00:00:35
Speaker
Get the Saban kid laugh. I don't know. Maybe the ha ha ha ha. I mean, it doesn't sound, it's like 30 kids at once. Do you remember at the end of Power Rangers, the Saban laugh? I don't, I don't think, oh, they were the producer, right? The people that actually made it. Yes. Right. I didn't watch a lot of Power Rangers, to be honest. My parents probably thought they were evil.
00:01:03
Speaker
Yeah, fighting space demons sure seems pretty evil. They were very suspicious of most things. Speaking of most. Oh, sorry. No, we're already recording.
The Impact of Children's Laughter and Humor
00:01:16
Speaker
What? You can cut over much of this out that you want. It's all fine. I'll leave it in. Yeah, this is the natural. I'll let it still. Mm hmm.
00:01:28
Speaker
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There's still plenty of meat on that bone. Now you take this home, throw it in the pot, add some broth, a potato. Baby, you got it still going. How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of South Stone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? It was going better before I had the sound of child laughter in my head. Yeah, now there's a few things more disconcerting. Also, I had pasta for dinner, so I am
00:01:59
Speaker
Full. It's not converted into energy yet. Man, I started thinking about different instances where children's laughter is used to be unnerving. And there's kind of a lot, actually. Children are always used for being unnerving. Yeah, pasta is pretty good. Big cup.
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah, I have no segue way after that one. So hopefully you can direct us to a left turn or a right turn.
00:02:31
Speaker
Well, I mean, we do know, uh, two people in our friend group who will be having kids. That's true. One of them already has a kid and can be considered a greedy jerk. Uh-huh. I was going to say four people, if you count, if you count their people to having kids with. No. To be fair, it's only two people who are having the kids. Right. Two other people also have joint ownership. Right. They're co-signers or co-sponsors.
00:02:59
Speaker
Yeah. I wonder, has anyone ever? No, they, the joke has been used. If like you had a son named William or something, you're just like, Oh, I co-sponsored this bill. Yeah, it's pretty bad, but it's basically dad joke bed. So I would expect someone. This is what I get from like Alexa. Tell me a joke.
Themes of Childhood and Humor in Media
00:03:21
Speaker
Okay. We didn't set it off. Okay. But they're really bad. They're, they're eye rollers, if you will. Yeah.
00:03:31
Speaker
Yep. So anyways, this is the episode about kids. It's not, it's not though. What are your thoughts on kids? Don't have any. Do we have any good examples of kids and bad examples of kids? Amongst our friends, right? Let's dive in. Rate our friends, kids. Pass. I would like to, I would like to back up from this line of questioning.
Immersion in Video Games: An Introduction
00:03:57
Speaker
All right, yeah, so we'll review rating other people's offspring and instead talk about immersive video games, how important immersion is in games, what that can mean, because obviously that's hecka broad. And, you know, cite some cool examples, discuss how important we think it is. How important do you think immersion is?
00:04:21
Speaker
I want to make the shitty joke of the topic of immersion is as broad as a lady in the 1920s and then say, I feel it like a lot of things. It does depend. But if I want to be invested in a game, it needs to be immersive in some or multiple capacities. Like a lot of the games that I've really touted
00:04:46
Speaker
over the years and on podcast are things that have a decent enough degree of immersion. Because there'll be things that I will think about while I'm playing and then afterwards, I'll still think about it. I'll have fond memories. I'll remember experiences more so than just, remember that time I dodge rolled and then slapped him on the ass?
00:05:09
Speaker
Right. Yeah, I think it's we're going to be referencing a lot of games that we've referenced in the past. Surprise, surprise, because we've played the games that we've played. But there's a there's a really wide range for different ways you could qualify something here. So things that aren't even on the list, like something can be immersive just due to pulling you into an emotional moment. Let's define immersion. Sure.
00:05:37
Speaker
before we get to that list. Right. So my definition for immersion would be something that pulls you into the moment, pulls you into the gameplay. It keeps you focused on the game. And basically, the difference between me and my parents when it came to playing games is like, one, I'm good at video games, obviously, in my parents' time. But the other thing is,
00:06:06
Speaker
they would press buttons, right? Like they're holding the controller, pressing buttons consciously. That's the conscious part of it. I need to jump, therefore I'll press A. Whereas I think our generation and people who grew up playing games, we learn the controls and then we do things in the game, right? So immersion to me is something that is
Emotional and Visual Engagement in Gaming
00:06:29
Speaker
Keeping you in that headspace of being in the game Like a car across the street honked its horn and you didn't notice it because you're in the moment here But obviously that could be a lot of games so I'd say what immersion is not is if a game is just mechanics and You could be doing something on another monitor and
00:06:50
Speaker
or talking to friends on something else, that's anti-immersion to me. That's the opposite from my definition though. Take that cookie clicker. Does your definition vary from that at all? Probably not too much, but to just reword it for the sake of content anyway.
00:07:11
Speaker
Kind of harkening back to that initial statement that I made, it's something that I'm going to remember afterwards. Like I'm having experience in the game. Other things like outside stimuli do not affect you as much. And you're not thinking of the game as a game. You're not thinking, oh, I'm going to go collect the loot and press the buttons. You're just having an experience through the medium of a game. Right.
00:07:39
Speaker
So like big emotional impacts that I've had in gaming, like the death of Aerith in Final Fantasy 7, things in Undertale, some intense quest lines in Witcher 3. These are all things that like I was very focused on in the moment and just being there because I cared what happened to the characters in the events. Right.
00:08:04
Speaker
It's a certain level of investment. I'm beeping the boobs. I think that's probably a good way to think about it. Anything that takes you a little bit away from just the controls of what you're doing.
00:08:22
Speaker
And emotional aspects can be really strong for this. Like looking at the list here, might as well honestly start off with a really strong one, which I think hits immersion from a couple of different perspectives. I know what you're looking at. I know. You just, you see me scroll a little bit.
00:08:38
Speaker
I didn't see where your cursor is. I just took a guess. So Undertale is a place I actually think we could start on. Because if you think about graphical immersion, you can think about no HUD, audio immersion, things pulling you into the universe. Undertale is like a classic RPG.
00:09:05
Speaker
in its design, and you're specifically playing many of your games almost like WarioWare, but I'm curious what aspects of it you find immersive. What pulled you in for Undertale?
00:09:20
Speaker
I mean, it's definitely minimalist as far as the art style. Everybody knows that. So there's a certain quirkiness of that or it was just being unique at the time. So that was a level of interest in and of itself. Um, then I'm not going to reveal the whole story of my emotional investment at the time and where I was, but it did pull me in emotionally and I did grow to love the characters in the story and I gave a fuck about what happened. Um,
00:09:52
Speaker
And like all of the music was good and upbeat for when it was happy. It was intense for when it was like dire straits. Just the design of it suited the game. Nothing felt generic. Everything felt if you cared about like a given character and you had a boss fight, you're like, oh, this is definitely their fucking theme. Yeah.
00:10:18
Speaker
I think music is a really good touch point for this because on its own, the music is really good for Undertale. We listened to the OST for years after it came out. I still occasionally listen to the songs. That's another medium just a moment away in my memory.
00:10:38
Speaker
Um, but, uh, the way that the music pulled you into the moments, like these characters were really well written. Obviously we circle jerk about Toby Fox now, unceasingly. Um, Toby Fox. I like to call him. I haven't used that joke in two years.
00:10:59
Speaker
But the way that the writing is elevated by the music usage, like these characters themes, the high points, the low points. And together, neither of those things would be, I'm lost in this video game territory on their own. If there was no music,
00:11:19
Speaker
some of the highs and lows of the games would not have been nearly as impactful. But when you threw that all together in that package and you had it as polished as it was, I think Undertale stands out as something that doesn't traditionally get put in that immersive game box, but it earns it.
The Role of Audio in Game Immersion
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of those features are definitely complementary.
00:11:50
Speaker
I'm trying to think of an example of a game where it's a lot of those elements are not complimentary and they're probably not. They're probably not. What's the word I'm looking for? They're probably not blatantly not working together. They're just kind of there.
00:12:11
Speaker
Right. Oh, I can think of an example, actually. This is a little bit weird, but it was a minor controversy. We talked about it a little bit, but doom eternal.
00:12:21
Speaker
came out. And this is not a game that's on our list for immersive games, although it's still really cool. Recommend it still. But the audio mixing for the game was, I don't want to say done poorly, but there was a lot of issues with getting the composer and the team together and getting the tracks out on time. So it felt like
00:12:45
Speaker
It felt okay, but there was very few highs. There wasn't like, this is the track I'm going back to. I'm going to listen to this on repeat on the OST. And it wasn't as action-packed as the first Doom. And the game has all of those adrenaline-filled moments, but the OST never feels like it drives that.
00:13:06
Speaker
There's not that drop when you like cock the shotgun coming out of the elevator like in doom one. And that's the way audio could help immersion. And it didn't in this case for me, at least for doom eternal.
00:13:22
Speaker
syncing up music to game events is huge if you're trying to get someone invested immediately, if you want them to hit that dopamine peak. Seriously, all of the intro and outro edits that we do, we alternate week to week, but we love to be like, hey, other person who didn't do the edit, check out this cool edit, and you're like, oh, that's signed really cool. Because there is a,
00:13:49
Speaker
It just, it fits. Yes. You're like, that feels good. And just going off of that good feeling gets you invested, whether it be the podcast, please like and subscribe and share with your friends, please, or the game that you're playing. Yes.
00:14:04
Speaker
Another game that I think fucking kicked ass in like every aspect, but going off of the audio alone is Senua's. Right. Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice. There was an episode already, so I can't repeat everything, unfortunately. We would have a 10 hour long episode. I know. We really did the content for all these games.
00:14:26
Speaker
But just as far as the narrator dialogue, it's very quiet, whispery. You can hear the skull or send you a breathing and it kind of draws you in. If you have like somebody speaking quietly, they're not trying to get your attention. You have to seek it out. Yeah.
00:14:48
Speaker
So it kind of draws you in and like, hey, what's going on? And it's very up close. All of the graphics are really expressive for the character.
00:15:00
Speaker
I'm trying to think there wasn't any crazy standout track that would go back and listen to, but all of the audio really fit. The ambience. Yeah. It fits if it's a tense moment or action-packed. Everything about it was just very clean. The game tells you at the start, we recommend wearing headphones for this experience just because of the whispering in Senua's head.
00:15:26
Speaker
If that's not immersive, then I don't really know what is. It's like we literally tailored the mechanics to the hardware you're going to be using. It's ridiculously good. I mean, you can go back and check out our episode, but getting emotionally invested in the story
00:15:46
Speaker
sensory deprivation, making some of the boss fights really intense. One boss fight in particular, I'm again not going to go back to, so I don't have to spoil, put a spoiler disclaimer for this one. But like the game uses those mechanics frequently, visual and auditory balancing to highlight certain moments. And I think that's really cool. I feel like we're describing cool things, but there definitely is an overlap.
00:16:16
Speaker
If there's something you enjoy about a game and it's not simply gamified, I feel you can be immersed. So Mario, obviously a very gamey type game. Mario games are designed for the sense of it's family friendly, it's going to be fun to play. When we were talking about Odyssey the other week, it was just like a really fun fucking game and that was the goal of it.
00:16:43
Speaker
And it does feel very gamey, but in the same way, maybe like Paper Mario has enough world building or little jokes from like the Toads you find that draws you in. Yes. So it's really that hook factor or multiple hooks. If you're a pro fisherman like me, one hook at a time, ha.
00:17:06
Speaker
Double pulls over both shoulders. Here we go. Pulls a Kimbo. Yeah, I wouldn't actually classify Super Mario Odyssey as like an immersive game. Oh, no, definitely not. It's super fun. But fun doesn't necessarily translate one to one with immersion. There are immersive games.
00:17:32
Speaker
That I actively do not enjoy. Yes. And there's immersive games where if the immersion is lost or if a game is aiming to be immersive, but the immersion is lost, it actually reduces fun because part of it is some of that buy-in for the investment. An example I have here for that is
00:17:53
Speaker
Amnesia. Amnesia uses both audio cues, graphical cues, to put you in the shoes of someone who is haunted, basically,
Balancing Immersion and Efficiency in Games
00:18:06
Speaker
right? You're being chased down by these monsters. But you can't look at the monster. This is a form of visual sensory deprivation. At the same time, at one point, I was just fed up of being
00:18:20
Speaker
scared of the thing. I was like, I'll respawn. The game doesn't uninstall itself if I die. I'm going to look at it. And then I realized the model didn't look that good. And it kind of just stood there and then killed me. There was no dramatic death sequence or anything.
00:18:35
Speaker
It's like those flash games on Newgrounds where you're just like, ahh, slap. Right. You died. And in this case, losing that wall, that block where you can't see the monster significantly reduced my immersion of the game because I started to see the mechanics. I was like, oh, the monster will chase me under these conditions. I can't look at it because the game will go blurry because they realize that it becomes unscary if you look at it.
00:19:06
Speaker
Um, and I gamified it. And from that point on my speed run for amnesia improved dramatically because I didn't care about the monster anymore. Right.
00:19:18
Speaker
There's like a specific room in there where there's like three monsters. But you can book it to go to like an animation. Did you start doing things like that? Yeah, I think for a lot of them, the game is most impactful when you're hiding from the creatures and trying to sneak your way past. But it's not the most efficient way to play if you're trying to just see the credits.
00:19:46
Speaker
which you shouldn't be aiming for if you're playing a game like Amnesia anyways. But I mean, so question for you, because I do this a lot personally, how often do you try and gamify a game and try and like make it more efficient for your play through and be like, these are the mechanics I can abuse and will abuse to achieve a certain goal? It depends a lot on the game. I do it sometimes in response to stress. So like,
00:20:15
Speaker
In the case of amnesia, the game was scary. I didn't like being scared. So I wanted to confront that so I would no longer be scared. Um, admittedly, again, kind of ruins the game. Maybe I shouldn't be playing horror games. I can accept that criticism. Um, but other times, you know, I'll listen to audio logs. I'll read books. I'll do whatever. I don't have to be, um, always in a rush.
00:20:43
Speaker
you know, or turning it down to base mechanics. I don't make spreadsheets for every game despite the rumors. Comma anymore. I have refined my gameplay to a socially acceptable state. I would probably be in a similar camp and I would almost argue that the games that I don't either A explicitly do not allow it in any fashion or B I don't want to because of the immersion. Right.
00:21:13
Speaker
Mm hmm. Like if I'm in it, I'm in it. You can set the fucking rules. You can write my entire lore. You can have like this whole pre-destiny set out for me. I will confide to the game universe and just live in it. Yeah. But if there's something I don't like or something I want to cheese. Hello, Divinity Original Sin 2. I love the game. I will break you. Right.
00:21:41
Speaker
No, that's entirely fair. And I do the same thing sometimes. Go for an optimized run.
00:21:49
Speaker
just be like, all right, this is enough time to become broken and overpowered and we're going to force your way through this. Um, is there the other question I had to kind of loosely queued up, is there one aspect of immersion you think works better either in general or for you specifically, whether that's through like auditory, um, visually or just like an emotional hook?
00:22:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think visuals may be... I think emotion is the strongest one for me, because even some of these... I was going to talk about Subnautica at one point. Some of the reasons that that game is super immersive to me is not because you're covered in water. We made that joke back in Subnautica. Submerged in immersion.
00:22:39
Speaker
Um, but, uh, the feeling of isolation, right? When you're underwater, which is a common fear for a lot of people is being in deep water. Um, you feel isolated. You're playing a single player game in this case. Uh, if you're far from your base, which feels like your point of safety, you can be concerned for what's out there. Um, and.
00:23:05
Speaker
That does, it does raise the cortisol levels does make me a bit stressed. But I think that, um, that also gets me engaged in what's going on. Um, and I pay myself sometimes cause it's freaking scary game, but in some Nautica, like the difference is, um, you were talking about gamifying something.
Graphics and Their Impact on Gaming Experience
00:23:27
Speaker
If you know all the solutions, like the map doesn't change dramatically between some Nautica runs. There's some minor variance in your drop pod.
00:23:36
Speaker
But if you know where things are, the game is actually significantly less scary. Like, knowledge is the difference between where you start and where you end, for the most part in Subnautica.
00:23:50
Speaker
I think emotion is my answer and I'm using subnautica pinned into the answer. It looks, looks at voice bar. Okay. Um, do you have, I suspect the answer would probably be emotional for you too. Oh yeah. I'm a big feelsy, big feelsy guy. Um, I mean you were recommended Undertale to me. So like,
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah. Only you and nobody else. Um, but I feel like so auditory stuff, like we use seniors as an example, definitely draws you in. Right. But as far as like the music side of that, I feel like it's really good for punctuating certain events. Right. Again, abusing Undertale as an example here, when you fight Undyne and you have her theme pop off for the fucking boss fight, you're like, Oh shit, it's going down and it feels really good. Um,
00:24:49
Speaker
And like that bomb bass really excites you. Yeah. But I've never had a game that was so musically good or I'm like, this is the sole reason I'm playing it. Mm hmm.
00:25:00
Speaker
So like super giant games in general, obviously the music is kick ass. Obviously the art styles kick ass visually too. Yeah. But it's the story and the character writing and how their dialogue sounds. If they have dialogue or if it's just a narrator, that's what draws me in. It's the storytelling aspect. Gotcha. Like the world building and thoroughness of it.
00:25:24
Speaker
Yeah, by the way, do you know how much fucking content is in Hades? Jesus Christ. It's a lot. It's a lot. And it's great. I don't think Jesus was one of the Greek gods, though. I think that's a conflation of deeds. Oh, you should get his boon. It is. It is OP. If you die, you just come back. That's pretty good. It's easy peasy. You actually always have that boon in Hades. It's just you come back at the beginning without all your stuff.
00:25:50
Speaker
Also, they don't tell you this. You can literally just throw thunderbolts. You just choose not to. Right. No, that's fair. I think I'm a little surprised our lists didn't contain any Supergiant games. Maybe it's because we've talked about them. It feels like we talked about them a lot. But they are a perfect example of making entirely immersive worlds that don't depend on the mechanics whatsoever to attain that immersion.
00:26:19
Speaker
Yeah. Pyre being in a fucking example, everyone's thrown by the basketball mechanic. Yeah. But what you remember are the characters and their style of speaking.
00:26:29
Speaker
Yeah. It's like a visual novel, really. Yeah. I'm saying like, if you use something like Animal Crossing, each different character has their own kind of mumble speech. Right. And in Pyre, they also have like their own kind of language and not actual words, a certain sound and style to them, which gives them like a persona. Yeah. Yeah. And their own voices.
00:26:55
Speaker
No, it's really true. They clearly put a lot of effort into getting you invested in that. Recently it came up that we were talking about on the side that if there's like a proper noun or something, rather than just defining what it is in the context every time, you can always just mouse over
00:27:15
Speaker
the text will be like bolded in a certain color and you can just mouse over it and see the definition. It just pops up. So you never like are going through these lore books and codexes and stuff like that to figure out what everything means. You can just stay in the game, stay in the conversation, be like, oh, I don't quite remember what that is. Mouse over. Pardon me. OK, I'm good. You know, just like that.
00:27:38
Speaker
Yeah, it definitely feels weird to ever have to look something up. Something a lot of games will do will give you these audio logs. I think we've talked about the good example being something like Bioshock. You pick one up, it's like, how do you want to play it? So you can just listen to it while you walk around and the audio stays with you.
00:27:57
Speaker
versus anyways, hey, touch the shrine. It's going to start playing some audio. Don't walk too far, though. It's it's location based. Yes, they kind of do the the Batman hand up to the earpiece thing a little bit where you're like, all right, I get that you don't want me to progress while this is going on. So we don't overlap audio cues. It just feels weird.
00:28:22
Speaker
Borderlands isn't on our list, but they're the opposite of that. They have the opposite issue. The immersion's broken for me. Um, not because the world's completely ridiculous, Pandora's completely ridiculous, but because I could be listening to someone talk to me in real time, like over the radio or whatever, they're telling me a mission, um, instructions. And then someone else will just interrupt them. And that dialogue will play over the whole thing. Like,
00:28:50
Speaker
Audio mixing is important, right? And it can really help or harm immersion in a game. As somebody who's quote unquote mixed audio before, being able to hear both people at similar levels so you're not missing dialogue is pretty key. Yeah, no, it's very true.
00:29:15
Speaker
And we've thankfully never made any missteps in our audio mix. Literally never. Perfect. Between this episode and episode one, the same. No. Yeah. Consistent is the one word to describe us, I think.
00:29:31
Speaker
Really just, I want to touch one more point on audio real quick. Yeah. Because we've got Fallout on here. And without jumping into everything that is Fallout, I just want to tackle one aspect that they use for immersion. And you have the option when you're playing the new Fallout games, anything past two, to turn on a radio. And there's usually a couple of radios offered that play old style music.
00:29:57
Speaker
like Adam Adam on Baby, Uranium Fever, all this stuff. I don't want to set the world on fire. Like all of these songs that are super great set the tone and immersion for a light hearted wasteland slaughter fest romp.
00:30:16
Speaker
that shows up in their trailers like when they have trailers for fallout they're almost always set to these these tracks that get you a pace for the game but you can contrast all of that to
00:30:32
Speaker
what happens if you turn those radios off, in which case the ambient music kicks in and it's always haunting, slow, it's got like synth and stuff, it's really like kind of subtle and it makes you feel more isolated, alone, not like you're gonna be a mass murderer wiping out all these raiders and it makes it feel like a wasteland as opposed to like your own personal playground.
00:30:58
Speaker
Um, that's a cool toggle. I will say a lot of those songs definitely still make it feel very, I'm going to kind of like slowly play my banjo and shoot stuff along the way, like a slower pace exploration rather than running around murder rampage or something like border lands. Right. Yeah. New. Yeah.
00:31:22
Speaker
I can't say I've played much of the Fallout series. And to my credit, I think it's for good reason. It's also just never really appealed to me. I would love to disagree, but it's hard to pick a Fallout game that's both still playable and wouldn't be a terrible experience because of hardware and graphics and things like that.
Soundscapes and Immersion in Gameplay
00:31:47
Speaker
I think I just missed the boat.
00:31:49
Speaker
Yeah. The only one that's really modern playable, that's still recommendables like fallout for, and it's not really the classic fallout experience. So I'm, I'm not bitter. Is there anything else you think would stand out for audio or would you want to jump into visual immersion? Oh, just that ambience makes a huge difference.
00:32:20
Speaker
Like one thing I always notice people do in video games if given the option is the run around, jump around and hit stuff a lot. So when you don't have any feedback from those, it feels really weird.
00:32:36
Speaker
copying off of Mandalore Gaming who does really good gaming reviews on YouTube a lot of times. Oh, of course. We'll always talk about the sound mixing of just some ambient things. And he's using the forest as an example in the forest review, where you hear the grass. When you're chopping down a tree,
00:32:59
Speaker
You hear the chop. You hear the wood fall. You hear the wood when you pick it up. You hear like the natives run around barefoot. And it's like these elements make it feel more realistic. So having those in good quality and spacing them out correctly is... Yeah, we talked a lot about like music, but just sound effects are equally as important. It's weird to have like really good music and then badoing. And you're like...
00:33:29
Speaker
Like some of that Saturday morning radio hose type sounds. Yeah, right. They have their sound board off to the side. Just roll face on sound board. Right. All of the sign build sounds go off at the same time. Crazy Carl. Oh, that's very true. It's completely true. As are all things that I say.
00:33:55
Speaker
I actually have one I want to mention before going too much into graphics and how immersive they can be. This is the anti case. This is a shitty example. This is a great example because it sets up immersion through deprivation, which we mentioned a little bit earlier. But in other waters, which we talked about a while back, I played it, I bought it and played it.
00:34:21
Speaker
And I don't know if I full recommend it because it's one of those not game games, but the not game game aspect of it is You just remotely control where this person is going You don't see what they see you just have like sensor data up on your screen like basic like
00:34:42
Speaker
knobs and levers, essentially, for what you're doing in the game. And then just like a text readout for what the diver you're assisting is what she's saying. And
00:34:57
Speaker
This takes away all of that. It's like you don't have audio. If something like surprises her, you don't hear her like scream or do anything like that. Right. Yeah. You don't get any of that. You don't get to see the enemies. You just see like, oh, here's there's a dot and it's coming toward us. You're like, all right, let's go back. Let's turn this thing around.
00:35:15
Speaker
Beware Janet, the dots. Right. In a weird way, even though this is anti-immersion because you're not seeing or hearing any of this, it can generate suspense immersion because
00:35:32
Speaker
It's like you have a radio, like a walkie talkie, and you're guiding someone through a process. And you're not focused on what you're looking at. You're trying to inject as much meaning into this walkie talkie as you can to help them out of their situation, which gets you invested in the moment, at least, even if the other immersive aspects aren't there.
00:35:54
Speaker
Hmm. I don't think that would play a part of like just being on the other side of it, not being able to directly influence. Yeah. I think the other piece to steal a quote from community is in the same way I can name this pencil Jerry, break it in half and a small part of you dies because it's easy to project of like, oh, that's a thing. I care about the thing. Right. Even though like it could be a fucking dot. Right. Exactly.
00:36:25
Speaker
Human psychology is fascinating. Yeah, it's crazy.
00:36:30
Speaker
Is there anything else here that stands out you want to talk about from an immersive perspective? We actually have a much more lighthearted slash maybe shallow example in crisis for graphical immersion. This is probably like the level one. If we actually ordered our steps, this would have been like the initial stare to talk about immersion. But we do know such thing.
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, it was for the time crisis was supposed to be very realistic. But I've never had a machine that could run it. I think your machine your machine now could. Well, yeah, now, but I'm not gonna pick it up now. But when I first got it as a kid in high school, and I was like, Oh, I have enough disk space to install it. Let me do that. And then I did. And then I was
00:37:24
Speaker
Do you remember having like a fucking dial up connection and trying to load a picture on Google? Yeah. Like it started to like load blocks from the top. That's basically how it was for the first mission. You jump out of a helicopter.
00:37:40
Speaker
And every five seconds, my character would drop another foot or so. I'm like, oh, it's coming. All right. I will reach the ground. So that was just a hardware disparity. But having really good graphics or something like that, really without an extensive HUD, makes you feel in the moment of like, oh, I'm James Bond running around shooting people or on this special agent running around shooting people.
Visual Style and Game Longevity
00:38:06
Speaker
I just really want to run around and shoot people, apparently.
00:38:10
Speaker
I have a specific example for this one, for Crysis. Because I couldn't play it when it first came out either, but eventually I got a better graphics card, and then I was able to play it on medium or something. But it was one of the first games that had water that looked absolutely amazing. Bioshock, obviously, is another great example of this.
00:38:33
Speaker
But I ran through like a pool of water and it was just kind of like pouring off the face and stuff like that. I'm like, holy crap, this looks so freaking good. And I don't know, just everything about it was so graphically impressive when it came out. I watch videos on YouTube of just here's a million barrels stacked up in a skyscraper and we'll just blow the whole thing up.
00:38:58
Speaker
like just massive explosion and the guy had to render it out like frame by frame and then just in post bump it up to like 30 frames per second so you could watch it. And it was just it was just crazy like how cool everything looked.
00:39:17
Speaker
And on its own, usually that's not enough for me. Like graphics are great, but it stood out because they were so it doesn't need to drive the game. But going back to something like gunfire, gunfire was really stylized in a cartoony fun way. I enjoyed it. Right. But there's definitely a gamey aspect to it versus if it was something that was very realistic. Mm hmm.
00:39:43
Speaker
I might have a different experience entirely. I might be more immersive, but I might not enjoy it as much from like a, let me hop on, do like a quick run type thing. Yeah, I think it's really rare. Like I actually would probably prefer cartoon graphics more often because they don't age as much. And you don't feel like these people were trying for realism. And now by today's standards, they have missed.
00:40:10
Speaker
the characters in Crysis looked significantly worse, even though they were massively impressive when they came out, than the characters in The Last of Us 2. There's been massive, they're obviously different games, but there's been massive leaps, so I haven't had another experience, I think,
00:40:33
Speaker
That's not true. We recently talked about Detroit and I literally told you about a fight where I was like, I think this is just a prerecorded looping actual video clip because it looks so good. But those moments are rare for me. It's rare that a game takes me in just because of the graphics.
00:40:52
Speaker
But at least with something like Detroit, the difference between active gameplay and cutscene, there's such a small difference. Yeah. It's not like a fucking Final Fantasy X, right? You have your in-game, and then you have your pre-rendered cutscene. You're like, dear God, it looks beautiful. But then when you come out of that, you're like, back to being polygon boy. Yep.
00:41:17
Speaker
I mean, Final Fantasy 7, there was the similar thing. It was literally fucking polygons, but when he had those cool cut scenes, you're like, Jesus Christ. Sephiroth's in the flames? That's intense. And it looked real for the time. Cloud Ghost for being an anime character to like polygon per hand. That's literally it. Yeah. Yeah. It's more so like,
00:41:45
Speaker
If you have a set style on something, even if it's not the best graphically, if it's consistent, it helps a lot more with immersion than if you have something that's kind of jumping back and forth between. Right. Because it really is jarring, I think. Yeah.
00:42:04
Speaker
And, uh, yeah, we've covered several titles where they, their consistency helped them out with, um, pulling you into the universe. Undertale. Undertale and crisis is probably going to be the only time I have a comparison between those two games. They're basically the same. Um, another one I wanted to mention from graphics perspective, did you play like any of the elder scrolls back in the day? I definitely played some three, which I think is Morrowind.
00:42:36
Speaker
Did some skooma, didn't really know much of what I was doing, but I did find a- After some skooma, that's pretty normal. I did find a cheat to heal, so I would go fight obsidian guards, pause, put in the heal cheat, and then I think I stole some stuff. I didn't do too much in that game. Missed Oblivion entirely, and then played one of the 17 editions of Skyrim, most of the way through.
00:43:00
Speaker
Yeah, the main quest is entirely optional in Skyrim. So I have never done it. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the one I had picked out was Oblivion, actually, even though I put more time into Skyrim because it's statistically. Yeah. Yeah. I played like three editions, all of them on PC at this point. Like, oh, the 64 bit edition better pick that one up.
00:43:29
Speaker
But I still remember in Oblivion, and it must have been a similar experience in Morrowind, when you escape the prison in Oblivion, because up until that point, you're all in these pretty constrained locations. And it feels like relatively, there's some branching locations, but it's like linear for the most part.
00:43:55
Speaker
And then you make it out of the prison and you're just like, all right, now that we're out of the sewer, here's a river in front of you and some ruins beyond and the whole open world and the music kicks in. Going back to that. You thought we were going to pass music. We're not. And the whole moment of just
00:44:17
Speaker
This is graphically super impressive. I don't know why I thought that, but at the time, that must have been closer to truth. The music's dropped and I just stood there. I was like, crap. My frames per second are garbage. So I had to go get a mod called Old Oblivion that turned off all of the shadows.
00:44:36
Speaker
and desaturated everything and it made the game playable on like integrated graphics. Some of you didn't have a discrete graphics card. But even then, the world building and like those series drew me in more than anything. It's impossible to talk about immersive games from my perspective and not mention Elder Scrolls.
00:45:00
Speaker
Yeah, it definitely falls under that space. Another part of that is the game persistence. So if I left some bodies somewhere and I come back, there's still going to be those bodies there. If I piss off some town guards, they're still going to be really pissed. So it's not like you just go up. It's not an instant space thing. There's solely one game universe that you're in. And what you do has impact.
00:45:28
Speaker
Yeah, whether that's an undertale and you killed a character, cough, looking at you, Gennaro, or if you pissed off some guards or you dug something up in Minecraft.
Player Impact and World Dynamics in Games
00:45:42
Speaker
Yeah. Having your impact last in a game carries so much more because you have direct control over it. You're not just sitting through an experience, which in and of itself can be like a very immersive experience.
00:45:56
Speaker
But having a layer of tactility onto it, of I directly impact and change the outcome of the game. Right. A huge hoof. So for Oblivion, for me, it was this combination of all this stuff. Graphically impressive. Music was awesome. And like a fully fleshed out world I could just live in for hundreds of hours. Right. Like.
00:46:24
Speaker
That is, to me, some of the definition of traditional immersion.
00:46:30
Speaker
Had to, had to get a place in here, I think. Definitely. I will, I will always take pieces of the cheesecake. Like you can have, like I like graham crackers. So having them as a crust on its own, I would just eat graham crackers. Cool. Cheesecake. Fucking love cheesecake. Right. Strawberries. They're great on their own too. But when you have them all together and they're fucking complimentary and they make this cohesive, bad bitch. Fucking love it.
00:47:01
Speaker
And I'm sure a lot of games that people are thinking of that we haven't mentioned that they had their own experiences with, they feel the same way of I felt a part of the game world through the world building, the storytelling, the characters and their interactions. Oh, this guy made a quip? That's so him. And the music and sound effects going on in the world that bring you into the universe.
00:47:29
Speaker
Yeah, like for a book, a book standpoint, how do you make a reader give a fuck about somebody? You have to relate it to them. You have to flesh out the character and their world so that you can actually imagine what it is. Yeah. Otherwise, it's me just being like, hey, Jake, so this guy goes into the drugstore to get some coffee and eggs because the drugstore also has that. And you're like, uh-huh. Right.
00:47:59
Speaker
You're like, and he was a podcast listener and I'm like, Oh no, what happens to the guy? Meanwhile, I'm like, it's time to play the music. I know you're not, you're going to play.
00:48:14
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. The full experience really brings it together. We have like a couple full experience games on our list. I mean, Deus Ex for me. I mean, you can mention any fucking interactive sin like that. I'm like, we there. It's another great example outside of Bioshock of. It's about the character dialogue and the choices you have in the game. Yeah. And the things you do having impact, but it having a badass sound score.
00:48:44
Speaker
Are you thinking particularly of like human revolution? Yes, I'm never going to go back and say the first one ever. I still have to go back and officially beat it for Ian's sake.
00:48:57
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not going to go into spoilers. Different entries in the Deus Ex series definitely take the idea of actual consequences for your actions differently. But as a whole, the series does it significantly more as it is in Immersive Sim, right? Yeah. Than other things. Do you think decision impact assists or kind of detracts from immersion for yourself? I think as long as the decision actually
00:49:27
Speaker
Have we crapped on telltale yet this episode? Not this episode. It's going to happen. I think if done right, then it can really enhance it. I've literally had points in games where they're like, hey, do you save the school? This is a theoretical example, but it's a standard. Do you save the school bus full of kids or do you get like plus 10 to your health pool? And I'm like, oh, geez. I mean,
00:49:53
Speaker
10 health, you know, it's not always that it's not always like when if a game is like evil or greater evil or like personal evil or public evil. Yeah. I've had to stop like take a step back a little bit and be like.
00:50:11
Speaker
I really want to Google what the results of these choices are and I'm not going to because of ethics. And then I Google them. But until that moment, I'm still in there. It's an interesting split because.
00:50:31
Speaker
I never necessarily want to pay for my actions in that way. You don't want consequences? I don't. I mean, I don't think anybody does. They want to play a game for fun. What was something like Telltale? It's like, hey, do you piss off this person or this person? And you're like, I don't want to piss off either. But you're put in this lose-lose situation.
00:50:55
Speaker
Sometimes you just go to try things out. I really like when it's not a forced decision. So going back to the Skyrim example, if I steal and get caught by the guards, I completely opted into that situation. I said, I want to take personal gain over my relationship with this town and the guards, right? Right.
00:51:22
Speaker
But it's not like them giving you a piece of candy or money and it's like, which do you choose? Which would be a forced decision. So having that agency and being punished for that doesn't take me out of it because I had the freedom to do
Character Connection and Emotional Investment
00:51:41
Speaker
so. You opted into the risk.
00:51:43
Speaker
Yeah, as opposed to just choose the lesser two evils, but pick an evil, right? Yeah. But if you pick something like that where, oh, this character is probably gonna have negative consequences, and then it's just not negative consequences, that feels more like a TV show to me.
00:52:04
Speaker
These two characters fought to the death, but one of them left with a scratch on their cheek. If you're going to have this game universe and you want me to be invested in it, and you're giving me a dire choice like that with dire consequences, let it play out.
00:52:25
Speaker
I know we usually talk about video games, but this whole thing is making, reminding me of the last D&D session we had, where the players chose to teleport across the map into the path.
00:52:39
Speaker
of an immensely powerful dragon. And I'm like, if you do this, I'll give you inspiration, which is just like a care on a stick, basically, like I'm trying to lure them over the edge to their deaths. And the care on the stick is right there. And it also is just high drama and interesting. That's the real reason to give it.
00:52:57
Speaker
Um, but they almost freaking died. Like they, you know, tactically, it was a very all in strategy to just, it sounds like jump straight to the dragon leaving most of the party behind. Um,
00:53:14
Speaker
And due to some disaster management on their part, they survived it. But just like you said, they measured the risk. They took the risk. I'd like to believe they would have been okay paying for the risk, but they found a way out. But that makes the world more interesting when you have the control to make decisions like that.
00:53:39
Speaker
I would agree. In Telltale games, choose which of these people dies, which one lives. The other person is almost guaranteed to die by the end of the chapter because from a technical perspective, they didn't want that person living through the rest. Right. Yeah. Which is why I like the David Cage version better, where it's, hey, here's some things you could do and then you can go and do them or choose not to. Yeah. And you still have consequences for those. But
00:54:09
Speaker
But you're not in control of everything. It pushes you off in a direction, and then you can kind of choose what to do from there. Certain parts are more linear, but you still have a lot of options. Yeah. I'm glad we hit on this. The impact of choice and immersion wasn't one of the planned points here, but it's an important one, I think.
00:54:34
Speaker
It's also without talking about any spoilers whatsoever. This is just an inside joke, maybe not a joke, but inside reference for people who listen to the podcast or have played the game. But everything we just talked about, just think about that. And then the Last of Us part two.
00:54:52
Speaker
Other games you talk about is Breath of the Wild. No, no, no. Hold on. Shut the hell up for a sec. Not Last of Us 2 specifically, but Last of Us as a series. All right. Can we say that? Yes.
00:55:10
Speaker
Another good example of you kind of made to give a fuck about the characters. You're in these tense situations to also build that emotional connection. Right. You have this kind of ambient wasteland where things are very bleak, but a little bit hopeful.
00:55:30
Speaker
And that was just a, I mean, the game gets points all around as it has for many years. But as far as immersion, I gave a fuck about that game. And when I finished that game, I felt shook, which doesn't happen a lot where I'll have an emotional response from a game. Dual shock, baby. God, that was the best joke.
00:56:02
Speaker
I agree. I agree entirely. And I think part of that is because even though that game does not really give you plot choices, for the most part, like things happen in cut scenes.
00:56:17
Speaker
Things tend to not happen that are wildly disparate from what you yourself may be experiencing emotionally or considering happening if one of the protagonists takes that course. It's not something that you're gonna be at a right angle with their decision. So you're like, I am now removed from the experience because this person I'm controlling.
00:56:38
Speaker
is not a stand-in for me here. I can't empathize with what they're doing. I'm now controlling the puppet and then the puppet just goes off on a murder spree, right? Like when they want. So real quick, kind of an inside joke for the podcast listeners. I won't spoil anything.
00:56:56
Speaker
Uh-huh. Last of us, part two. Sorry to continue. Yeah, right. So, yeah, I mean, I think the first one handled that a little bit better. And if, as a general concept, if you have characters doing things, you, the player, do not want to do, it can be either off-putting or entirely remove you from the experience because you lose, like you were mentioning earlier, you lose that connection. Exactly. With the character.
00:57:25
Speaker
What do you have in common with this person in this story in order to keep me reading? You still need to maintain that in a video game as well Yeah, so there's not any specific. Oh, this is the one thing to make a game immersive There are many different angles to go about it but it's some way to like put hooks into a person to pull them into the Story or the universe of the game and keep them invested and make them give a fuck
Personal Preferences and Immersive Experiences
00:57:56
Speaker
Maybe you don't show all of the menus. You don't go over the top with that.
00:58:02
Speaker
Maybe you have the music kind of fit the scenery. Maybe you focus on dialogue and not have people say random dumb shit that doesn't fit their character or the universe. I don't know. Maybe it's a lot of these things pieced together and it will depend between myself and Jake or anybody else. What for them makes for good immersion.
00:58:27
Speaker
But usually find a game that does a really good job at it will attract multiple groups of people. Yeah, I'd like to believe so.
00:58:39
Speaker
Hopefully Pyre sold well. This is my takeaway. That would be the test, right? If being immersive is enough to bump sales, Pyre will have sold well. I mean, there's definitely a time for it. There are times I don't necessarily always feel that I'm in the mood for something. Sometimes they're like a mindless game.
00:59:00
Speaker
like Minecraft or Path of Exile or if I'm just autopilot and doing Hades runs, that's still fun for me too. But if I want to get into a single player experience, that's something we didn't actually touch on as we're coming up on time. Do you think good immersion is solely for a single player experience?
00:59:23
Speaker
I don't think it's solely for a single player experience, but single player has a multiplier on it, and it's a hefty multiplier. So any mechanics and systems that you're building together into a single player game to try to make things immersive usually work better in a single player game.
00:59:46
Speaker
look back over all the titles we talked about, how many of those would have had the immersion reduced if it was a multiplayer? Skyrim would have been obliterated because somebody would stab the NPC I'm talking to in the back. Senua would have another person whispering in here instead of just your own psychosis. It's hard to
01:00:13
Speaker
Having multiple people in a game pushes a certain type of feeling and pacing for the game. Yeah, it literally needs to be like a co-op. You are relying on the other person. Right. You can't have two P1s. You can't have two main characters, I think. It's like, we go back to divinity a lot. Divinity is the closest thing, I think, to legitimately pulling off
01:00:40
Speaker
being able to share a narrative and a multiplayer experience with a lot of world building and RPG elements and not sacrificing a ton to get there. Even then, the game is more immersive, I think, in single player, but not more fun. So why do you play games? You know, that's true. No, that's actually a really good example. Divinity didn't show up to my mommy, but that does pull it off. Yeah.
01:01:10
Speaker
It's, it's an outlier. It's actually a really good showing that they were able to do that. Hopefully Baldur's Gate three. Yeah. It's an early access. People are, I think when we started recording, people started someone messaged us in the discord being like, Hey, what do you guys think about it? To answer you when you listen to the podcast later on Sunday, uh, probably going to hold off until after early access.
01:01:41
Speaker
though I've heard good things. Yeah, that's freaking immersion though. You guys have been immersed in our voices for a bit. Thank you for listening, for taking part in the auditory part of the podcast and what immersion you can derive from that. If you would like to immerse yourself in our subculture,
01:02:04
Speaker
Uh, you could do so by sending us your feedback at soapstone podcast at gmail.com or you could join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. They're all good people there. I think I've talked to a few of them. I could vouch for them. I don't think there's sauce. I think they're good sauce as always.
01:02:30
Speaker
We'll see you in the next one. Not if I see you first. I don't want to set the world on fire I just want to start a flame in your heart
01:02:58
Speaker
In my heart I have but one desire And that one is you No other will do I've lost all ambition
01:03:22
Speaker
A worldly acclaim I just want to be the one you love And with your admission that you feel the same I'll have reached the goal I'm dreaming of Believe me, I don't want to set the world on fire