Games and Video Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 27

Players become immersed in games in several ways:
■ Tactical immersion is the sense of being “in the groove” in high-speed action
games. It's sometimes called the Tet r is trance . When playing such a game, the
action is so fast that your brain has no time for anything else. You don't have time
to think about strategy or a story line; the game is mostly about survival. To encourage
tactical immersion, you must offer the player dozens of small challenges that can
each be met in a fraction of a second. These small challenges must be fairly similar
to one another—such as in an arcade shooter. Abrupt changes in the gameplay
destroy tactical immersion.
■ Strategic immersion occurs when you are deeply involved in trying to win a
game, like the immersion of the chess master: observing, calculating, and plan-
ning. You don't think about a story, characters, or the game world but focus strictly
on optimizing your choices. To experience strategic immersion, the players must
understand the rules of the game clearly so that they can plan actions to their max-
imum advantage. Strategic immersion breaks down if a game confronts players
with a situation they have never seen before or if the game contains too many
unpredictable elements. Unexpected or erratic behavior makes it impossible to plan.
■ Narrative immersion is the feeling of being inside a story, completely involved
and accepting the world and events of the story as real. It is the same immersion as
that produced by a good book or movie, but in video games, the player is also an
actor within the story. Good storytelling—interesting characters, exciting plots,
dramatic situations—produces narrative immersion. Bad storytelling—two-dimen-
sional characters, implausible plots, or trite situations—destroys narrative
immersion, and so does gameplay that is inappropriate in the context of the story.
If a player is immersed in a story about being a dancer, the gameplay should be
about dancing, not about flying a plane or commanding an army.
You cannot create immersion purely by design. The game must also be attractive
and well constructed, or its flaws break the player's sense of immersion. Also, you
cannot design a game that pleases everyone, and players do not become immersed
in a game they don't like. If you want to create an immersive game, you first must
have a clear understanding of how your player likes to be entertained, then deliver
the best entertainment experience that you can. Chapter 3, “Game Concepts,” dis-
cusses the question of understanding your hypothetical player in more detail.
Socializing
Most conventional games are multiplayer games, so since the earliest times, gaming
has been a social activity. People love to play video games together too, and tech-
nology gives them lots of ways to do it:
■ Multiplayer local gaming means two or more people playing together in one
place. It's classic home console play for more than one person. Each player has his