The 3 Pillars of Immersive Games Pt. 5: A Few Final Thoughts
Some ground rules before we get to the good part ...
A Note on the Games I Like
Some may say my taste in video games is vanilla. I was an only child, and grew up playing almost exclusively single-player games. Ironically, one of the first games I write about in this book must be played in two-player co-op, but it’s the only one that isn’t almost exclusively single-player that I’ll be discussing in this book.
I also have a full-time (and a part-time) job, a partner who I’m trying to support while she attends medical school, a dog who requires an almost uncomfortable amount of eye contact as part of his care routine, and hobbies I enjoy outside of playing video games. So, the time I have available to play games is limited, and I tend to play the 3-4 biggest releases of the year, while maybe having time to run through a few smaller games in the breaks between larger campaigns.
All of this is to say, I deeply respect indie developers breaking the mold and setting off on their own to disrupt a deeply flawed AAA video game industry (I’ll put in another plug for anything written by Jason Schrier for a much better breakdown on this than I can provide). However, the games I tend to play and enjoy do fall in that bucket of high-budget, single-player, usually action-adventure romps — my name is on a big board at Sony HQ and I hope they keep making games that cater to my preferences, and mine alone.
This is not to disparage or diss smaller developers and smaller-budget games. There are simply just not enough available gaming hours in the year for me to play around and uncover the sleeper hits that much cooler people talk about in bars thick with cigarette smoke or whatever. I try to cover a decent range of genres, game sizes/budgets, developers, and more with my selections in this work, but looking at the final list of games, there is definitely a slant on what I like and don’t like, which will obviously differ from everybody else’s personal tastes.
And personal taste is a critical piece of the framework I’m using to discuss games here. While a game can objectively be very well made and conceived, it’s not automatically going to be an immersive experience for everyone who plays it. That’s because immersion often requires an element of nostalgia — or at least fondness — for a game’s genre and some of its core mechanics. For example, I didn’t really play a ton of first-person shooters growing up, and as a result, games like Halo and Call of Duty have never really hooked me. On the other hand, I played a lot of role-playing games (especially Japanese ones) throughout my childhood and teenage years, and now pretty much any Final Fantasy or turn-based Square Enix title is a Day 1 purchase for me. I realize not everyone is like this, but these are games that are easy for me to get absorbed into the worlds of, and these preferences are going to be different for every gamer.
But who knows? Maybe even if your personal taste in games doesn’t perfectly align with mine, reading about why these the titles I’m talking about resonate with me will give you more of an appreciation for them, and encourage you to check them out (I guess that’s one of the reasons I’m doing this whole thing, after all). Perhaps I’ll even return the favor and start taking requests for games to feature in future works, in an effort to expand my palate.
Methodology
Deciding what to write about for the first three chapters for this book was easy — I cover the games I was playing (or stopped playing) when I established the framework for this review format. Elements within these three games helped me articulate and understand the meaning of immersion in games — that just because a game is “good” does not mean it’s immersive, that immersion isn’t usually achieved right away (and it can be really satisfying when it takes awhile for all three pillars to come together), and that what might be an immersive experience for someone might not click at all for another.
For the other chapters, I selected games that I 1.) had already played; and 2.) had fond memories of, and wanted to see if and when they immersed me.1 When applicable, I’m going to spend a lot more time talking about the part of a game I perceived to be its weakest, but that surprised and delighted me to find it was a strength, rather than giving a ton of flowers to aspects of games that have already been lauded at length. I don’t need to spend 3,000 words telling you that A Plague Tale: Requiem is a feast for the eyes or that Astro Bot is super fun to play2 — there are already plenty of reviews out there about all of the games being discussed in this book that give them plenty of flowers for their strongest elements.3 Rather, I want to talk about the moments where a developer shocked me by delivering so masterfully in an area I had written off as a shortcoming that their game took my breath away. A lot of times, this will come from a well-executed story twist I didn’t see coming, which invests me in the character(s) and/or plot in a way I didn’t think would be possible.
Within each chapter, I’ll talk about how a game measures up in each of the 3 Pillars, and the ways in which these elements (hopefully) all come together at certain points to create immersion. Although the way I’ve listed the 3 Pillars in this introduction (gameplay, aesthetics, and storytelling) is (usually) the hierarchy used in making games, I’ll usually talk about a game’s storytelling first in each chapter. As I was writing this, I found it was counterintuitive to make a bunch of references to characters, locations, and plot points in the gameplay and aesthetics sections, and then finally end talking about what the game’s story was actually about at the end of the chapter. I would criticize a gamemaker for bad storytelling if they structured their game’s plot this way!
I either replayed or very recently played every game I selected for this work so that the details of each were fresh in my mind. I’ll share some things I remember from my original experience with these games (and why I chose to include them), if there was anything novel about the way I played a game while revisiting it for this book (e.g., deciding whether to play the original The Last of Us or the PS5 remake, The Last of Us Part I), and what I noticed upon looking at these games with fresh eyes. I’ll be interested to see which games lose their immersive quality upon a second playthrough4, and which ones fare better with age.
For the most part, I stayed away from playing/covering games that I already knew didn’t click with me — that would have turned writing this into work, which I swore to myself it never would be.5 If this upsets you, convince me why I should give your favorite game another shot; you can even use my own 3 Pillars framework against me.
These aren’t hard-and-fast rules — I’ll break both a couple of times.
I might still do both of these things — I haven’t written these chapters yet.
Also, my goal in this book is not to review games, but rather analyze them in the context of the 3 Pillars framework.
Or 10th playthrough, in the case of The Last of Us.
Actually, trying to get this introduction and first three chapters written by the end of January (an entirely self-imposed deadline) did kind of become work, but nothing worth doing is ever easy!