Okay, so one final rant about
immersiveness. This one having to do with games.
I have been playing computer games
since before I bought Wizardry:
Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord in the early 80's. The
Mass Effect
trilogy is the game I have been waiting for since those days of CGA
graphics and intentionally impossible gameplay. It is my favorite
computer game ever, and I have played through all three games
multiple times.
Mass
Effect I also contains one
of the most egregious examples of failure in immersion in computer
games ever.
Immersion
in games is more complex than even the coordination of hundreds or
thousands of people involved in making movies and TV. That is
because it requires the direct interaction of the audience as well as
the authors. And more, it requires that the player be able to
interact with the game in a way that allows for immersion. This
largely happens through the interface (a focus of future rants), but
also occurs in the manner in which the authors offer both gameplay
and exposition to the player.
This
divide is marked in Mass
Effect in there being three
separate modes of play. There is the basic tactical/shooter mode,
which defines the most active elements of play. There is the
character interaction mode, wherein the player makes decisions about
how Shepard will speak to non-player characters in the game (NPCs).
Then there are cutscenes.
When
they first appeared in games, cutscenes were an innovative way of
adding story to the experience. No longer limited to short, scripted
conversations to provide large chunks of exposition, designers could
now throw in large-scale full-motion video, eventually with voice
acting and cinematic elements. Getting players involved in the story
now included all of the tools that movies and TV had been making use
of for decades.
But
while a TV show or movie is nothing but a cutscene, players play
games in order to take control of the action. Cutscenes, it was
quickly found, could not simply be dropped in where they would best
fit the overall story, but had to be placed carefully, so that the
player looked on them as an addition to the game, not a frustrating
interruption of play.
Mass
Effect I ends on The
Citadel, a space station that houses the central government of a
large section of the Milky Way galaxy. The player is there to
confront Saren Arterius, who is the
primary servant of the Big
Bad of the piece, a machine intelligence known as Sovereign.
The
final encounter begins with an argument between Shepard and Saren,
which ultimately ends with Saren being thrown down into a lower
chamber. Which, of course, becomes the scene of the second
stage of the fight. Now it gets tough. The second stage of the
Saren fight is easily one of the hardest in the whole game (if not
the hardest, Thresher Maws aside). It requires careful attention be
paid, careful timing and a strong knowledge of Shepard's abilities
and those of his/her squadmates. This is especially true when
playing on the harder difficulty levels.
And
then, when you get Saren down to about 50% health... boom. An
unskippable cutscene that lasts for a full minute or two. Completely
interrupting your rhythm in the fight with Saren. Possibly occurring
during the middle of an attack/skill animation, virtually
guaranteeing that you will be caught unprepared when the battle picks
up at precisely the second it left off to go tell you that the fleet
is still fighting Sovereign. Not fun the first time it happens, it
becomes something truly torturous on later playthroughs.
This
cutscene adds nothing to the fight with Saren, and destroys the sense
of immersion you had just seconds ago. Why? Because it took control
away from you at a completely inappropriate moment. In addition, it
is clumsy, because there are many ways that this could have been
avoided with very little work on Bioware's
part. Having Saren break off to try to complete his original mission
of capturing the controls to the Citadel and run to another part of
the station would have added a third and satisfying stage to the
fight, and allowed for the cutscene without disrupting a player's
control in the exact middle of the critical moment.
So,
lesson to designers out there. Immersion in games is more than it is
in other media because the player is involved. You take control away
from a reader or a viewer in written and cinematic formats. In a
computer game, you cannot just take control, loss of control must be
as carefully managed as cutting, dialog and lighting in movies, or
pacing and word choice in literature.
In
short, smooth roads make the best stories.
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