I agree, Culture "THEORY" is a valid academic field.. Culture "PRACTICAL" is not however- evident by how many times an Elephant has produced a painting that has sold for +$10,000..

People are morons that's why I left uni at the end of 1st year through Visual Com, it just can't be justified hence why the career was a dead end. As you can see I made the right choice (as I am now working in the video games industry /Brag again)

Jonas your explanation was spot on, I've read it somewhere before (the whole HoloDeck vs Matrix thing) though..

The fact is as Jonas put it, we're dumbing the entire game design discussion down too much when getting into the gritty of debate.. If someone mentions Immersion at GDC for instance everyone would eventually start going "what? huh? what are you on about?" so we've got to be specific- Game designers HAVE to be specific (you'll never see Immersion appear in game design documents.. unless its either to hype the game to publishers that read it (that never happens because they don't read lol) or its a game for VR).

If you were to build a game with the intention of being "Immersive" you'd either 1. Fail or 2. Have to break down what Immersion is first. This is what the problem me and Jonas both have with it because as game design enthusiasts we see game design as much complex than just the face value, whereas Game Reviewers don't and to some extent idiot PR guys like Peter Hines of Bethesda.

Further more, Forum fanbois sound like the biggest idiots when they use it in the wrong context.
Graphics = Immersive
Sound = Immersive
Gameplay = Immersive
Replayability = Immersive
Non-linearity = Immersive Story
Freeform = Immersive Freedom
Open World = Immersive World
VoiceActors = Immersive Characters

see where I am going with this. It just confuses the crap out of me.. and then people accuse me of being a troll. Its only because what some people say makes fing no sense what so ever! They use the same word to describe EVERYTHING, so they simplify and say "X Game is Immersive".. Be specific.

EDIT: Oh and yes, I suspect people will accuse me of being Elitist.. Well I have news for you, I'm being Elitist to Elitist Gamers that call themselves "HARDCORE" to distinguish themselves from Casual gamers.. We're all gamers in the end. Get off your fucking high horse.. The industry is making money ain't it? you're getting more games then ever right? thank the casual gamers for that.. if you are pissed with the quality.. blame yourself because you didn't do enough "Smart Buying" to evoke the right trends in the market. Simply put as Don't Buy Shit Games Like Halo 3

Banned.

lol well I thought it was but eh each to their own I guess. My point is still valid though if you see your influence on those market trends then honestly its not very hard to think "how do I get game companies to improve the quality of their games?".. simple, buy the games that listen to feedback .. The problem with Halo is that I don't think they are listening, companies that do business like that (JoWood I am looking at you!.. Bethesda too.. oh and definitely Atari- their releases have been shockingly bad. Bioware sadly gets a bad mark because their Feedback is obtained by EA and we know where our comments go.. (See Spore, also the new KOTOR Online game since they aren't making me want the game any more than I did.. it looks like SWG2.0 with more WoWClone, looks like the feedback on SWG did nothing) Lionhead Studios is the WORST for it.. Black and White has so much feedback, Black and White 2 comes out minus some shit from the first and that was basically all. They haven't improved either which makes me regret buying Fable 2 a bit..)

Basically what I am saying is Support companies that actually want to make the industry better.

See TaleWorlds and Introversion for Details. (basically I'm saying BUY MOAR INDIE games! less of this AAA shit)

Ok people, first off words don't mean a god damned thing. (I know DDL sort of beat me to that.) Language is a collaborative effort ruled by the majority of whichever community you happen to be speaking or writing in.

What that means is if everyone is using a word incorrectly but you, they aren't and you are. If you're trying to correct an error being made left and right by multitudes, guess what? You are the error.

One day, when I have made it so everyone uses effect to mean affect (I'm on my way) that will be the correct usage. I don't even need everybody, I just need a majority of a single community that won't back down when someone says, "You're using it wrong." Then I have dialect, from there I work out into alternate form, then preferred form, and once I hit that point anyone who disagrees is, quite simply, uneducated and incorrect.

That is the way language works. If immersion is used to mean something you don't like as much as you say it is then you're too late because it isn't an error anymore.

-

As a bit of a side note, anyone who says that a sizeable group (any sizeable group) is using a word wrong is an elitist. An elitist who is already losing at that.

Language evolves you can accept it, and possibly even enjoy it, or become obsolete. Well not quite obsolete. Just outdated.


Nice idea in theory, but there are too many concepts. (Though do try to get a copy of The Meaning of Liff, and The Deeper Meaning of Liff.)

Consider all of the words in the English language, very few of them are redundant and yet its words are still overloaded. As a native English speaker it amazes me how many completely distinct, in no way the same, not remotely equivalent in meaning English words must be translated as a single word in a non-English language.

I've been told that there are languages with over 100 words describing types snow (but, I've also been told, not a single word equivalent to the English word snow) No doubt speakers of those languages must feel the same amazement when they learn English speakers group over 100 distinct things into a single word.

(If you still don't get what I'm talking about, imagine you encountered a language that had one and only one word to describe donkeys, horses, airplanes, cars, trucks, trains, elevators, escalators, roller-skates, skis, boats, litters, wagons, sleds and a plethora of other things because they were all transportation and no one would ever possibly need to distinguish between them. That would be more or less how I felt when I learned the amount of things one language considered indistinguishable from "smile.")

[Added:] And the conversation has already moved onto other matters. I need to post faster.

I think you need to ease up on calling things/people "shit", MCP. It's basically losing all meaning.

No I went off topic then for a quick Community service announcement. (Buy Indie )

Anyway, Wow. Conformity at work.. You know what's funny about gamers, the fact that our entire culture is a minority..

The fact is though.. what is the point in that if game designers can't understand what the hell you are talking about? how are we supposed to get valued feedback if everyone can't explain what they mean? we need specifics.. we can't just group it all together with ambiguity because when doing a game design you can't do that. If you want to have a serious discussion about games YOU HAVE TO USE THE DETAILS, else its not serious and I'm not going to understand what you mean as my words will conflict with your "immersion".

If I'm going to produce a game, I won't want feedback saying how immersive my game was.. I want to know down to the point this was good, I felt it worked because its graphics reflected something out of reality.. I don't want to see "the castle level was very immersive" because that tells me nothing.. I can't tell if you meant graphics or audio and I can't tell how well it worked- it tells me nothing and it doesn't help. The consumers ability to communicate with the developer is essential..



True.. sorry I'm really stressed at the moment, I'm working right now so yeah I tend to swear mentally more often.

Well, if you think about it, veteran gamers are trained to save a lot, and game designers have to account for that. So you die, or take a large amount of damage, you just load to somewhere just behind the corner... Whats the point of having permanent health then?
Basically COD style regeneration just saves you the trouble of saving behind every corner, however, this doesn't mean that saves should be eliminated completely.

Easier way is to enforce Autosaving like Fable2 or MountandBlade.. but this can lead to data corruption (unless it saves every 5 mins of playing to 2 incremental backups) kinda like having an account for an MMORPG.. No Saves. So if you died it'd just reload the previous AutoSave (most likely a PRE-Battle checkpoint) as opposed to kill you off entirely. Meaning you wouldn't be able to "Choose" where to save.

That takes the hassles away. AutoRegen isn't needed as You could however remove health entirely anyway (I've been experimenting with a Wound/Blocking/Armor system.. where by blocking saves you, if you are hit it'll wound a part of your body (fatal areas kill, non-fatal just reduces your efficiency) and you can armor yourself to lower the chances of death.)) Its based on the Deus Ex system but much much more gameplay specific (as it controls the other 50% of your combat options outside of just attacking).

This is how I want to design my combat systems from now on because it just makes more sense to do it like that.

Ok, so everyone went and moved on while I was asleep (damn you all), but even then, there are some things I cannot let pass:

First, Chris: BAM! Exactly.

Second,

This, folks, is a straw man argument.
"Come up with something I didn't say, indirectly associate it with what I'm saying, refute it, and thus by extension refute what I'm saying." Hooray! But shitty debating.


Meaningless. Or at the very least, irrelevant. The games industry is entirely welcome to use evocative, emotional, presence, pants-wetting, or whatever terminology they want within their own circles, but the fact remains that outside of those circles, nobody understands what the hell any of those mean in this context. You can complain about 'Immersion' being too vague, but the 'non-elite' can complain about all the rest being too fucking specific. Both are in fact valid complaints, depending on where you're standing when you make them. Possibly one source of our disagreement stems from the fact that I'm standing in the non-elite circle (it has punch and pie!), and you're standing in the other one. If I explained what I do to non-biochemists as "research into the compartmentalisation of stress-induced methyl-guanine pyrophosphohydrolases" then I'd be an idiot for using the wrong words to the wrong audience.

Immersive is used by reviews and game-blurb writers to convey things to the game-buying public, not to other fucking game devs. If someone bought a game that said 'immersive' on it, and then complained because it failed to magically insert them bodily into an entirely convincing virtual world, using technology that we all fucking know doesn't even exist.... then they are an idiot, plain and simple. For the rest of the game-buying (presumably non-elitist) crowd, then that world could mean "it feels like you're in the world" if it's an FPS, "it feels like you really care about the characters" if it has RPG elements, and so on: we know we're not going to feel like we're actually physically in the game world because we're not fucking morons. And we know that an immersive 3rd person RTS game is going to be a different kind of immersion to that of an immersive FPS. And that's fine, because perhaps surprisingly, it fucking WORKS. And that, ultimately, is the test of language usage, as so eloquently explained by Chris. Word usage propagates based on popular usage, which in turn is essentially based on how effective the words are at communicating what the communicators desire to communicate. (try saying that five times fast..)


And finally (and I can't believe you didn't spot this)


Joined shortly by


So companies are guilty of not listening to feedback, even though the feedback is, apparently, nigh-on meaningless. Oh, those bastard companies, eh?


Right, done ranting for now. Continue debating autoregen or something if you wish.

I feel a sudden urgent need to extricate myself from this debate as fast as possible and never look back, but I want to clarify my position before I retreat:

Yes. My point is exclusively that when discussing game design amongst developers or academics, the word "immersion" is too vague and needs to be defined and specified better. I have no problem with Deus Ex being called an "immersive FPS" and I have no problem with Bethesda extolling the immersive virtues of their games through the usual PR outlets. Hope everybody understand that.

That still doesn't mean I'm not elitist. I am elitist as fuck.


Yeah I get all that. But two points:

1) If you can nurse your own pet project of having "effect" take over the meaning of "affect", why can't I support the academic cause of splitting the word "immersion" into two or three different words? This isn't even my project, it's theory established by people with way longer educations than I.

2) I'm not trying to correct an error. I'm trying to get a grip on a word that a lot of people use who don't seem to really understand it. The problem isn't 10 million people disagree with some official pre-defined meaning of the word, the problem is that nobody seems to agree on the meaning of the word. I find it difficult to describe just how vague the word "immersion" is, a problem shared by other terms critical to game studies such as "gameplay" (to some degree) and "interactivity" (to a very high degree). You may think the words work because everybody understands them, but if you delve just a little bit deeper, you'll realize nobody seems to understand them at all because they were never actually defined. Ever. Anywhere. It's not a case of people not using the official definition, it's a case of there never having been an official definition.

And like I said, that's rarely a problem in common discourse. But - at the risk of indulging in a bit too blatant self-congratulations - these forums tend to have a pretty high level of debate when it comes to games and game design, and we're rapidly approaching the level where using badly defined words can seriously impair the debate. If we're going to continue talking about games this way, it might help to make sure we all at least agree on the meaning of the most fundamental terms, don't you think?

Ok, let's start with the basics: define 'game'.

*runs away gibbering*

No, but seriously, I have no problem with highbrow usage of assorted gaming sub-element terminology, I just object to CP being a dick about people using non-highbrow generalised terminology.

Er...and I like ranting on the internet, to be honest. I'm not terribly proud of it, but there you go.

HAH! I assure you people are trying. That, too, is a problem. That's why game studies still kinda suck, people are still scrambling to put together a good terminology. Being a bio-chemist, you probably don't realize how fucking terrible it is to write academic papers when you have to start each and every one of them with a discussion of your entire terminology. I am so sick and tired of talking about the schizm between ludology and narratology! IT IS A NON-ISSUE. Games are rules, simulation, and story. This should be obvious to anybody. GET OVER YOURSELVES, GUYS.

Ahem, but you know... the upside is that I get to write about computer games until they give me a degree. So I guess it all evens out in the end, eh?


I sympathize with that.


Well your rants have a solid fanbase here, so don't hold yourself back

how bout we all agree that immersion is something cool and should be used in games. see? simple, no argument needed

see that was easy. anyway cool stuff yeah...back to discussion anyway since I have nothing serious to add

But I will say one thing that scares me about Deus Ex 3. It is the fact that they were saying it will ship with the best graphics...deja vu? IW talked about that shit too, bump mapping, normal mapping etc, and look how that turned out. Not only did it not look the best, it had a whole heap of technical problems, so that it didnt run smoothly all the time..hopefully the same shit doesnt happen again. I dont care too much about graphics, otherwise I wouldnt play the original

Well, fuck. I had nice post and it just went poof. I never


I wasn't directing that at you. I was directing it at the one who said, "Mine isn't elitist at all. I'm trying to correct an error here," after and before listing various groups that are near uniformly (if not uniformly) in "error".


I have no problem with your cause. As I understand it you were speaking of a way of defining immersion that is more useful for developers, Mr. CP was saying that non-developers were using it wrong.

Also, I'm not actually nursing said project, I just wanted a example. Would be nice to have a lasting effect on language though.


Again, that bit was directed specifically at the one who said, "I'm trying to correct an error here."


I agree entirely. I've been in religious debates where everyone refused to say what they meant by, "god." It made any intelligent discourse on the subject impossible. I certainly understand how poorly defined words can screw things up.

You should understand that my previous post, before quoting you, was directed at the world and general and/or Mr CP in particular. (Whether and or or depends on the specific part.) Obviously the parts directed at the world in general were directed at you, but those did not include what you seem to be responding to.

Sorry I didn't make that clear in the original post.

The part after I quoted you was, obviously, directed at what you said about words having more than one meaning and how it would be nice were that not the case.

As I recall, the last time I heard you give a definition of game I thought that basically anything would qualify. (Running for political office, having a war, existing in physical reality, so on.) Not sure exactly what the definition was though.


Couldn't you just write one paper on your terminology and attach it as an appendix onto the rest of your papers?

Or, failing that, write out a description of your entire terminology and then, when you've written a paper, tack it onto the front of your paper after deleting the parts you didn't need. Wouldn't require any more effort than cutting and pasting.