Are there ways to encourage emersivity in design? To make players more aware of themselves and their actual reality rather than the fictional world presented?
Mer (in Telling our stories inside and outside the games)
So we’re hot in pursuit of emersiveness.
(kinda an inverse of immersiveness but… not exactly the entire negative space)
I think the last paragraph from Mer’s letter, quoted above, is as good a working definition as any — an emersive experience makes the player more aware of themselves and their actual reality (rather than the fictional world presented).
I recommend following the letter-trail back (see the link in the top-left corner) to see how we got here, because I think it’s very interesting and that way I don’t need to get into the “why emersion” topic.
The part I’m really interested in is answering the question: “Are there ways to encourage emersivity in design?”
It’s a huge question and I don’t think anyone knows! Right now the only clear strategy available to me is to pay close attention to the human experience.
Specifically I’m looking at the human-computer system, ignoring if possible what’s on the screen (or at least what’s inside the game window), and thinking about — okay, what’s something I would enjoy … doing? … thinking about? … watching someone else do? … talking about?
I find prototyping is a really trial-and-error experience, a random walk around playspaces to discover what works and what doesn’t. It’s the only way to stumble upon something totally new! So my personal answer:
P.S. Something that occurred to me after posting this. “Systems external to the game” are quite scary to work with — it’s almost analogous to “systems I don’t have control over.”
In planning to work with external systems, and to be clear this includes the insides of players’ brains, I have to accept this loss of control.
Shit happens.
P.P.S. None of this is to say “this is the only way I want to make games”!!! Haha. Just that it feels like the path to designing emersive games: first, you have to find something emersive to make a game around.
My intuition is telling me that you aren’t talking about Bounden. Or maybe you are talking about something that includes Bounden?
Davey Wreden once made this game called “The Beginner’s Guide” in which you play as a person sitting in front of a computer playing a fictional videogame called “The Beginner’s Guide” by the fictional Davey Wreden who exists only within the fiction of the game. It is particularly effective because you are in fact a person sitting in front of a computer playing a game called “The Beginner’s Guide” by a person (a real person, I assume) who’s name is Davey Wreden. Because of this intense similarity between the reality of your situation and the fiction of the game, many, MANY people had the experience of standing up afterwards and not knowing whether they just played a videogame about a videogame or just a videogame. I took a walk shortly afterwards, but a lot of people went to the forums and started accusing the real Davey Wreden of theft and demanding their money back from Steam. Many people reported feeling “dirty” after playing the game.
But my intuition tells me you are going for something even more subtle than the dancery of Bounden or the mind-trickery of DW’s TBG.