The thing about being five posts behind, is that I need a bunch of posts to catch up. So, emersiveness.
I have this very specific memory of waiting at the bus stop and realizing I could get on that bus, or any bus, and just go anywhere I wanted — not only to my destination, but I could choose to travel anywhere in the city. That that’s what buses were for.
Getting on a bus today isn’t charged with the same energy.
(droqen, in Emerging)
This is so interesting and relatable! The realization of one’s actual freedom. I realized at some point in my life that I liked travelling because when I’m in another city, I don’t always have somewhere to go, so I can just go anywhere. Because I have nothing to do, I have no tasks, I can just ride a bus and get down anywhere, I can chose to walk and make a turn wherever I feel like it. “Loving the plot more than the ending”:
I walk through Madrid in your company. (…) With a slow walk, like yawning, like who kisses the neighbourhood when stepping, like who knows that has the whole afternoon to do nothing more that caress sidewalks.Â
(Jorge Drexler in La Trama y el Desenlace – Spanish in the original, translation by me; this is the first part, so go listen to how it rhymes)
But then again, isn’t it also scary? If you can just go anywhere, that also means you can get lost. And that’s not just scary in real life, in games it is as well. Minecraft was terrifying for me back in the day. This huge world, where I could just roam without objectives, but what if I couldn’t go back to my home?. And even in less gigantic worlds, having too many options feels overwhelming!
“Slowly filling the space of your empty hug”
(Jorge Drexler in Eco, yeah, I’m listening to him while writing ^^’)
Another slightly emersive aspect of games is the way that player’s can, when prompted by a game in the right way, consult their own experience and bring in some context, memory, feeling, fact, reason, etc. and so supply some part of themself, something external to the game, to their experience with the game.
(Jack in What Isn’t Emersive)
This also has to do with the Haiku Games, the emptiness, the Tao, “the silence from where the music is possible” (Julio Cortázar in Hopscotch). Saying just enough to trigger the connections in the player’s head. It’s been a decade (oh god I’m old), and I keep on thinking about this quote:
What would be the use, for instance, in giving the plan of the room that was really MY room, in describing the little room at the END of the garret, (…). If I said more, the reader, back in his own room, would not open that unique wardrobe, with its unique smell, which is the signature of intimacy. Paradoxically, in order to suggest the values of intimacy, we have to induce the reader a state of suspended reading. For it is not until his eyes have left the page that recollections of my room can become a threshold of oneirism for him. And when it is a poet speaking, the reader’s soul reverberates, (…) [this] gives the energy of an origin to being.
(Gaston Bachelard in The poetics of Space, page 49 – French in the original, translation by Maria Jolas)
It struck my 20-ish YO mind this idea of the reader lifting the eyes of the reading to daydream about some new or old thought that the book had triggered. But as Bachelard says, you need a poet speaking. You need the emotional ride Droqen mentioned in a comment. Without the poetry, the craftship, (the gamefeel?) you don’t get emersed. I think you first need to immerse someone, but in an incomplete world, with enough holes so they can emerse through them.