Immersion and Motion

E3 is behind us and we safely say that this year's convention was dominated by two big elements: 3D and motion control. What is even more amazing is how PR and marketing decided to sell us those two things. The big buzzword was immersion. 3D and motion control will totally immerse you into the gaming experience and the gaming world.


I am not going to linger on 3D here. It's hard to judge something like this based solely on 2D images. Right now, I am more interested in the new motion control craze that is coming with Kinect and Move, but mostly the former. From what we know about our relationship with the current controllers and the Wii, how can we assume that the Kinect is going to help us be more immersed in games? What is more immersive, holding a controller or jumping in front of your television?


Two schools of thought basically go toes-to-toes here; on one side, the controller is a physical object that exists outside the boundaries of the games and it is anchoring you to the real world, but on the other, the controller is a tool that helps you take control of an avatar and puts you directly in control of the fiction. Depending on which side of the fence you are, you will see motion control in different lights.


"Traditional" motion control such as the Wii and the Playstation Move are controllers that also requires, most of the time, extra movement in the "real world" in order to control the game. Games such as Mario Galaxy requires you to waggle the Wiimote to spin Mario, and the Move will probably require that you point at the screen in order to kill something. So either you will see these extra "real world" movements as something that breaks the immersion even more, or something that helps you immerse yourself even more in the game by giving more faithful control over your avatar.


I think you can split immersion in games in two different categories: immersion in the narrative (the kind you could get watching a movie, reading a book, or playing a good narrative-driven game), and immersion in the system (feeling that you have full control over your avatar). What decides the level of immersion in both categories is mostly the game and what is the level of control the player has over his avatar.

A game like Heavy Rain will immerse the player in the narrative by creating interesting situations that will draw you inside the fiction and make you feel scared or happy for the characters. Narrative immersion can also be created by gameplay, although it will mostly capitalize on emergent narrative. A good example of this is Far Cry 2. You become immersed in the adventures of your avatar not because of your search for the Jackal, but because of the perils linked to your trip through a country that does not wants you.


Even though Heavy Rain lets you do a counter-clockwise quarter rotation of the thumb-stick to open a door, this movement has about as much to do with the real world as a counter-clockwise quarter rotation of the thumb-stick to throw a fireball from your fist. System immersion is present mostly in motion-controlled games. You will not be immersed in the narrative track of a Wii Sports boxing match (well, maybe the emergent narrative linked to punching your brother in the face), but you will be immersed in the system, the gameplay, as the movements you make in the real world will be mimicked in the game. You will feel you have full control over your avatar.

With Kinect, the game literally changes. The control is removed and replaced with more faithful body recognition. As they like to say at Microsoft: "Your body becomes the controller". What is the effect on immersion though?


I am not saying that narrative immersion will be impossible with Kinect, but system immersion will certainly be the focus for many game developers. We can now look back and see that with the Wii, games focusing on system immersion, such as party games, became third party developers’ genre of choice. Many of the game shown so far for Kinect also reflect that.


Narrative immersion also becomes harder to maintain when your whole body is the controller. If a plastic controller was anchoring you to the real world, Kinect will certainly do it even more so. In a movie theatre, you get immersed in the narrative because you are in a state of "over-perception and under-mobility"(French: sur-perception et sous-motricité). It basically means that the optimal conditions of a movie theatre will fill your field of vision with images and your ears with sounds but also keep you in your seat. When you play a game with a controller, you are still in a similar situation. You cannot move away from the television or else the action would stop, and your physical movement is limited to the movement of your fingers. Maybe it's not to the level of a movie theatre, but it certainly is close enough to watching a DVD.


With that in mind, games that would be played with Kinect (and to an extent those which uses the Wiimote and Move more actively) will rather put you in a state of "over-mobility". In that state, you become more self-aware of your presence as a player, as a controller. In that sense, you are fully immersed (Could we even say integrated?) into the system. You are in total control of your avatar. Narrative immersion, in turn, becomes harder to keep. The more complex the movements you have to do to interact with the virtual environment, the more aware you are that this whole thing is a game that you control.


It is not to say that developers who will choose to make full use of the Kinect's features won't be able to write deep, meaningful and interesting stories, it's just that I have an hard time imagining being moved by a story if I have to mimic a fight scene, or scream JASON at my television while walking around my living room. Games truly exist on multiple levels, and motion control integration is just another challenge that game developers will have to work with.

I Once Had a Ranch

Kirk Hamilton wrote recently about Red Dead Redemption’s flawed middle chapters; basically spanning from the annoying Irish to the bloated McDougal, with caricatures of the worst human beings you can have south of the border in the middle, but also its surprisingly well-developed early and final chapters. What’s interesting is that both those sections of the game take place around a certain type of location: a peaceful ranch.

After being shot in the chest, Marston is saved by rancher girl Bonnie McFarlaine and taken back to her father’s ranch. At this point, Marston’s quest for revenge is suspended for a moment. You go around the ranch hunting rabbits with Bonnie, you hurdle some cattle, you patrol the ranch at night and you play a few friendly poker games with the guys after a hard day in the sun. At this point in the game, you can also take on a few missions with Marshall Leigh Johnston in return for information about Williamson. If this game is based on the western genre, why was I more interested and invested in the daily business of running a ranch than the manly cowboy action of shooting the bad guys hidden in a canyon?

Apart from the point Kirk Hamilton makes in his piece; the characters around those missions are much more well written, I think I enjoyed those missions so much because I was free not be violent, not to be a tool in some sociopath hands (I’m looking at you De Santa). The first few missions in McFalaine’s ranch are obliviously tutorials giving you pointers on how to ride your horse, shoot a gun and lasso up horses and bad guys. By breaking those few tutorial mission with some of the Marshall’s mission, all involving shooting bad guys in the head, I found the ranching missions much more innovative. Hurdling cattle may not be the most interesting job in the world, but the mechanics revolving around those missions was novel and interesting enough to keep me hooked and actually enjoy riding behind a group of cows while keeping them in check.

You really get to appreciate those missions once you are at the end of the game. After hours of being a carpet and doing horrible jobs for even more horrible people, you are free to get back to a “normal” life with you family. This is the redemption the game is telling us about, this is the freedom you’ve earned. For a few missions, the game lets Marston, and the player, be something else than a killer. It lets you be a human being who tries to put the pieces of his life together by trying to get his ranch back up. Just like Marston, I didn’t want this part of the game to end. I would have enjoyed just living on this ranch, working everyday to make it better by taking the cattle to the pasture, get some horses to sell them back, get a little garden that the wife would take care of, go hunt with my boy and bond a little, protect my ranch from rustlers and bandits, sell and buy merchandise with towns and other ranches, just put the killing life behind I guess.

Sadly, the cruel world created by this game denies Marston and the player this freedom. It is brutally, but not surprisingly, taken away from you in a moment of violence. Marston’s redemption was short-lived. The civilized world will inevitably kill the old anti-hero of the West; the law does not forgive the criminal turned vigilante. The game completes the circle by giving us control over Jack Marston, John’s son, the boy who lost his chance at a normal life with his family. The son literally becomes the father as the player is given the same control over him and as the game is giving the same options to the player. Jack cannot be a rancher. He can only be the same as his father was during the game, a man who wanders the land in search of someone to help, or someone to shoot.

Who knows, maybe one day Rockstar will release a DLC that will let us be an honest rancher? John wasn’t able to enjoy his redemption but maybe we will be able to lead Jack to his.