Before I start talking about anything, I should probably put up some manner of big Your Mileage May Vary warning, which should probably apply to everything I put up on here. You would hope it goes without saying, but my general expectations of people are quite low.
Anyway.
If you’ve even been remotely connected to me in some way for the past year, you’ll know that I’m pretty much obsessed with Dragon Age: Origins and some of its characters. This even extends to the largely inferior Dragon Age II, for which every part of me is screaming out about how bad it is, but I just don’t care, and continue to fangirl over it and Anders. But more on that later! Today what I really want to talk about is immersion in video games, and what makes crazy obsessives like me actually get obsessed over something that really doesn’t exist. Naturally, what I’ll be saying applies to all manner of other fiction works, especially ones that are Fantasy/Sci-fi, and the reasoning for this I’ll eventually get to if I can ever manage to stay on task.
But yes. Immersion. You know how when you’re consuming some manner of fiction, like a book, a game, or a TV series (and to a slightly lesser extent, a movie, since it demands a comparatively shorter length of commitment), once you get into it enough, you’re less inclined to put it down and the media effectively consumes itself as you continue to trudge on to the ending? As far as I know, most people get like this when they’re enjoying their media consumption enough. In my mind, what brings this over into the cloudy skies of immersion is that after you’re done consuming, be it that you’ve finished reading the book, or you’re just taking a break from the game, is that the story, its characters and its universe essentially continue to linger in your mind. Seriously, there have been days where plans with my real life friends/family have forced me to stop doing what I’ve been doing, and all throughout the outing, I’ll be all detached because I’m too busy emoing out over, say, Ezio‘s dead girlfriend, or mapping out strategies on how to kill that one boss that caused me to ragequit before I left the house. And then, when I’ll stop playing for mundane reasons like say, sleep, instead of going to bed I’ll just be on the internet, reading up about extended universe lore or get stuck into fan works (of varying quality) and thus manage to get a less-than-recommended amount of sleep.
Now obviously this crazy obsessive stupor doesn’t happen all the time. For me in particular, it happens so rarely that when it does, I actually continue to feed the obsession further so that I at least have something fun to think about instead of boring old life and monotony and other not very fun things. That’s probably why I’m not so much of a fan of media that’s set in real life (except for the really depressive movies about adults , but I only watch those for the express intention of emoing out after I’m done), just because if I want to fantasize about things that are never going to happen, I may as well go all the way and fantasize about them in the context of a universe that will never exist and I can do whatever I like. This is the general idea behind my overall dislike of cosplay and other overt and enthusiastic expressions of fandom, because I think that fantasies should stay where they belong; in fiction and in the minds of its consumers. But I digress…
Before I got distracted by that fantastic aside, what I was trying to get at is that most immersive fiction works (I’m going to lock this down a bit more to fantasy/sci-fi works for simplicity, the reason for which should be obvious by my big “real life is shit” rant above.) appear to have certain qualities to them that make their universes immersive. Bioware, in particular (or at the very least, the ones I’ve played) seems to be particularly good at this. So. Knights of the Old Republic. It’s a pretty fantastic game. Sure, the combat is kinda boring and I can normally get up, get a glass of ice tea, come back and the fight would be won, without much input from me, but combat generally isn’t why you’re playing (or were playing, with how DAII turned out…) a Bioware game. You’re playing because of the story, the dialogue, the characters, and most importantly, the extended universe. You see, what both KotOR and DA:O manage to do is that outside of its story campaign, it facilitates the idea that its universes contain a lot more that has remained unexplored and has yet to be visited. Both games have oodles and oodles of auxiliary text and dialogue about locales, culture, customs and races which all add to the idea that the context you are playing in is a living, breathing world, inhabited by actual sentient personalities (well, your party members at the very least, but do you expect to make friends with every single person you ever meet?) and just the idea that there is a lot more beyond what the game is allowing you to traverse.
Naturally, this is what sparks mass fandom. It isn’t the games or its stories in itself, but the potential left by them that makes the immersion so strong. Essentially, by being left without all of the details, we fill in the blanks ourselves and co-ordinate our own logic with the constraints left by the universe. If anything, what becomes an immersion-breaker is when all of these blanks are filled in. Here’s where part of the disaster of DAII comes in. From Origins, all of the wheels were set in place, lore wise, for most of the events in DAII. Darkspawn, Qunari, the big old Mages vs. Templars dealy. This would have been just fine, but really what seemed to have happened is that having all of this extended lore in place allowed them to get lazy. Conversations were shorter, they no longer weaved extensive exposition about most things since they assumed most fans were already on board with the necessary lore. Further, everything was explained, and even then, not in a particularly satisfying way. Remember how in Origins, the only real information you received about the Qunari was all of Sten’s stories, and his general comments about how he viewed things? That was what kept the Qunari so interesting, since all you had was the narration of one character. In DAII, we get a motherfucking Arishok, preaching to us about how things should be. And, just like that, any illusions as to how the Qunari are are eliminated and I, at the very least, was left quite disgruntled. And it’s for this exact reason why locales like Tevinter and to a certain extent Orlais still remain interesting — we haven’t gone there yet. It is my hope that should we visit those places in DA3 they would have ironed out all of the writing disasters from DAII to make the locale more palatable, but if it were up to me, there wouldn’t be additional sequels. Letting you explore new places effectively makes your world seem smaller. It’s the same reason why World of Warcraft seems infinitely smaller once you get to fly around all over the place; making the player feel like they have access to everything effectively makes their experience poorer for it, because the game is telling them how something should be, rather than letting the player take the reins with their imagination.
Since I’m on the topic as to why DAII was shit, alongside making its extended universe smaller, its story, dialogue and characters were simply not quite as compelling. As I mentioned before, they took shortcuts on auxiliary dialogue and text, under the assumption that everybody was already familiar with the lore. In Origins, pretty much every character that joins your party has some manner of monologue about their past, how they feel about things and how things are where they come from. In DAII, the only character that really does this is Fenris (which is basically why Tevinter remains interesting). Exchanges with most other characters are shallow at best and most of the characters can be boxed into a couple of simple tropes, rather than Origins characters, which are an amalgam of at least twenty (as all good characters [and humans] should be). The game’s only real saving grace is the combat, because, well, it’s just great. While I’m having oodles of fun replaying Origins right now, I keep going back to the way my staff in DAII is so, so much better, and how there isn’t any friendly fire outside of Nightmare mode (part of why DAII is so crazy easy). There are a bunch of other gameplay and level design related issues with DAII, but to me, it would have all been tolerable if they had gotten a handle on the characters and story. I mean… I still really enjoyed the game, and I will replay it, but it’s not for the game in itself. It’s for its potential and the mark that Origins and Anders had left.
So we’re going to watch Harry Potter soon so I should leisurely start to wrap this up. I had intended to talk a bit more other things (food, mostly) but I’ve kind of lost that particular train of thought now.
So. Uh. Yeah.
That’s about it.
