(image from narrativedesign.org)
NarrativeDesign.org has an amazing article on the evolving philosophy of games and narrative, and where it’s going from here. It breaks down and identifies the foundation that we now stand on as we move forward. Overall, we’re talking about the desire to give the player full interactive immersion through experience:
The video game industry now stands on a threshold, ready to create a new form of story, an interactive one. As video game products increase in diversification that new form exists, forming a yet to be named niche within the medium whose aim is dramatic play. It is at the intersections of interactive media, games, and drama that dramatic play exists. It’s been a long time coming; for over 150 years people have been trying to bring it forth. Heralding it most was Richard Wagner, ever famous German composer and theorist. He called this new form “Gesamtkunstwerk“, or ‘the total artwork’, the embodiment of all the arts into one fusion in which the fourth wall [screen] is dissolved and the spectator becomes actor-player.
Reading this gave me goosebumps.What strikes me about this is the ‘rabbit-hole’ level of depth here. Movies don’t have this anymore. Avatar was regarded as an envelope-pushing movie, and yet the viewer experience was marginally better (at best) than other epic-sized movies of similar class. In other words, movie directors can achieve 90% of viewer immersion with a minimal amount of props and backdrop. To achieve the other 10%, it requires more extras, and more complex mis en scene. Of course, there are directors like James Cameron who accomplish amazing cinematic illusion–circumventing a bad script with dizzying visual complexity. However, not many others have that luxury.
‘Immersion’ in a movie sense is a loose term. It has only been in isolated cases that movies have enabled audience participation, and then only by methods that ultimately sabotage the original goal, ejecting the audience from the story in order to ask them what they would like to do next.
It’s my belief that the biggest hurdle to immersion in the interactive media sense is input technology. Game control systems have historically been the slowest in evolving. An Xbox 360 controller now doesn’t look a whole lot different than the original NES controller from 25 years ago–just more buttons and movement sticks.
Control systems need to disappear entirely, or turn to such a natural way of input that it requires very little effort to learn. Check out this video from Ted:
Imagine an entire manipulation system built upon tai chi or yoga. Even this, though, doesn’t take the idea of immersion as far as it *could* go.
I’m not going to try to solve the rabbit hole in this post, but suffice to say, I’m part of a journey, and I’m excited to be here.