Ugh. Missing my Monday update threw me off, and then I had a crazy school project to work on. Apologies to everyone for not having this up Thursday.
One of the important implications of the way I understand immersion to work is that immersion as a process can not be engaged in simultaneously with thinking about it. That is, thinking about immersion, abstracting it, and considering it are forms of conscious mediation.
This is possibly one of the reasons that people who seek immersion as a primary goal in roleplaying tend to be disinterested in new mechanics and new games, and often tend to ignore new mechanics in new games they do play. New mechanics require abstraction and consideration because they are unfamiliar. Players must think about implications carefully or risk ineffectiveness.
But that very consideration is disrupting to immerstion. No matter how clever the mechanics are, or what cool things they facilitate, when they are unfamiliar they make it more difficult to immerse. And when immersion is a primary (or even the pirmary) goal of play, new mechanics, no matter how clever, tend to make play less fun.
I believe that this sheds some light onto part of the ‘system does/doesn’t matter’ debate. It is not that the system does not matter to the immersion-seeking player, rather it is that, to date, all systems have been similarly unsuited to promoting immersion. System most clearly does matter, otherwise it would be unneccessary to ignore it when seeking immersion.
Does this mean that mechanics themselves are opposed to immersion? I think not. The problem is not mechanics in general, but rather the specific types of mechanics that have been focused on in design to-date. What we need to do, then, is to seek out the sorts of interactions that support immersion, and then attempt to design mechanics that promote those interactions.
One thing I believe is also worth mentioning is that familiarity with a mechanic can allow a player to engage with it without disrupting immersion. As you become familiar with a mechanic you are able to evaluate it unconsciously. Players can roll dice, add a small number, and report that to the GM without really considering those actions. This may account for the fact that many people stick with familiar systems, that very familiarity allows them to engage in the mechanics without disrupring their immersive goals.
Of course it would make sense that the simpler the mechanics, the more quickly a player can familiarize themselves to the point that engaging the mechanics is not disrupting to immersion.
To reiterate, if we want to develop mechanics that support immersion (with the caveat that immersion works in some way similar to how I have proposed it does), then we need to:
- Identify the sorts of player-to-player and environmental actions that support immersion.
- Develop games that utilize simple mechanics that support these interactions.
So, what are we waiting for?
Tags: Theory
Hello,
First of all, thank you for this website I am reading for some while and I must say it is always very interesting.
>>>Develop games that utilize simple mechanics that support these interactions.
I might be wrong but I think that the main point is not complexity/simplicity but are :
1) How easy the mechanics are to get familiar with?
2) How far the rules are a quick an easy translator between narrative PoV to mechanical PoV?
1) I do agree that most of the time simplier mechanics support immersion in a better way than more complex ones. But it depends a lot on your players’ group gaming habits. Let’s say your playing with a group where everybody is used to crunchy complex games, they might feel very weird to use wushu mechanics (just an example) and thus loose their immersion capacity. Of course, it would be easier for a fresh new RPer to use simplier mechanics, but for most of the seasoned ones, immersion has to deal with their gaming history. They have to learn an other way to play (here based on action movies style realism instead of on “fantasy realism”), another logic, and will need to be familiar with it before to get immersion again.
So mechanics need to be simple AND their “logic” need to be easy to learn, as the learning period will always will never be an immersion period.
I really have trouble to express my point in English (sorry about that) but I think it is a bit like driving and tax. For most people, tax form filling is not such a so complex thing to do. If you’re the average person, you have only to fill your salary, maybe some stock revenues, and everything will come by itself on the sheet. On the opposite driving involves an always moving environment, other cars, people that might cross the street without notice, taking care of steering, gears, lights, and so on. Driving is much more complex activity than tax form filling. But most people can easily drive without thinking about it although they cannot fill a tax form without thinking about it. Thus complexity is not the only factor, even though there is an obvious relationship between simplicity and learnability.
2) Whatever the mechanics are, the mechanics need to be not disruptive about how the player imagines what’s happening. Either it is narrative or mechanical, he has to translate what the GM (if there’s any) says to him to the way he imagines situation. For some players, it might be clearer to say “you’re heavily wounded, you can barely move” or “you loose 7 hit point and get a -2 penalty to all your tests until you get taken care of”. There is not absolute better way to do (even though I must admit I prefer the first one), the best way is to minimize the time the player needs to “compute” it.
So I think (I speaking the top of my head), there are at least two factors: learnability and “translation”.
Hey, thanks for commenting.
Yeah, I think you’re definitely right about the simplicity thing. Simplicity isn’t as important as mechanics that the players can quickly familiarize themselves with. Sometimes those mechanics are going to be pretty complex.
I think your second point is actually related to the first. Not only do the actual mechanics themselves need to be easy to familiarize, but so do their results. The mechanics need to give you results that ‘feel right’. This is probably also a familiarization thing. If you have a super-hero game, then people who are familiar with the super-hero genre are going to feel that the mechanics are producing valid results, while people who aren’t into super-heroes might feel like the mechanics are totally jarring.
Thomas