Most people get the idea of the immersive sim wrong.

Common misconception #1: "but any game I care deeply about is immersive!"

no, it's engrossing. The words appear to mean similar things, but there's a component of being SUBMERGED--becoming a part of a thing outside you--that defines immersion.

Common misconception #2: "an immersive sim is any heavily systemic game"

Nope, a game that is ~just~ systemic is not an immersive sim. Breath of the Wild is incredibly systemic, for instance.

Common misconception #3: "an immersive sim must be first person"

I wish, but no.

Common misconception #4: "an immersive sim must support multiple play styles through obvious player intentionality."

Absolutely not. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is not an immersive sim because there's a way to punch through walls OR talk your way through OR hack your way in.

the "multiple playstyles" approach tends to create artificiality through distance--instead of becoming flexible and allowing you to live in the space, these games have a rigid, unrealistic approach to solving problems that are incredibly gamified.

this isn't a value judgement--there's no inherent wrongness with a game like, idk, Civ, right? It's just a board game, basically. So why would there be a problem with a game that is systemic and supports sneakers and talkers and punchers? there isn't. It's fine! Just not imsim.

(un)Common misconception #5) "an immersive sim is one where the space feels lived in"

lol no

any 3d game can create spaces that feel lived in. Plenty of 2d games can too. It's a component, but again, it's not the whole. The person who got an article written abt this was wrong.

So! Misconceptions out of the way! One reason that some recent immersive sims have failed spectacularly is that their creators have been looking--quite heavily--to tabletops and more traditional 'game' design. It's a kind of backwardsthink we often deal with in games, right?

like someone goes "i want to make a game" and then instead of making something cool they go "what's a game" and then read a textbook that prescribes what a game is and then they build something inside those parameters--there's no real grasp of the medium there.

video games and physical games (from shit like tag to board games to card games and ttrpgs, etc) are very, very different, and if you see video games as merely an extension of physical games, you'll never really understand the medium. You DEFS won't get immersive sims.

so at this point I could direct you towards the book "Hamlet and the holodeck," talk about how a lot of the early immersive sim theorizing explicitly discusses the idea of games-as-holodecks (I politely disagree with @radiatoryang's suggestion that we should give up on this)

So how about I point out that one of the Looking Glass Studios people described (paraphrasing) their first imsim as "what if we applied flight sim's simulation to a dungeon crawler?"

See, that's the key here.

So many people think this means "simulator."

oh yeah, Common Misconception #6: "immersive sims must be stealth games."

lol no, STALKER is the platonic ideal/most advanced immersive sim ever made, and it isn't a stealth game at all

Immersion is about putting a person into a space

a Simulation is an approximation of a real thing, a virtual modeling of the real

An immersive sim is a game that does its darnedest to put you in a believable, functioning space. It reduces as much of the gamification as it can, eliminates as much abstraction as possible... all so it can put you in another reality. Because it wants to be a holodeck.

Sure, it gets a lot of praise now, but most of the praise Far Cry 2 gets seems to come from people who didn't play a lot of Thief/System Shock/STALKER/etc.

Why am I bringing up Far Cry 2? Well...

Remember the complaints? There was actually a connection between most of them (fast respawning checkpoints, malaria, no friendly civilians in the world, etc). All of it came down to a lack of realism.

Far Cry 2 focused a lot on doing a bunch of very cool, 'realistic' things like the in-world map, the fire propagation, AI that would check on its friends if they were hurt, etc.

People loved that.

What they didn't love was the artifice.

When people talk about loving it now, they focus heavily on the immersive aspects and always kinda shrug and go "yeah the non-immersive parts sucked." The game deserved the reviews it got--it was trying to be two different games.

One half was very, very gamey and nobody praised that part. One half was very, very simmy and people loved that shit. They still do. They'd love it less if they played STALKER but that's because STALKER is perfect, but I digress.

there are some people who will say "look! nobody wants immersive sims because look at how badly several immersive sims sold!"

let's ignore the massive negative press surrounding both dishonored 2 (because bethesda refused review copies and youtubers got mad about it)

and mankind divided (because it was a broken piece of shit when it released--they patched it so much they literally corrupted my 19 hour save. also, remember the whole kerfluffle about awful preorder dlc or the shitty apartheid metaphor?)

there is nothing inherently wrong with the genre.

When done right, it sells incredibly well

Just look at STALKER.

Or, hey

just look at Skyrim.

*RIPS OFF THE MASK*

oh yeah baby, skyrim is an immersive sim.

i know a lot of fans are mad about it being an awful RPG but that's because it's an immersive sim

i also know immersive SIM fans have argued it's not an immersive sim because #reasons and because it's not a good stealth game.

ignoring, for a moment, that former looking glass people work on it (emil pagliarulo comes to mind--you know him for the dark brotherhood questline in oblivion, leading fallout 3, and writing the arrow to the knee line, as I recall)

skyrim, like stalker, like thief, like system shock, operates on a simple principle: the world is alive outside of you.

If you turn skyrim on and type ~tdetect (iirc?) and just watch the game play out, it will do its best to, y'know, be alive in some way, shape, or form.

like a dragon will show up because dragons show up and the guards will fight the dragon because the guards fight dragons.

It is not a perfect simulation, but it is one of the most impressive I've ever seen. It's robust.

You look at a game like Breath of the Wild and the bokoblins will run after you until you get out of their camp range and then they will stop. Yes, there are systems there, like fear states, but the game also resets every so often (moon) because it's not trying to simulate shit.

You play a game like Thief and you beat the shit out of a furry t-rex that belches poison in the sewers and every time it sees you for the rest of the game it will run the FUCK away from you because it KNOWS you are swordman. It has learned this.

an immersive sim is a game where the world exists as a living, breathing world despite the player, and the simulation of that world responds with as much robustness as possible to outside input without breaking.

and people fucking love it.

when you focus on just doing stealth (niche), or having clear, artificial paths for players (unimmersive), or only think your game is about systems (see a lot of 'roguelike immersive sims'), you limit your game's actual appeal.

but if you actually do the real immersive sim thing--if you make a game world that feels alive and responds interestingly to your interaction and strips away all that abstract board gamey nonsense

you'll sell as much as skyrim does

*fires gun*

sorry was I boring you?

when gamers say "I don't really do the main quest of skyrim, I just fuck around in the world," they are telling you they value the simulation more than anything else.

Why do you think GTA online is so popular? Look at how fucking immersive that shit is.

People love it when a game world responds to them naturalistically; an immersive sim is just one that goes all in on it.

You can't have an immersive sim without living, breathing AI. It needs to live outside your interaction.

I'm sorry the thread was long, I hope it made you laugh

btw I hope none of you think I was dissing Dishonored 2. I just don't want people to point to it as "we shouldn't make more games like this." It's a very, very good game--I mainlined it in two sittings and few games can defeat my ADHD like that.

It had external challenges.

If you want to make an immersive sim that sells just focus really hard on giving people a world that lives outside of them, that they can poke and prod and discover delightful interactions with.

by the way, I'm reading a book right now on human motivation and it turns out this might actually be FAR more compelling than extrinsic motivation mechanics and there's actually a huuuuge potential in these sorts of games. They're just held back by traditional game design thought

oh yeah one last thing: people really fucking love simulation mechanics in their games.

I alluded to this with grand theft auto, but do you know how many millions of people play Red Dead like Skyrim?

Just... run around, doing cowboy shit? watching the world react to them?

"why isn't red dead an immersive sim"

well, @joewintergreen gets it here: https://twitter.com/joewintergreen/status/1296408682318696452

people want immersion. people crave it. games labeled 'immersive sims' have a bad habit of failing to actually offer it. They're not even bad games!! some of them are among my favorite video games _ever_ (looking at you, dishonored 2)

"i don't know if doc loves dishonored 2"

here's me writing about why it's one of the best games ever

without ever saying 'immersive sim' https://kotaku.com/what-made-dishonored-2s-time-travel-level-so-good-1819596566