Just Elvia

Staff for The Escapist, Issue 84

"Coming down from a love affair can be like breaking an addiction. If you're with someone whose very presence fills your body with sexy endorphins, their removal from your life leaves you crushed. The hardest bit of coming down is finding a way to fill the hours you previously devoted to the object of your affections. Planescape was full of things to do - it wasn't challenging, but there was always something to think about. Which artifact to buy? Where to explore next? What's that angel creature really up to? Roleplaying games are an obsessive's dream." Kieron Gillen looks at games as consolation prize for a failed romance in "Alone in the Dark."

"Indeed, Introversion games frequently feel like the kind of game you'd carry over to your friend's house on a 5.25" inch floppy when dinosaurs ruled the earth. I asked if that feeling was intentional. 'Yes, I think that's definitely part of the Introversion aesthetic,' though he added, 'I'm not sure it's entirely intentional, but often seems to end up that way, mainly because it was a really creative and exciting period for game design, and we were growing up in the midst of it all.' As of late, he says, 'We've lost a lot of that fearlessness in the pursuit of innovation and great ideas in recent years, perhaps because the stakes are so much higher. It's all about making a profit nowadays, and the suits are the ones to determine what games will be profitable, not the developers, so we end up with this cookie-cutter approach to game development, with many publishers getting stuck in the design rut.'" Shannon Drake speaks to Introversion's Chris Delay.

"Designers were faced with a twofold challenge. First, they had to fit player failure into increasingly complex, fixed stories. The solution was to make failure independent of the story - you could die as often as you liked. The second problem was figuring out how to penalize failure without requiring the player to replay substantial areas. Around the same time, LucasArts, faced with a similar conundrum in the adventure game genre, removed death entirely. But RPG designers could not give up killing the player, in part because cheating death is such an integral part of fantasy stories. Instead, they relied on saving. If the player saved his game regularly, death would not force him to replay much. And if death ended the game, failure didn't cause any story problems because restoring a saved game "undid" the death and reset the story." Marty M. O'Hale explains why death is overdone in "Killjoy."

"From the moment the first cut scene plays, we're immediately assaulted with Emotioneering techniques. A beautiful and mysterious flower-girl walks the streets of the grotesquely industrialized city of Midgar. We're intrigued and pulled in by the girl. Who is she? The mystery motivates us to keep playing. Freeman calls mysteries a 'motivation technique.' The visual incongruence of the fantastical city pulls us out of our reality and into that of the game's in an emotionally resonant way. Visual incongruence is a "world induction technique," because it pulls the player into the fantasy world. "Moments later, the main character, Cloud , nimbly leaps from a train and prepares for combat. By the cut scene's end, we already know Cloud is an athletic action hero looking for a fight. Cliché? Just keep playing; a cliché Cloud is not. " Bruce Nielson highlights the long-lasting player endearment to Final Fantasy VII's characters as an example of "Emotioneering" in game design.

But what is it, really? We can put a neat little definition on it, but it gets us no closer to achieving it. We can point at things that have encouraged immersion in the past, but there's no guarantee it will work again. We can try to make a game that's pinnacle of immersive to all people at all times, but there's really no such thing. Why?