There is a quote that I can’t find. I’ve looked for it all week. I’m looking for it now. Oh well.



It might be the case that someone–Truffaut or Godard or another New Wave director, maybe–once said something like this: “The way to watch a film is to sit in the theater, in your little chair, while smoking a cigarette. The cigarette will remind you of your body, of the little chair, of the theater, and you will resist the pull of the screen.”

It was, I think, something like that.

Image Credit: StrafeRight.com

Ruining My Immersion

For years, if someone asked me why I liked Far Cry 2 so much, I told them it was about “immersion.” Even after Rich Lemarchand, Ben Abraham, and Robert Yang laid into the term to reveal its flaws and political problems, I still felt compelled to weasel around and reclaim it. “Okay, if not immersion, embodiment maybe? Or identification?” I was desperate to address the way in which I felt physically implicated in the gunfights and hand-held maps and field surgery of Far Cry 2.



The focus on “embodiment” in Far Cry 2 wasn’t novel in kind, only in execution. As Leigh Alexander wrote last fall, games have been centered around the player for a long time (or at least, our discourse around them has been):

“You" is a fundamentally-present concept in games … Despite all the modern industry’s talk about “storytelling”, and despite all the earnest comparisons to immersive cinema that people often make when trying to get others to take games seriously, we’re not acclimatised to talking about them in narrative terms. We talk about you. … In Destiny, “you” do this, you do that. In Super Mario Bros., you have to rescue the princess. When you hand your friend a controller, you’re less likely to say, “Okay, you are Lara Croft, and Lara is hunting for treasure.” Instead, you tell them: “Here’s how you jump. You need to get over there.”

In this way, “immersion” (understood in the broadest way possible, or perhaps understood instead as “Attention” as Lemarchand and Abraham suggest) has always been a goal. Developers have just gotten more effective at pursuing it (and maybe at marketing it, too).

Somewhere along the path of considering all of this, I’ve strayed from this desire to defend “immersion.” Not because I’m ready to fully give up on the term (I’m too invested in salvaging things for that), but because I feel like this heightened form of “immersion” is the increasingly the norm (or at least a typical goal) for a certain sort of game. As the Far Cry series grew in popularity, as the First-Person Shooter got faster (and heavier) with the releases of Titanfall and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, as RPGs asked us to meander longer, as Rockstar added a first-person camera to GTAV (finally catching up to what GTA modders have been doing for years), as critics praised Dark Souls-style environmental storytelling, as Bungie threw away the singular protagonist and instead offered Destiny players the ability to create a player character they’d rarely even see… this sort of “immersion” began to feel commonplace.

(Not all games follow this model, obviously: I’ve spent a lot of time with 4X Strategy games like Sid Meier’s Starships and Endless Legend over the last year, and those have little interest in making you feel “embodied.” And some of the games that do want me to feel “embodied” have been unable to elicit that feeling from me because their definition of who “You, the player” is fails to account for me, the player: Watch Dogs put me in the center of a networked city, but couldn’t imagine that I’d want to actually connect with someone; Animal Crossing: New Leaf made me feel the rhythms of a warm spring day, but it tried its hardest to keep me from doing that in a form I recognize as “me.” Yes, immersion is bullshit, but I can’t help but wish that these games would’ve accounted for me so that they might try to bring into their fold.)

I’m not only turning away from “immersive” games because they’re increasingly popular, though. I’m turning away because “immersion” is least interesting when it’s being pursued directly. It’s far more compelling when it’s addressed skeptically, undermined, or toyed with.

This attraction to media that plays with its own form and conventions isn’t new, either. In his essay “From Work to Text,” critic Roland Barthes outlines his reasons for preferring the latter to the former. “Works,” he says, are the sorts of books that exist fully on the page, on the bookshelf, in the store. They have a dominant reading–which is both to say that there is a single, major way to understand it and that they fit nicely into the status quo. “Texts,” on the other hand, live beyond the page. They live in the reading (and in the re-writing). They don’t only rely on the formal conventions of their genre, they anticipate, address, and undermine them. Texts are social and they are plural–we bring our readings to them, and can continue doing so indefinitely. They are active, unfinished, and playful.

While later post-structuralists built on this essay in order to argue that every “work” is actually a text, Barthes specifically wanted to address (and admire) the work done by writers who actively pursued “textuality.” And so, while yes, if pushed hard enough I could produce a reading of how even Call of Duty, Battlefield Hardline, or Dragon Age: Inquisition’s do something interesting with “immersion,” I’m more interested in talking about those games that actively address the very process of addressing; the ones that recognize that “the game” doesn’t only exist on the screen, but instead exists in a conceptual space shared by hardware, player, programming, writing, society, genre, and history.





Do You See Me?

I’m sitting in a cafe and wondering what the people beyond me think they’re seeing on my screen. Do they see a game? Or do the flickering, stuttering images on my screen really read like security feed to them? Are the pristine hallways and cramped storage rooms enough like the ones in our own bureaucratic centers? Do the prison guards walk with the same intimidating presence?

I’m playing République Remastered, a recent re-release of the 2013 smartphone stealth-action game. The protagonist of Républiqueis Hope, a girl caught in the middle of revolution and conspiracy in an Orwellian dystopia. But while you direct Hope from hiding place to hiding place, you don’t really play as her. Instead, you play as you, the player with the phone (or mouse) in your hand and access to the cameras and security systems of “Metamorphosis,” the oppressive facility that Républiquetakes place in.

As you direct Hope through Metamorphosis you zip from camera to camera and watch the live feed pour in. At any time you can hit a button to freeze the action and navigate the security network at your own pace. You steal keycodes and open doors. You hack into phones and computers. You locate weapons and information to equip Hope with. But she uses those weapons. She’s the one who needs to avoid the guards. It’s not good enough for you to get into the locked room. You need her to get there too.

(A thing Camouflaj couldn’t count on is that I’m playing République Remastered on a tablet/laptop hybrid, which can’t quite keep up with these enhanced graphics. I don’t mind, really. In some ways this is better. The lag. The sound of my computer’s fan. The warmth of the screen in my hand. The game shudders when it needs to show me detailed faces, and when I decide to take control and freeze time, it snaps firmly into place, announcing my power. This is immersion that no one could count on, but still, I can’t ignore it.)

Through your time in Metamorphosis, you’ll do more than get valuable information about the République’s various political factions. You’ll also access dossiers on Metamorphosis’ other inhabitants, from guards to officials to other prisoners. You’ll learn their names, their medical histories, their crimes. You’ll see what games they like to play. Some of these are even real people–Kickstarter backers who paid enough to have their names (and, for some, their faces) in the game.

But they’ll never see you. They’ll see Hope. They’ll see Cooper, one of the allies that you and Hope rely on throughout the game. But you’re safe. No one will learn your name or your face. You can’t touch the world of Républiquedirectly, but you are its perfect voyeur.

Except–and Camouflaj could not count on this, either–I’m in a cafe, and I’m wondering what the people behind me think. And it strikes me that this is one thing that the PC re-release loses: the likelihood that your perfect voyeurism could itself be seen. When I first played République, it was on a train headed through upstate New York. And as I thumbed over the screen, panning the camera across the room so I could better study the patrol routes of the guards, I caught sight of the passenger next to me with his eyes on my screen. I wonder what he thought.

Image Credit: Reddit User Ponyofduality



“Messages Transmit to Other Worlds”

I do not have a take on From Software’s Bloodborne, and I hope I never need to give one. (The next time I write about a FromSoft game, it better be about an entry in the Armored Core franchise. If it isn’t, please yell at me.) What I do have is an accounting of why it is I like Bloodborne, and the titles in the Souls series that preceded it.

I like the marks on the ground that, when I activate them, show me the final moments of other players who stumbled at this spot.



I like the messages that players leave for each other out of a cut-and-paste pidgin. Messages encoded with a very specific meaning in mind which produce a certain spark of frisson when translated into something useful.



I like the theorizing about the mythology and history of these worlds. In fact, I like the theorizing more than I actually like any of the theories. In these games, a final historical account is always deferred. Instead we get puzzle pieces. No, that’s wrong: you put together a puzzle and see a picture. We get crayons. We get orange and blue and green and are told: Draw something together. Draw the sun over a hill. Draw a colourful bird. Draw a forest on fire.



I like the frantic IMs and DMs and tweets: “Did you see…” “Are you in…” “What sort of…” “How do I…”



I like the building and re-building and counter-building of different sorts of characters. The exploits and the counter-exploits. I like the huge tables of numbers even though I don’t read them too closely.



I liked that when I first imported Demon Souls (on the word of a friend of mine who insisted that no, no, it would never be localized), I had to translate Japanese fansites and forum posts to get my bearings.



(on the word of a friend of mine who insisted that no, no, it would never be localized), I had to translate Japanese fansites and forum posts to get my bearings. I like that to play Dark Souls II with a friend, we had to perform a strange ritual of menu choices and geographic positioning and timing. We counted aloud together and nothing in life ever makes me count aloud with my friends. And it doesn’t work sometimes, and that’s okay, neither did alchemy, but have you seen their beautiful charts?



And, yes, I like the difficult, deliberate, weighty combat. Yes, I like the restrained, environmental storytelling. But these are secondary to (and support) my real attraction: These games encourage you to play them even when you put the controller down. Browsing the fan encyclopedias, reading fan debates on the lore, flipping through the art books (with their exclusive information): These are not secondary activities for these games. They are the gameplay. They are as part of the gameplay as the inventory system and as the level design. Said differently: A Bloodborne level doesn’t just include the on screen architecture, it also includes the social architecture built around that level.

Again, this isn’t new. BioWare spent the entirety of the last console generation insisting that the best part of their games came the day after you finished them, standing around the water cooler and comparing notes with your friends. But the Souls games leverage this always-already present sociality in a way that even BioWare doesn’t. In Mass Effect, I progress forward alone and then address this progress only in retrospect. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, I tap into the social past, using my knowledge of the fantasy genre’s conventions to make choices about my character and world. But in Souls games, I need to be actively social in the present. I rely on the messages left by others throughout the game. I decide how badly I want to pursue one of the unadorned, obtuse side quests, and check to see if anyone else knows how to do it.

All of this is why I’m so often confused by the claim that what people like about Souls games is the difficulty. I can’t rely on myself in Bloodborne–or, at the very least, it would be incredibly foolish to try and do so. Again and again I’m relying on the work of others. To be clear: my point isn’t just that Souls allows for social activity. It’s that the sociality is part of the game. The game doesn’t exist on the screen alone. It also exists in our tweets. It exists in the hoops we jump through. It refuses me the idea that I can succeed as an embodied hero–I have to (want to) succeed not as a me, but as an us.





Collaborative Irony

Right now, Hella, a brutal mercenary, faces the prospect of killing one of her only friends. Months from now, another one of her friends, Hadrian, will need to make a similar choice–and he’ll decide that the killing is just and right. Of course, she doesn’t know that will happen, does she? Well… sort of. Her player knows it because we already played out that future interaction as part of a special Holiday session. But what should her character do with that knowledge?

Friends at the Table is a podcast that I’ve been hosting for the last six months or so. It is (and if you’ve listened you’ve heard this already) an actual play focused on critical world-building, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends. An “actual play podcast” is like a Let’s Play for tabletop RPGs: It’s a recording of a real play session that I GM for my friends. In our case, we’ve been playing an ongoing campaign of Dungeon World, a sort of story-focused version of D&D.

People play RPGs for lots of reasons: To overcome tactical challenges; to collaborate in storytelling with their friends; to explore interesting worlds. If you asked me why I came to Tabletop RPGs years ago (you know, around the highest point of my Far Cry 2 fandom), I’d tell you that it was because I liked to really explore my characters, to feel “immersed” in their worlds and their psyches.

And that’s valid enough. That’s one way to do things. In fact, to some degree, that is even in line with one of the golden rules of tabletop gaming: Don’t act on information that your character doesn’t have. You, the player, know that the Dread Dragon is weak to the puresteel of a distant mountain because you’ve read the Monster Manual. But Dardek, your Dwarven Paladin, doesn’t have that info. So, the common rule goes, don’t use that information. Stay immersed. Don’t “meta-game.” So keep that puresteel dagger of yours in your backpack.

Except… it turns out, that’s really boring. It’s also a fundamental misconception of what our roles are in storytelling. The tabletop player isn’t only the wide receiver on the football field, they’re also the camera. Even when the receiver doesn’t know where the ball is, the camera does. They’re not only Michael Corleone on the boat with his brother Fredo, they’re also Al Pacino, whose knowledge of that scene guides his acting throughout The Godfather: Part II.

So, my goal as a GM isn’t only to encourage my players to understand the minds of their characters (though it is that, too!), it’s to remind them of potential ironies and to guide them to the perfect framing. My job is to have the Dread Dragon strafe the party with a blast of fire, sending Dardek the Dwarf tumbling, his dagger dropping out of his backpack and landing at his feet. And it is my job to to whisper, “Oh, damn… it’s weak to puresteel, and you have that dagger, but you have no idea do you?” And then Dardek’s player laughs. “Dardek kicks it away. He’ll need something bigger than a dagger to take down a dragon.” And now our camera gets to linger there on the solution that none of the characters can see. And the whole table gasps and sighs and laughs together.

This is what I love about these games which reach out of the screen, or off the page, and into our lives. It isn’t only about my personal preference, not only about the joy I take in scrolling through a debate on a Wiki’s discussion page. It’s that these games reaffirm the social component of play. They insist that even when we play alone, we’re playing among others; that there is no immersion deep enough to get away from the world; that whatever character we inhabit, we still sit in our little chairs, in our little homes, in our little world.





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Disclosure: A copy of République Remastered was provided by Camouflaj for evaluation purposes.