I feel like those games in particular are even purer examples of immersive AI than suggested here. Rather than creating the illusion of characters that live their own lives, those lives are hard coded into the NPC's themselves. A lumberjack will be programmed to cut trees in the daytime, hit the bar in the evening, and go to sleep in his home at night. Even in the short term, in the case of Bethesda's games, NPC's will have a procedural conversation, end it, then proceed on to doing something else once it's done, nothing 100% scripted, nothing immediately looped.

This sounds good, but the problem is with also with linear games full of one-off encounters. We need to figure out how to make the player move on without the reason being "I've run out of things to watch".

@Adrian: Make something interesting in the distance. Behind the door, on top of the hill or past the corner you want them to go to. The problem with stuffing every area with still-standing stuff to look at is that the player will stand still, looking at it.

@Adrian: Maybe the solution is to make everything more boring :)

imo, Honestly, at the end of the day, the average player isn't interested in sucking the marrow from the game. Take those let's plays that the author couldn't find. I think the issue is, like the author said, that immersion is ok for people who don't really care about what the AI says, or trying to hear every bit of dialogue. However, for some people, the game isn't "shoot all the bad guys," the game is "get every bit of story that the creators included." And the latter involves watching the game in such detail that it involves a break of immersion. I guess, kind of ironically, story-world immersion is left to the party who cares about it the least.

There's not going to be a chance to have a contract with the player, because even though everyone has the same software, it's a slightly different game to everyone.

You hit the nail on the head. Before you complain about games not being realistic, take a look at your own actions! You aren't going to shoot some kids playing soccer, if you are on a mission you aren't going to offer them candy, you are just going to walk by! So walk by! In reality its very rude to just stand there and eavesdrop on a conversation, you are only doing that because it is interesting! The realistic thing to do is keep walking.

So Adrian is complaining that the conversation is so interesting that it forces him to sit there like a creep, but the NPCs don't react to him being a creep by stopping their interesting conversation he wanted to listen to? Hmm.

Exactly. But exiting a room or splitting paths do not cut it anymore. Sooner or later it all becomes too convenient, too predictable. We need one more layer. But it's damn hard to figure out what exactly should that be :)

@ Mark:

I got to agree with HL2 thing. Valve really made these moments seem natural and not staged. There are quite few things worth mentioning : like say event happens behind semi ope doors, and you can only see the events through a small gap, once the scripted event ends, some npc (or just environment) will close the doors, it both looks natural and gives player that subconscious cue "well, time to move" without breaking immersion.

Another example is making loopable moments seem natural even though they are loopable. This one is quite tricky, because you can't make any loopable event look natural. Example from HL2 comes to mind in Sandtraps (?) chapter, when you are instructed to drive to coast to some lighthouse, when that NPC explains this he goes on to his radio station and tries to contact one of the outposts. There begins loopable moment : he tries to contact that outpost, and sends this message many times (well, virtually infinite), but it seems natural, because that is how a person would behave in such situation - he could stand near that radio station saying the same 2 sentences for hours, because he needs to contact that outpost and this is the only way to do this.

Along these lines, I never questioned a 2D sprite standing in the same place, repeating the same phrase over and over, but a beautifully textured high-poly model doing the same thing breaks my suspension of disbelief. It's like the uncanny valley all over again...

I had to reply to the "sorry for the long comment" thing (as my first site comment). I've found that longer comments tend to be better written (more cogent, with better stylistics). I like them, myself. I vastly prefer them to inane twitter content. :)

The Bioshock Infinite fairground bit was horrible, the whole town was standing still and in a loop, it didn't help that they looked plastic. Perhaps they were supposed to be manikins in the player's dream like world, but it lost all immersion to me. The companion was done quite well though, and I liked they way she ran ahead of me at obvious way points.

...but no one ever comments on this. No one thinks you're rude for staring, or looking at the ceiling when they are trying to talk to you, or wandering around messing with their stuff, or turning your back on them, or attempting to look up their skirt...

The flip-side to this is that you ought to be able to nod in agreement, shake your head, or look at the floor to express your character's shame. The control scheme needs to deemphasize the switching of weapons, reloading and the like completely and support articulate conversational mechanics as a priority. If we want better plots in our adventures then we should prioritize all attempts that the player-as-character may make in the way of participating in a dialog as well as issuing orders when diplomacy fails and weapons eventually are required to persuade. We should view starting an adventure 'gun in hand' as a lost opportunity in terms of an interesting character arc - what happened to them to make them think that violence was the answer, why did diplomacy fail?

Normally, games contextually trigger NPC monologues when you stand in front of them. This isn't too bad if they are standing in one place like the waxworks in id's RAGE, but in Nintendo's Majora's Mask you are forced to race across the marketplace to interpose yourself in front of whoever you want to listen to and the only way to prematurely exit the "conversation" is to switch off the console. The solution to the first bit of unnaturalness is to let your character call out 'Hey!' to whoever is in the centre of their vision by pressing (A) on the 360 gamepad. The simplest reaction would then be for them to stop and turn to see who was shouting at them, but you could make it so that they didn't hear you if they were out of earshot, in conversation with someone else, wearing headphones, or deaf. Consequently, you might have to sprint up to them repeatedly pressing (A) to gain their attention, if only by inferring from the reactions of the surrounding crowd that you urgently needed to communicate with them. This frees them to be much further away, or on the point of leaving the area, or entering a building or vehicle and becoming unobtainable - thereby generating dramatic tension. Once the conversation was started you might want to prematurely exit their expository monologue (e.g. it may be your second playthrough), so you need some way to say 'Bye!' by interrupting them mid flow with a press of (B). They could get annoyed at you for this breach of conversational ettiquette and in future chose to ignore your hails, or worse: get angry. As you start without weaponry LT and RT default to melee attacks with the left and right fists - but these will only incapacitate, not kill and only until they gain assistance or eventually regain consciousness by themselves, luckily with no memory of the perpetrator if they were drunk.

As there is no way to construct sentences articulately with the 360 gamepad and using some form of natural language speech recognition is too unreliable (and reasserts the player's own identity and voice over that of the character they are role playing, breaking immersion), the player-character is constrained to passively respond to questions from the NPC that they have waylaid with 'Hey!'

The adventure knows what the player-character's supposed current active goal is, but it does not just have the NPC perform the necessary exposition you need to know what to do next, or how to do it, as they also have a modus operandi of their own. You may have to conceal your true intent and lie in response to searching questions:

NPC: 'Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party'

YOU: (X) 'No'

NPC: 'Do you consider yourself to be a Patriot?'

YOU: (Y) 'Yes'

...for illustrative purposes only...

Isn't it strange that most 'dialogue' in games has the NPC passive, subservient even? Where are the truly independent self-motivated dramatis personae whose interrelationships make stories emerge out of a deeper simulation?

Yet, this passive scheme wouldn't prevent you from tying an NPC to a chair and interrogating them by alternately beating them with LT and RT punches and simply refusing to answer WHY you were doing so, until they asked you if you thought they were responsible for some act of terrorism or betrayal, and when suitably softened up confessed to their part in a conspiracy. You could still mishandle this. Beat them too much and you may incapacitate them (it helps that LT and RT are analog triggers so you can hit them without full force). Go easy and they will test your resolve, dancing around your suspicions of them, questioning your motives and intel. You have to trap them intellectually with the right set of facts garnered from your prior investigations, weaken them and then at the appropriate moment give them a way out through their confession. This is where brandishing a gun in their face would just make them fear for their lives due to a possible angry split-second reaction. It is because NPCs can become plot points that melee can only incapacitate - it is important to keep that story thread alive after all the trouble the game has gone to in order to set it up.

Later, much later... you could find that this Cold War has grown Hot and you need to respond to a squad of marines under your command on some foreign battlefield. Again, they approach you with a radio message from HQ detailing the next objective, or somesuch and they await your decision to accept or reject the mission (the consequences of the latter on your career having to be balanced with the practicalities of the situation on the ground and how "suicidal" you feel that day under the circumstances). Confidence from the abstract hierarchy above and morale your tangible squad below exist in a dynamic flux that has to be constantly managed. The reason you are fighting and the trust you engender in those who fight for you reinforce themselves as you are required to intervene and reassure paniced soldiers who feel that they may never see home, that the war has turned against them and that they are on the losing side. They may well be, as the war itself is another simulated system generating stories, the outcome of which the game tries to make your contribution a deciding factor by dynamically rebalancing the circumstances you find yourself in whilst still varying the dramatic pace so you don't flake out with adrenal or emotional exhaustion.

Yet, command cannot rely on passive questions being responded to. Your squad could spread out and need to be ordered to Retreat. So, you press the Back button for them to seek safety - not that you have to micromanage them at all if you want to be a lone wolf as they will just do what they think is required of them, depending on their faith in you, when they aren't trying to resuscitate a fallen comrade and pull them out of the line of fire.

Pushing Up on the D-Pad will command your squad to directly move to a piece of intervening cover, or objective location (such as a building that should be secured, or vehicle that should be boarded), or assault the enemy target in the centre of your view. Similarly, pushing Left or Right will result in your squad performing a flanking manoeuvre on the same point of interest, again at their discretion regarding your foolhardiness under the circumstances. Morale will dip if you repeatedly order them into the path of unsuppressed targets, your role is to provide a "bounding overwatch" whilst they move, so that they can respond in kind when its your turn. Finally, pushing Down will make all the members of your squad regroup at your location that aren't pinned down by enemy fire.

Obviously, complex... but not involving a single cascading command menu and you don't even have to master its use if you don't want to involve yourself in that aspect of the game. Your typical weapon-related buttons exist in a 'Quasimode' where RB is held as the face buttons are used. You can then merrily reload, or... swap weapons with (Y) and there is no loss of player articulacy due to the fact that the forefinger is temporarily holding the bumper rather than the trigger as you wouldn't in reality be able to fire a gun whilst swapping it with your other one anyway. The same applies to not being able to reload whilst firing, they are mutually exclusive actions - and just as the face buttons can be given alternate meanings in this Quasimode, the D-Pad can be used to deploy a limited selection of military equipment, such as Claymores.

In games actions speak louder than words and given that they are systems of rules that can be used to simulate immersive worlds we should reject cutscenes whether or not we can walk around in them a bit whilst they trap us in a room whilst someone we haven't actively chosen to care about rambles on about something the author of the game thinks we should do next.

We should decide what to do next, we should be our own authors of our own dramatic misfortunes. There is no need to adhere to a predetermined script, however there is still opportunity for excellent incidental writing to elucidate character biographies and motivations to be teased out of NPCs as we gradually gain their trust, perhaps only to then subvert the situation by strategically betraying them. The game should attempt to continually reassert an underlying theme. It won't have a story as such, rather a history with an echo of a raison d'etre: some deep truth about humanity that your character, if you follow 'the contract' and role-play it as defined, will experience as you become entangled in a web of interdependent dramatis personae each driven by their own sophisticated machinations. The writer's role will be to create generic templates, or patterns, which when matching dynamical systems that have emerged in the game are woven into the history by manipulating the motives, place and especially time at which important events happen in the predicted future path of the player-character. It helps here that they can be semi-guaranteed to arrive at a given location 'sometime' in the fairly near future due to the assertion of time-sensitive friendly NPC entanglements. Your loyalties with NPCs are hard come by and a requirement to you progressing deeper into the adventure behind what were formerly "closed doors". Gain trust and you gain access and further introductions. Characters who were blithely unaware of your existence as anything but an innocent bystander come to view you as an acquaintance, friend, employee or witness, liability, enemy. To ignore a request to attend some location for some important reason can jeopardise a relationship and it is this psychological effect, or the drive to seek vengeance on the reported sighting of a foe, that can propel the player-character across an open world to a specific destination whose topography forms the stage for the contrived piece of ad hoc drama artfully forshadowed by its resonance with long-established plans percieved to have been behind a number of disparate reported or witnessed events earlier in the simulation and its rearticulation of the central theme. Hence, the writer still has a role, but multiple characters now use his words in a jigsaw of dramatic speeches bent to fit the specifics of each place and time. They do not have to actually 'speak' their lines... indeed, it is better with the state of current technology that they do not attempt to do so - subtitles will have to suffice - even though varying intonation was done with Starship Titanic via its Spookitalk system:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_titanic#Gameplay

However, it should be recognised that promising though this is, it is one thing to record multiple intonations of a word, for interrogatives, expletives and the finality that marks the ending of a sentence, it is another to do the same for all manner of emotions for a large cast of characters and pull off anything approaching a dramatic performance - even if the raw text were laden with metadata for the electronic thespian. Perhaps, this would work for an invented language like Klingon or Elvish for which the majority of players would be unable to discern a 'weak performance' and then use the subtitles to translate the gibberish - much as in Majora's Mask to a certain extent.

Ending on a purely practical note, Metro: Last Light could start off with your character being pushed forward as if by an invisible tsunami. They could walk or run to where they needed to be, ignoring all the incidental details as was their wont, or they could pause and observe... only for their head to be forced to turn away (whilst still allowing for some latitude of head movement), as the tsunami caught up with them and pushed them forward before the man cleaning his gun had to "exit stage left". The same would apply to a cut-scene temporarily disabling Jump so you couldn't bunny hop throughout. Asking the soldier if he is in desperate need of the toilet is just going to encourage the player to see what other 'Easter eggs' are buried in the game's code. We need to get away from thinking that we need to see everything, to unlock everything, to get our £40 worth... the way to do this is to make adventures based on themes underlying simulations rather than competitions in conflict with stories.

@ Nick "but no one ever comments on this. No one thinks you're rude for staring"

I seem to recall Alyx Vance from HL2 looking at me quizzically and asking "what?" when I looked her up and down during a moment of silence and no action. Although I agree it's very rare, it does happen in some games.

I often do a repetitive action on npc's to see if they react, quite often they do. Even in WoW the Night Elf npc guards will respond with several self aware comments that you keep clicking on them.

Things like npcs tracking your with their eyes and head, lowering your weapon when you speak to someone, these were all at one time not implemented although these days they are quite common. The trick is explaining to your publisher or investors why you need extra money to add in something that to an outsider may seem superfluous.

What can I say, games are weird. Most of the time, we are in 100% in control of a certain character. We tell him to move, he moves, we tell him to fire, he fires. And yet the rest of time the character is autonomous. For example, he kills someone we puppeteer him to, and then comments on the kill with his own voice, in his own style - one that's not necessarily ours.

It's an odd, schizophrenic experience. It should not work. It has no right to work. But it does not bother most people like it should.

The "pure" game will have a character that is 100% you, i.e. 100% of the actions allowed within the mechanics are yours. An example would be almost any shooter's multiplayer. But in Single Player games? Heck, even Skyrim features a cut-scene...

So for now the best we can do is not to bring the attention to the fact that "games are weird" - for example by not teasing the player to behave out of character by offering him an alcohol (or, if you do, make sure there are real consequences to this behavior).

@ Mr Chmielarz

Thank you for the reply. Actually, since I made my post someone I live with took an interest in the conundrum and took the view that I should stay in-character and act as Captain Grayson Hunt would. I am not playing as me as I wouldn't shoot someone, neither am I playing as an "alter ego" who would kill to defend themselves under the circumstances portrayed in the Bulletstorm as they would try to shoot their adversaries in the head quickly and cleanly, not perform sadistic acts of cartoon violence: kicking people onto large cacti or electrified panels. It was one of the reasons I disposed of my copy of 'Gears of War', as I ended up having more sympathy for the brutally dispatched Locust whose planet it was anyway...

So I did get drunk and as expected I was promptly ambushed whilst lurching around the disco with double-vision. What was interesting was that the game gave me an 'Intoxicated' skillshot for killing an enemy whilst drunk worth 100 points that I was able to convert to more bullets.

Aha!

The system of rules behind the game world was inclusive of the protagonists character flaws. My act of consistent role-play was the correct choice and the level of immersion increased as I got into the spirit of things and actively sought to leash enemies into a fan (100 points for 'Sucker'). The cartoon nature of the violence helped ameliorate my qualms, but it was more my decision to meet the game halfway and adopt the role of a sadistic drunkard that got me off my ethical hook much as if I were adopting the role of Richard III, or Hitler - I can portray them without that implying that I am equally flawed.

It reminds me of that line from the movie 'Total Recall'...

"What is exactly the same about every single vacation you have ever taken?"

My experience with Bulletstorm has persuaded me that, from now on, I don't want to play 100% as I would under those circumstances. I want to both escape into another world and escape from myself. Consequently, I will be rewarding consistent role-play in my own game as I think it brings the player into the gameworld through the lens of their character, making it more immersive.

I agree, that's why I said "for now". I stuck to this "pledge" in the rest of the game, e.g. whenever I felt like the conversation is dying, I moved on.

Think about it this way: when you are reading a mystery novel, you don't read the ending first - because you don't want to ruin the experience for yourself. And yet when we're playing a shooter, we fire at the sidekick to see if the game does anything about it. Why?

But still, I agree this is on the developer mostly, and we should keep finding ways to make better and more immersive worlds.

@Pallav I pretty much agree with you here. It seems to me that the needed amount of resources to fix these issues could always be better spent elsewhere and I think of these types of complaints as nitpicking - but who am I to say other people don't actually get their moment ruined by looped animations?

I was thinking about what immersion actually meant to me the other night and I arrived at the conclusion that I couldn't recognize the "being there" experience personally. To me, immersion is simply being very engaged in the gameplay while being kept company with music, sound and graphics that I like a lot. I prefer the word atmospheric since it describes what I want from a game world better than immersion.

Do some people really suddenly believe they are in another world, literally? Somehow I doubt it. More than anything, I want to understand how different/similar my "immersed" game experiences are from those of people who care about animation loops.

"As long as the player knows he/she is playing the game on a PC/Console, he/she always knows that its a game." - tell that to people freaking out when playing Slenderman. In other words, it could not be further from the truth. Just because most games either do it badly or have some smaller issues does not change the fact that the full (or "satisfying level of") immersion is achievable, as proven by Amnesia, Journey or The Walking Dead.

That last game is a great example, btw. Most people start TWD the way they start most games: they try to "game" the system. Around third episode they begin to let go and start doing things they want to do, things they would do if they were really there, and they stop looking for gameplay benefits. If that's not immersion, then I don't know what is.

I would agree, this is a player problem. This is the kind of problem I hear from people who don't like video games. If this kind of thing breaks immersion for you, you probably just aren't the kind of person who will really enjoy video games, sorry =(. Enjoyment of video games requires a brain that is able to fill in the 1000-and-1 cracks in the facade and maintain the sense that yes this is REAL!

Craig, I would gather that many people would equate engaged and immersed quite closely.

I would suggest if you are having dreams about a game, you have become immersed in that game.

Hi TC, thanks for the comment!

I think you are largely correct, but the subtexts of the words are different in this context. Engaged means it is taking up your powers of concentration and holding your attention and you are actively using your mind. Immersed has a subtext of believing in the gameworld, at least as used in the article above.

So for example if you were playing a game of bridge, you might be engaged, but being immersed (as used in the above article) doesn't really make sense, as there is really no "alternate reality" you are being asked to believe in or take seriously.

I think the problem with the many of the game examples listed in the above article and the replies to the article is that there is no gameplay. In the article

http://www.theastronauts.com/2013/01/gamers-are-the-ultimate-troll s/

quoted by this author the example is given of the extra overhead required when the room is being flooded and "The sidekick screams: “This way!”, and climbs up the ladder to the upper floor. " and the player does not follow them. So the gameplay consists of following someone out of a flooding room. Big f***ing whoop-de-do. That is lame-oh gameplay. You are giving me a die-or-do-not-die choice and making sure I know which is which. How is that mentally engaging (although of course it could be immersive)? It sounds like you have an interactive movie. And so of course a person playing the game gets bored of the nonexistent gameplay and so sticks around in the flooding room to see what happens. Sorry, maybe I am being overly harsh to some specific games...

"Basically during the game, the player shouldn't get an opportunity to become an observer, unless it's part of the gameplay (ex: to solve a puzzle)."

I don't know if I'm not understanding what you mean clearly, or I just disagree 100%. Much of the enjoyment of a game like Skyrim or STALKER or even Elite comes from simply watching the world simulation do its thing without player input.

I'm glad that you actually asked. It's a good question, but there is a difference.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat is an open world game done right. When travelling, the player always has to be quick on his feet to avoid getting caught by the radioactive storms, but he also has to find food, bandages and might also want to avoid confrontations with creatures or bandits to save his ressources. Players are always driven to play and survive, because of the many incentives.

Dark Souls is another open world game done right. The world itself is the puzzle, players have to solve it and death can be used as a tool. That's all they can do; progress through the world.

Skyrim is a great open world game, but its design isn't as effective. Sure, the players can explore the world freely, but they aren't driven to do it as much as they would be in STALKER or Dark Souls. And when gameplay can become secondary, it's an opportunity for players to disconnect themselves from the experience. During the game, the focus of the player should be 100% on playing it. Players should never get the opportunity to focus on something that is not related to gameplay, the same way it wouldn't make sense for a multiplayer map to feature secret areas or super cool scripted events that would distract the players or work against the main purpose of the game.

Hmm.

"Skyrim is a great open world game, but its design isn't as effective. Sure, the players can explore the world freely, but they aren't driven to do it as much as they would be in STALKER or Dark Souls."

Despite playing all three STALKERs more than once, I've logged nearly 500 hours in Skyrim alone. It's certainly been more effective at immersiveness for me. :) And I'm pretty sure it's not just me.

I like this comment thread a lot because it's doing a great job of exposing how all of us (me included) tend to minimize the value of other forms of play besides the kinds we personally prefer. I suspect the same people who are commenting here that real immersion comes only from mechanics -- excluding story, NPC behavior, graphics and world-dynamics -- are the same people who argued (or agreed) that "Proteus is not-a-game."

That perspective simply ignores the reality that there are plenty of gamers whose immersion comes less from following rules (mechanics) than from the gameworld being built to feel like a believable place. Looping dialogues do matter to these gamers -- even if it's irrelevant to other gamers -- because robotic behavior from "people" makes it harder to invest rationally and emotionally in a constructed gameworld as a plausible place.

Not every gamer is wired to feel this kind of pleasure. But there certainly are such people, and their idea of what's fun is worthy of games that they can enjoy, too.

I did not claim that Stalker was more fun than Skyrim. There are many things that hold back Stalker from being super fun, but I can see the potential in the game. Its open world design isn't perfect, but its years ahead of Skyrim.

That said, I'm connvinced that a Stalker game produced with the same budget as Skyrim and by a talented team could be more fun to play.

" During the game, the focus of the player should be 100% on playing it. Players should never get the opportunity to focus on something that is not related to gameplay"

Right, I get you. In that case, I guess it's just 100% disagreement, then. :)

If the experience isn't about play, then how could that still be a game rather than just an interactive experience or simulation?

Formalist bellyaching over what is supposed to be "a game" or not is a waste of time. I know that I enjoy perching on a rock above the Whiterun plains in Skyrim and seeing a giant herd some mammoths, or a dragon attack a group of bandits in the distance, and I most definitely don't want some phantom designer over my shoulder going PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY.

And before the retort that, fairly or unfairly, I think you may be about to make, no, the experience of watching those events in-game is entirely different from watching the same events in a youtube video.

"I dunno which game it was, but npcs went like "What are You staring at ?" When i was staring (!)."

I think that was 'Bothers In Arms'

"...moved on..etc etc. I had better places to be than watching some dude polish his gun...There was so much adventure ahead!"
Exactly it sets the scene, and you get a little bored and move on. Bioshock Infinite on the other hand was automaton city... .. .