In this long-overdue post, I would like to discuss diegetic design in video games. However, I must first make an important distinction.
REALISM is a perceived closeness to our reality. When we want to hydrate we are required to physically manipulate a drinking recepticle and place it in the path of flowing water until said recepticle becomes sufficiently full. While this sort of action is elementary (and mostly subconscious) when using our real bodies, it quickly becomes tiresome in a gaming format, not to mention nightmarish in implementation.
IMMERSION is a perceived closeness to any reality. Most succintly, it's consistency. You can be immersed in a fantasy novel when its world obeys persistent rules even though said rules are often unrealistic.
If you know the word, you can feel free to skip this section. Otherwise consider:
Have you ever seen a film mute its soundtrack when a character turns off a radio? Perhaps you read a book presented as though the main character is the author despite being a work of complete fiction. These connections immerse you in an experience by making its outer constructs into understood aspects of the presented world.
Turning a narrator into an author or a soundtrack into a radio station works because of audience expectations. Further, these expectations stem from previous media consumed; we typically dismiss the narrator as a story element because we know what a narrator is. Put differently, we each have a running list of things to disregard in fiction.
For video games, most traditional sources of dissonance are interface-related, especially found in a heads-up display (HUD). For example, health bars are a staple of most action games, as checking our wounds or making a medical appointment to rule out an infection are not fun, energetic tasks- unless you ask a cataclysm player that is, but I digress.
Okay, so if abstractions are there for a reason, why get rid of them? The answer is simple: the reasons we replaced them are dependent on realism. If we simply acknowledge that realism is not the end goal of all art, we can stop obsessing over accuracy and instead focus on engaging mechanics that don't stop the fun.
I find the virtual reality ecosystem a perfect place to look for such innovations.
Virtual reality game design can (and possibly will) take up multiple posts of its own, but for now I'll say this: current hardware places incredibly restrictive design limitations on developers. This is bad for VR gamers, but it has spawned a plethora of different ways to avoid several unsolvable problems, making for an excellent source of inspiration.
For the sake of this write-up I'll list only this subset of problems:
There are many ways to solve even just these two issues which also deserve their own articles- too much to write about!- but let's look at two:
Teleportation is often seen as a necessary evil for VR games because we know exactly why it's done: to reduce sickness and disconnect. However, Neat Corporation managed to solve the problem by turning it into a signature in 2018's ππΆπ₯π¨π¦π΅ ππΆπ΅π΄.
Your player is a robot with a hand fitted to launch portals. These portals connect to one sitting atop your hand, allowing you to peek around corners, making for a clever stealth mechanic. Critically, you can grow the portals to travel through them, wrapping the dreaded teleport-based locomotion style in an inventive sci-fi gadget.
The primary issue with physics simulation in a VR game is that it affects you. When swinging a weapon that can collide with a wall, your in-game hand is forced to stop while your real one proceeds. This- once again- creates an uncomfortable disconnect. In ππππ this is a non-issue because your weapons' physics don't have any bearing on your hand positions. The game opted for a cartoonish style and gave all of its weapons a comical level of floppiness. In return, the hilt remains permanently fixed to your actual hand position, completely eliminating the gap between your world and that inside the game.
I have a whole lot more to say (very sorry) but it's getting late and if I leave a half-finished document in my filesystem it'll never get done. As such, this is now part one! Stay tuned for part two if you're so inclined.