Game within a game

Psychological involvement with a game is a crucial aspect to create immersion. Our emotions are manipulated by reward of completion, fear of a lunging zombie or loss of a fallen digital comrade. However these emotions are merely imitations of real emotion as the stimulus for their creation is imitation itself. Like how poetry is created by an overflow of powerful feelings (Wordsworth, ‘Lyrical Ballads’) but for the reader the emotions that the words inspire are not real.

Mainstream gaming industries seem to have focused solely on immersion being solely created through superior graphics, which indie industries have been quick to prove wrong. One particular developer Notch and his game Minecraft (minecraft.net) has shown how incredibly immersive a game can be become even without cutting edge technology. Using simple block graphics and an open world environment, most synonymous with lego, the player shapes his world by destroying and collecting existing blocks and then reassembling them however they want. There is only one simple rule: at night, enemies will spawn that the player either has to destroy or hide from. Immersion comes from how psychologically enthralling the risk of losing progress is. The more the player becomes involved in creating their own worlds the more threat the enemies pose, with some that can blow up large chunks at a time. The game is only in development but there is already several blocks that act like circuitry and switches. Players in this game have created CPU, RAM and other pieces of computing technology, making observes ask at which point will people be able to play Minecraft in Minecraft?

This asks the question; what is real? Christopher Nolan certainly had us thinking about this question last year with ‘Inception’ Using the Minecraft example, when does the Minecraft become a reality in which contains fictions of its own. This seems truly an extension of the ‘infintite canvas’, demonstrating the extent at which this can operate. And as virtual realities develop and enter our world more, how can we distinguish what is real and not. Someone (citation required) once said the holodeck (as in Star Trek which could emulate anything) will be the last human invention as it will satisfy all human needs and will be the death of all innovation and creation.