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From reading Laurie N. Taylor’s thesis, Video Games: Perspective, Point-of-View, and Immersion, I picked up on a certain point she made about immersion and the perspective view-point the game presents to the player. It regards her assertion that in party system games and simulation games, “the player plays as a god, general, or director figure, that is a force outside of the game that directs the actions of the game…the player functions as a force that acts on the game…instead of within the game space”. I find it strange that she would simplify the notion of playing a simulation or party game in the same way that she describes other videogame scholars as simplifying the immersion idea to being only effective in first-person viewpoint games.

It seems to me that she does not think the player has capacity to identify or become immersed in the experience of more than one character or figure within the game – that the player can only become effectively immersed within the game (talking about situational immersion here) as a single character, and as soon as the player is offered more than one character to control then they are no longer acting within the game space. This is merely my opinion, but I think that the player can still feel as if they are acting within the game space as more than one character – in fact, I think it expands the possibilities of action in the game environment if given the opportunity to play as more than one character.

Take games like the Tekken series for example. Like most arcade-style fighting games, it offers you the choice of playing the game as more than one character, although only once at a time. This extends to games like Final Fantasy, which Taylor mentions, where you control a party of characters rather than just one, but you still take turns using each one. As the player, you can still identify with each character individually and become immersed in their individual stories and actions within the game space, and even if you are a ‘force’ which is compelling them to act within their environment, does that not mean that it is you which is acting within the game anyway (whether as a secondary medium or not)?

This goes for the strategy games in which you act as a god/general figure as well. When I was about 10 I was obsessed with Age of Empires (this obsession was allowed as its ‘educational content’ meant my parents went a bit easier in letting me play it for long hours), a strategy game in which you take control of a Stone Age tribe and build it into a glorious tyrannical force which rules the land. While it is true that you are essentially playing as an unseen figure that commands the tribe members, I still think in these games that you are acting within the game space, as what you are ‘telling’ the characters to do is having effects on the in-game environment – much in the same way that when you ‘tell’ your character in Resident Evil (played in third-person fixed perspective) to destroy the zombie before it eats your brain, it has effects in the game space. I invested a lot emotionally into my tribe members in Age of Empires, and I would get really cut whenever some invading barbarian would destroy my villager’s homes or take out an entire legion which I spent lots of gold developing, and like some kind of weird virtual stone-age patriot I would rally my troops and strike back (I was a very passionate child). The point is, I really felt like I had an impact on the ancient environment of the game and it always felt good when I managed to build a rather sophisticated military-state society from a few villagers and very low resources…until my opponent arrived with their catapults and warrior elephants, that is.

What do you all think? Does any of this apply to sports games? It’s something I tried to think about but my ideas were more warbled than usual, to the point where I couldn’t post them here.