Personal Task: Getting into Immersion

I'm a huge fan of stories, in books, in film, in comics, via poorly reconstructed charades whatever the medium I enjoy storytelling and as medium of storytelling I think games are really good for it and have a lot of potential to be better. Good stories are immersive and video games have the power to be one of the most immersive media out there, I've lost count of the number of times I sat down to play a game in the morning to then realise it’s midnight and I’m sat in the dark. I've said this opinion to number of people and the replies range from agreeing with it to looks of pity for my clearly disillusioned mind.

I’m an avid reader but I find a game can a lot of the time be more successful at getting information across to me simply because it uses visual communication. While reading A Game of Thrones I constantly found my immersion breaking at parts were the author was adding a lot of heavy details to set a scene. There would be a tense confrontation between to characters when suddenly focus would shift from them completely to describe in detail the dinner the servants had just brought in and books are stuck with that issue, since they usually have no other way to get the image across but with more words. Games are a lot simpler, a quick visual image and your brain registers there’s food there and with that done you can quickly get back to the characters. 

Yup. Bread, cheese, fruit, Done. Now let's move on with our lives.

Of course that’s the kind of thing that film and television has over books but games also have another dimension to that since you can actually interact with the scene. Unlike a film where you watch the scene as some kind of invisible floating spectre with no input but usually with a game not only am I going to watch this dinner scene I going to knock over all the wine goblets, because I can!
The use of multiple endings and choices is also a bonus that games have. Everyone I have ever met has had a moment where they’re screaming at a movie protagonist to not go outside to see if the coast is clear after there was quite obviously a psychopath nearby a moment ago. Naturally the actor on screen does not care about your wise and sage advice because you have no control over this pre-recorded person, but that does not have to be the case with games. This protagonist is bound to the will of my directional pad so there will be no heroic, death wish antics on my watch, I’m going to crouch behind this chair until the madman goes away.

Though games are by no means a perfect tool for the job and they bring a lot of issues especially with content size, the capability limitations and the amount of freedom and control you can give a player before they inevitably mess something up. As technology develops games are gaining more and more potential to be amazing storytelling devices and while some aspects are doing a wonderful job I’m of the opinion that a lot of it is being handled nowhere near as well as it could be.