thread: 2005-06-02 : Immersion
On 2005-06-04, Jonas Barka wrote:
"I read you saying something like "dice fucks with my immersion in the game just like dice would fuck with my life if I had to roll them in real life to impress a girl". Am I reading you wrongly?"
Close, but not exactly. More like "dice fucks with my immersion in the game just like dice would fuck with *my sense of being me* if I had to roll them in real life to impress a girl". I have a feeling that I control my life, and choose my own actions. I want to experience exactly the same feeling when playing a character.
If you got an alien voice in your head (*please* consider this exaple in a serious way) saying stuff like "What are the motivation for this character in this scene", "What if I should bid five power to get this job" or "Ok, lets roll to se if he escaped the burning building", would this feel natural? Wouldn't you get a feeling that something is really wrong, that you eaither is mad or that someone is watching you and controlling you. You wouldn't feel like a real person at all. You would most certainly get distracted.
Why do your character doesn't get distracted by things like this? Can you really feel that you are him while in the same time rolling dice for his actions. I can't and thats why I do not use rules when I want this kind of immersion.
"I guess (hope) you cannot kill people for real in your roleplaying games. That's a rule. Does that interfere with your immersion when your character kills another character in the game's reality? If it doesn't, why do other rules, like dice rolling or card turning or hand sign or whatever?"
In table top rpg:s there are lots of things that interferes with the immersion. The surroundings aren't real, just imagined, lots of characters are played by the same person (the GM) and many other things. Not getting to actual kill something is not the biggest problem at all for the sake of immersion (not that we usually kill stuff in our freeform games). There are many things limiting the immersion but why should you add onother one that is as easy to get rid of as saying "we have no mechanics for conflict resolution".
In a larp things are a bit different, but there are still problems with the immersion. The surroundings are not always perfect and I meet persons i know in real life and that can be distracting. Of course you cannot kill people for real and that limits the level of combat immersion (and *no* I do not strive for this to be allowed, at least not in the games I participate in). In the type if games I usually play this is solved by having no combat at all. How often do you engage in combat in real life? Probably seldom or never. There are so many scenarios to play where real fights are unlikely. It happens that you (as the character) feels like attacking someone and in these cases you have to drop the immersion and choose some other course of action. But again, just because there are limitations to the extent of the immersion, why introduce even more of these limitations in the form of rules?
Are you from Sweden? If so it would be easy for you to try one of these games, like Mellanrummet (www.ncid.org/mellan). Without trying this way of playing, how can you know that it wouldn't be ruined by adding rules? I do play rules heavy games and realise their values but if you want to focus on immersion, the rules must go.
/ Jonas
unrealitiesofmine.blogspot.com
