On Immersion: Do Trees Fall in Virtual Forests when Nobody’s around?
In his post “Edelweiss“, Tesh discusses how details that may appear insignificant to the player, or merely background information, are key in making a player’s experience of a virtual world real. And I couldn’t agree more.
Beyond the obvious (the backstory, the major themes of the world presented to the player), a major factor of immersion for me is when the game stops being a movie theater that only plays when I’m here to witness it and starts giving the illusion of existing for its own sake.
As I recounted on a comment on Tesh’s post, when I started playing WoW in 2005, it was after spending a couple of years in FFXI. And the defining moment that put those two games apart in terms of immersion was very early on, in one of the starting zones, when I stumbled upon a wolf charging and killing a squirrel.
It was a purely gratuitous detail, but it conveyed the notion that the wolf had “other things to do” than just mill around until a player comes and kills it as part of any “kill 10 foozles, collect its pelts” grindy quest. But it was that one single event that gave me a true impression, back in the day, that I was playing in a persistent virtual world rather than a scripted movie.
In terms of design, another element also clearly highlighted the difference in terms of immersion between both games, the reaction of NPC guards to hostile monsters. In FFXI, back in the day, for all practical purposes, guards were simply animated statues. When a newbie bit off more than he could chew in the starter zones, and started to flee, the monsters would follow through an entire zone, and if they caught up with the player while he was reaching the safety of the nearest city, the player would get slaughtered right in front of the impassible guards.
More often than not, whether by accident or (sometimes) malice, such a flight would end up gathering a whole mob of hostile monsters, and if the player made it safely to the city, they’d mill about at the gates for about half a minute before going back to their original location, attacking any player they’d come across. But the guards and the monsters never “saw” each other or reacted to the other’s presence.
In World of Warcraft, the behaviour was designed differently: Guards react to threats and will defend, if not necessarily the player, at least their post, and usually make short work of any threat coming their way. And regardless of any other qualities those two games may have, it’s such details, rather insignificant to the player’s character in the grand scheme of things, that give the world a solid, consistent texture.
We all know the popular philosophical riddle: “If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”. In terms of virtual worlds, the question becomes “If no player is in the forest, do the trees fall at all?”. The answer to that question makes a huge difference in the “texture” a designer gives its virtual world, and defines the level of immersion. For decades, computer games have been set in worlds where “no” was the standard answer. For persistent online virtual worlds, going with “yes” opens a new can of worms, to decide how far this concept can be taken. It will eventually lead to the question of how much lasting impact a player or a group of players can be allowed to have on the world. But at the most simple level, having a world that functions, with a bit of randomness thrown in for good measure, independently of the player’s presence, is part of the details that make a big difference on how it is being experienced by the player.
