Game Design Ideas

These days “immersion” seems to be the big buzz-word for marketing departments. Marketing, being hype driven as it is, tends to stick that “immersive gameplay” label on every single game retail box, console and demo video they release. On a deeper level, everyone in game development seems to agree that “immersion” is an important achievement, if not the ultimate goal of playing games: immersion makes players feel passionately about a game and crave for more of the same.

Unfortunately, many game designers have failed to analyze the constituents of immersion, and have treated the concept as if it were magical – impervious to analysis! In this article, I will try to explore what immersive gameplay is, and how the state of immersion can be created.

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Sooooo…What does “Avatar” have to do with what I would like to call “the perfect game” and what is “Limbo”?

Well,…just as the avatar machine technology allows Jake Sully to delve into an alternate reality, where he is stronger and faster, and able to walk, and experience a “new” world, to the point where it changes him, the perfect video game could, and should change how you see the world by allowing you to experience the results (long- and short-term) of your actions, and by enabling you to show, and share your emotions with other inhabitants of the “game world”, which I will call “Limbo”. In this article, I have tried to describe how such an alternate world should look and feel like, and how it can be realized without “avatar-level” technologies!

(There is of course another reason for using this image from the movie on this article: I just recently saw the movie, and it blew me away – there is just so much of what I’d love to see in persistent worlds in the “actual world” of the avatars!)

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Major publishers and developers keep churning out game after game, without any innovation in gameplay or content, and, though we gamers keep paying them our hard-earned cash, we keep wondering how many innovative and revolutionary ideas had to be sacrificed on the altar of the so-called “market-oriented design”. There must have been a large number of lost chances for change over the past two decades, or else computer games would be the driving force of many economies, we think- and we would probably be right. So why don’t the big boys in the industry get the point? Why don’t they give us revolutionary games as they did in the past?

In this series of articles I will discuss the reasons for the lack of creativity in design in the game industry from a developer’s point of view.

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