Hi Richard,

Glad to hear you liked the post. I’ll have to agree with you that civilization is a game where analysis of a situation and weighing your options definitely is a must, however, I had games like Victoria and Victoria II in mind when I mentioned “micro-management”. As an avid Civilization fan, I’d say, when I am “in the flow” in civilization I am single-minded, all my production, my entire population, all my units, are geared towards conquest, my enemy has nowhere on the map to hide, and none of cities will escape swift and decisive conquest! On the other hand, sometimes, I face a situation where I am in a tight spot, with two or more stronger enemies, I have to pick which of my cities I will have to sacrifice to buy some time, I need to get as much money out of those cities as fast as possible – all in all, a bloody mess. And it is in a situation like this, that I would hate to be asked if I want to switch production from armor to a temple in some far-off little hovel that’s not relevant to the fight. To me, civilization can be very immersive when your goal is clear and you are snowballing towards it, and much less immersive when it comes to tough decisions, which have long lasting effects on the final outcome of the game. Civilization has an amazing design, but I don’t consider its mechanics to be that complicated. E.g. you change population ratios, to produce a certain resource type, and you use that resource to increase your power through one of three means: that is straightforward and very intuitive, exactly for the reason that you mentioned: it emulates a process we understand from our daily experience. Compare this to a game, where you manage wood that builds churches that spreads religion that creates ministers who raise the morale of one of your battalions which lowers their attrition rate, but increases their upkeep cost, which in turn means less rations, which reduces their general health, etc. In situations like this, your automatic consciousness (or sub-consciousness) starts failing you, and you quickly need to focus your attention on the situation and all the elements involved to be able to make sense of it all. This is the kind of micro-management that breaks immersion.
To sum up: You are right™ even though I think a game like civilization can have immersion-breaking moments, especially if you have invested heavily in a game, getting owned, and yet you are still expected to micromanage – though to be fair, civilization does allow you to “ignore” some of your cities, and they will keep running, even if not optimally, but oh how I hate that message “your city x has built a granary” when on the other side of the map, I have armor, bombers and battleships duking it out with another huge civilization! I am not suggesting that this makes Civilization a bad game – heaven forbid, I flunked a lot of college courses because of Civ I, but I think there is room for improvement. Imagine, e.g. if the game could smartly detect dangerous situation, and silently, take over micromanagement of units, cities, etc. that are deemed not important to the main battle and tweak parameters like tax rates, etc, at least for a short duration, to keep your civilization stable, yet maximally productive. Now, the game would have to be very unintrusive and smart about this, but it could be done, and I am sure it could improve immersion.
Once again, thanks for your comment…it made me want to go back to “that” game, which is a bad thing when you have a job and family,…well, maybe just for an hour

This was a really great and informative article, so let me start by saying thanks for writing it. However, there is one slight way that I disagree with you. Engaging the analytical functions of the brain doesn’t break immersion unless it is in a manner that is out of place with the surroundings. For example, if the player is crafting in an MMO, needing to know how many of a particular material is needed for a certain item does not, in and of itself, break the immersion. A particularly classic example of this is in the Civilization series. Players go into the game with the expectation of some degree of micromanagement, which by its very nature engages the analytical functions of the brain, but since that form of analysis is in-line with the conceptual understanding of running a country, it doesn’t break the immersion. The same could be said when trying to solve a mystery that is built into the story line, provided that it is presented in a way that is organic to the player and the avatar, such as the puzzles in Myst.