Immersion and Narrative: Games as Worlds
Michael Lee
Undertale | Toby Fox
For Part One of the Immersion and Narrative series looking at video games as film, please click here.
Video games are, and always have been, an active—rather than passive—form of entertainment. They are a game after all, and games are heavily tied to the notion of play. As such, when a player enters into a game world, allowing them some room to affect that world through their own creativity lends a deeper level of commitment and engagement to the game.
Undertale | Toby Fox
Detective Work
While player interaction with the game world can be experienced on many levels and in numerous ways, what I am most interested in looking at is how we imagine certain elements of a game world to be. Now, this might seem like a vague idea, and it is, but what I am getting at here is that once presented with a game world to explore, how we interpret the various symbols, narrative codes, characters, and even music of the game world becomes crucial to our engagement with it and immersion within it.
The study of symbols is known as semiotics, and when we participate in the interpretation of the shapes, colors, designs, objects, and movements of a game, we assign meaning to these objects and configure them ourselves. In essence, building our own working dictionary of a game’s world. Through the interpretation of signs and symbols, we are induced into further action. This is important work that, if given to the player to do, creates instantly stronger connections to the video game. Here is where we get into two games that do this exceptionally well. Undertale (2015) and Omori (2020).
On the surface, Undertale and Omori are aesthetically homages to classic JPRGs of the Super Nintendo era. Both games are made up of simple character sprites, feature 2-D backgrounds, and use battle mechanics that emulate the stylings of Dragon Quest or Earthbound, all set to catchy, short tunes that loop infectiously. One could dismiss these games as being retro nostalgia bait. But there’s a little more going on here. As the mainstream video game market pushes graphical fidelity to its limit, and produces more and more video games as pure spectacle, how is it that two indie RPGs, making use of game mechanics from nearly 30 years ago, are more effective at drawing the player in than the latest innovations in the industry?
Undertale | Toby Fox
Diving in Headfirst
Both Undertale and Omori drop the player into their fantasy worlds with very little preamble, Frisk falling into Underground, and Omori awakening in Headspace. These games establish the framework and rules of their respective game worlds quickly. Both worlds are very much unreal, both in their fantasy trappings and graphical simplicity, and we—as the player—are asked to suspend our disbelief immediately. Here is where we reach a crucial point as we try to establish why Undertale and Omori draw players in. Literary critic Marie Laure Ryan says that the process of suspending one’s disbelief starts by requiring players “to first admit to the unbelievability of the alternative world and then submit to its autonomous laws and particular narrative logic.” From here, the player can begin to explore, interpret, and push forward the game world and its narrative.
The first task as a player when presented with a game world like this is to start interpreting symbols. Both Undertale and Omori are rich in symbols that require the player to make sense of them. This is done actively as the player moves Frisk or Omori through the space of the game world. Talking to characters, interacting with items, freely moving from map screen to map screen to get a lay of the virtual land are all part of the process of reading and understanding the symbolic texture of the game. Because these are fantastical spaces, we must use some level of imagination to connect the symbolic dots in the worlds of Undertale and Omori. The pixels that make up Omori’s character sprite are not a photorealistic representation, and have to be read as a a symbol for a “human boy”. This work requires the player to invest in the game experience to establish that connection, furthering their suspension of disbelief. Harvard professor Chris Dede explains the importance of suspension of disbelief and immersion:
“the more a virtual immersive experience is based on design strategies that combine actional, symbolic, and sensory factors, the greater the participant’s suspension of disbelief... an immersive experience requires the participant to receive compelling sensory information about the simulated environment, take action and cause reactions within that space and experience deep emotions triggered by archetypal symbolic content encountered inside the virtual world.”
Both games encourage the player to actively explore the spaces they find themselves in. While the games have narrative structure and story beats that keep the plot moving along, even when there are moments of narrative urgency, ignoring these narrative imperatives is seen as less immersion breaking. The player can choose to deviate from the narrative as Undertale and Omori establish early on that exploration and free play are encouraged. This contrasts with The Last of Us, which is always barreling towards its endpoint, though this is also an issue of genre. The action genre is geared more towards the cinematic, is often the choice of studios looking to make a prestige game, and is a genre that naturally favors an achievement-based—or perhaps goal-oriented—style of play. But as we’ve noted previously, prestige video games cannot get away from the very elements that make them a game in the first place, and despite their attempts to mimic the attributes of film, break immersion with their gameness. Undertale and Omori are relaxed to the point that players could ignore the main story with little to no effect on immersion. The slower pace might, in fact, be the key point in creating deeper emotional investment.
Omori | OMOCAT
The Hangout Factor
Tim Rogers, talking about classic JRPGs in a video for his Action Button game review series, hits the nail on the head, saying “what these games lacked in graphics, they made up for in length and immersion-enriching systems… …We didn’t want to ‘play’ games, we wanted to hang out in them.” And it is this idea of ‘hanging out’ that draws players into the worlds of Undertale and Omori. Particularly in Omori, there are many events where you (as Omori) are asked if you would like to do ‘X’ with your friends. ‘Have a picnic with your friends?’ ‘Watch the moon with your friends?’ ‘Look at photos with your friends?’ These are just some of the examples of this type of activity the player can choose to participate in. This casual ‘hanging out’ provides an opportunity for Omori’s friends to endear themselves to the player, and also perhaps cause the player to associate these hangouts with memories from their own life, of hanging out with childhood friends, nostalgic visions of an unretrievable past both warm and tinged with sadness. The emotional investment increases.
Tied to this idea of ‘hanging out’ is the way in which we are asked to empathize with characters in video games. David Kidd and Emanuele Castano, talking about literary fiction, say “literary fiction … uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters’ subjective experiences” thereby encouraging the reader to practice empathy. Readers of literature are therefore encouraged to fill in the gaps in the narrative and work hard to interpret characters’ feelings and motivations. Popular fiction, on the other hand, tends to “portray the world and characters as internally consistent and predictable” according to Kidd and Castano, and requires little empathy to understand the characters in its world. We want to hang out in the world of Undertale or Omori to better understand the characters’ feelings and motivations. Like good literary fiction, there is a greater need in these games for the player to practice empathy, to make those connections and access characters’ subjective motivations.
Both games feature text only dialogue and a few drawn images of characters’ faces to give a hint as to the emotion behind the dialogue. Making sense of that symbology is a reward in itself for the player, a reward that is not driven by the ultimate goal of completing the game. Uncovering how to read Undertale or Omori’s world taps into something different than the focused goal of reaching the end and beating the big bad. Everything we read on the screen is a symbol that needs decoding, and doing so helps us empathize with the characters in that world on the screen.
This is what I am getting at with the notion of ‘how we imagine certain elements of a game world to be.’ With no spoken dialogue, and no perfectly rendered human face to display clear emotion for us, the work rests on the player to imagine how Aubrey sounds, how angry she actually gets when Kel annoys her, or how deeply we feel the desperation of Asriel Dreemurr as the text in his text boxes quivers in all caps during the final fight. We can imagine Aubrey with a voice that sounds like someone we know, or we can imagine something else entirely. We the player are encouraged to ‘fill in the gaps’ as if we were reading literary fiction and thus increase our level of investment in the game. Contrast that with The Last of Us, what Kidd and Castano might deem ‘popular fiction,’ where the game world is ‘internally consistent and predictable.’ Joel and Ellie are voiced, they are 3-D modelled to look like human people, and we the player must accept that they say things a certain way and emote like they do. We are powerless to interpret them in any way other than what is presented to us. They are who they say they are, and nothing about the game world is cryptic enough to warrant a deeper reading of its symbols to better empathize with these characters.
(L) Undertale | Toby Fox (R) Omori | OMOCAT
With a Song in My Heart
A final piece to the immersion puzzle, would have to be music. Composer Winifred Phillips says of game music:
“Music has the power to elicit changes in the emotions of listeners, altering moods and inducing emotional states. It can also have an effect on our ability to perceive and interpret visual stimuli. The music helps establish emotional tone of a scene or gameplay element.”
By establishing emotional tone, music gives players an anchor point that can help them read a scene better, and decode the symbols at play. In both Undertale and Omori music is a constant in the game world’s landscape. When visiting a new area for the first time, the player’s first impression of an area can be built from the music playing as they take their first steps in this new space. From that initial impression, the player can then look around, explore the space, and make inferences about the space based on the theme playing in the background. The track Home from Undertale serves to induce a positive emotional state in the player and affects how players interpret other visual symbols present in the scene. Players first hear this song as they enter the home of Toriel, a motherly figure to the player character. After navigating a strange dungeon, players enter the home and are greeted by this soft lullaby, a warm color palette, and objects that look like familiar household items.
Undertale | Toby Fox
The music sets the emotional tone, one of safety and warmth, which helps the player read the rest of the scenes in the home with this tone in mind. A bed looks somehow cozier, a pie cooling on the kitchen counter looks more delicious, and as Toriel sits by the fireplace reading a book, the player can feel that this is Home.
Undertale and Omori are able to create these shifts in emotion and mood effortlessly with numerous themes and motifs that shape player perception, and these changes in tone keep players immersed in the world. The aural language of the game speaks to the player directly, forewarning the player that something may be lurking ahead or putting the player at ease by playing the familiar melody of a friend. Part of the success these games have with regard to music and its usage to maintain player investment has to do with the repetitious nature of music. The Omori original soundtrack contains 179 songs coming in at a run time of 3:55:56, while Undertale features 101 songs at 2:10:43. The abundance of tracks are necessary to establish just the right mood at just the right time. Some of these may play in only one location, but as many of these tracks are short in length, they repeat often, reinforcing the mood they are trying to establish. In addition, both Omori and Undertale make heavy use of leitmotifs to connect areas in the game world, or connect emotional and thematic elements. Hearing a few notes of the main Undertale theme in the song Home, and then later in the song Hotel establishes a connection between these areas as safe, welcoming places of rest.
The music employed by The Last of Us has much more in common with traditional film scoring, and is at times completely absent from the game (this is not uncommon in film). It stands in contrast to the likes of Undertale and Omori, acting as an accoutrement rather than a defining piece of the emotional outfit dressing a scene. The soundtrack for The Last of Us clocks in at 56:21 across 30 tracks. While the compositions are impressive, they act as backgrounding to the more prominently showcased voice work and virtual acting done by the characters, who take the lead to establish a scene. Music deployed in this way serves a purpose, but it often does not leave a strong impression on the player, much like a film score. The soundtrack to 2019’s Joker won Hildur Guðnadóttir the Academy Award, arguably the highest prize for film scoring—and her compositions are great, to be sure—but no one is bumping Defeated Clown on Spotify. They are, however, performing juggling routines for the Pope to the tune Megalovania from Undertale. When people talk about Joker, they talk about Joaquin Phoenix’s enigmatic performance, not the music. So it is with The Last of Us. By relegating music to the background, a key element that could draw players deeper into the game world comes off as underwhelming.
Undertale and Omori succeed in retaining the player’s attention through musical motifs that set the emotional tone, and ground the player firmly within the game world. In games with no voice acting, the heavy lifting has to be done by the music. There are studies that point to how music can induce emotions when heard, or even come to personify an emotion. Phillips saying of the phenomenon “music is theoretically perceived subconsciously as a human individual, expressing emotions just as a person might do with facial expressions and body language... In short, we empathize with sad music, and then we feel sad ourselves.” When we hear A Home For Flowers (Tulip) in Omori, it is a warm, inviting theme played when entering the home of Omori’s friend Basil. When visiting Basil’s home later, A Home For Flowers (Empty) is heard, its sparse arrangement of the theme indicates to the player that something is amiss.
Omori | OMOCAT
More Work & More Play
Giving the player more investigative work to do leads to greater levels of immersion and overall investment in a video game. Creating spaces that players want to hang out in, giving players more symbols to interpret, and teasing musical leitmotifs that connect characters, all serve this goal. Doing this creates a lasting impact on the player, an effect that might stay with them long after the controller is put down.
—The third, and final, part of this series on immersion and narrative focusing on video games’ place in the world and the media landscape at large is out now! Click here.
Michael Lee is the Editor of KOSATEN, and is currently pursuing research on Japanese fandom, with a particular focus on doujinshi and other fan-created media.
