Immersion and Narrative: Video Games and the World
Michael Lee
Cyberpunk 2077 | CD Projekt
For Part One of the Immersion and Narrative series looking at video games as film, please click here.
For Part Two of the Immersion and Narrative series looking at video games as worlds, please click here.
So where does this leave us? What was the point of this entire exercise? The idea for this short series on immersion and narrative came about after I finished my playthrough of OMORI. I found myself so deep in its wonderful world, fully invested in its characters and lore, and it came as no surprise that as I reached the final stage, the emotional gut punch hit hard. This was exactly how I felt reaching the end of Undertale years earlier. I was fascinated by my own reaction to both of these games, and wondered why a game so lauded for its narrative like The Last of Us (or the Bioshock titles, or the new God of War) left me feeling almost nothing. As previously stated, the prestige titles that are supposed to represent the pinnacle of gaming are solid (and in many cases, exceptional) games. They present video games as blockbuster entertainment that have arrived in the mainstream and are deserving of respect. I wanted to examine why their narratives left me relatively cold, and what these smaller indie titles are doing that hits different. There are many factors at play here, some of which are entirely outside of the games themselves.
God of War (2018) | Sony
Growing Pains
Video games, even after all these years, can’t quite shake the stigma that they are immature. And maybe they are to some degree. Is that so bad? They are a young art form in search of their own voice in a crowded mediascape. They haven’t yet reached maturation. Most AAA or prestige titles still make it a point to say that ‘their game isn’t for kids!’ through their marketing. Cutting edge graphics, complex gameplay, and mature themes (usually in the form of blood and guts) are the hallmarks of video games saying “look at me, I’m adulting.” Further to that point, the taking on of cinematic language to create games that resemble films is just another way to try and establish this legitimacy, like a younger brother adopting the mannerisms of his older brother, insistent that doing so makes them look more mature.
In trying to seem legitimate by using film technique to heighten narrative, what I noticed as I watched a full playthrough of The Last of Us from start to finish is how the use of film technique is so half-baked. Nearly every interaction between characters consists of static shot-reverse shot, and moments where an interesting edit or camera angle could be used to pull the player in, the game director refuses to do so, and the game winds up losing its filmic qualities. In a scene where Ellie presents a Gundam-like toy to Sam (a boy Ellie and Joel meet on their travels), an annoyed Sam tosses the toy to the ground. The camera remains at a distance at all times, focusing on Sam, then Ellie, then back on Sam. It is simple, and asset efficient.
If this were a scene in a film, it would probably look quite different. Ellie would reveal the toy and pass it to Sam, there would be a close up of the toy in Sam’s hand, then a cut to an upper body shot/slow pan of Sam raising his head to look at Ellie, showing surprise that she remembered how upset he was that his brother wouldn’t let him have the toy earlier, then a cut to a close up of Ellie reacting to Sam (likely with a warm smile) before she says her final line and leaves his room. Sam can then toss the toy, where we get an extreme low angle shot of the toy hitting the ground before we slow pan around to reveal the bite marks on Sam’s leg. It is a scene that in the grand scheme of the game doesn’t matter, but reveals the shortcomings of video games’ attempts at the cinematic. As it is presented, the scene is devoid of emotion, when it could be used to show two young people connecting in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. If the game is supposed to be cinematic, then make it cinematic.
To say that games like The Last of Us simply can’t do that is to let the directors off the hook. Naughty Dog’s previous game, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (2011) includes a number of film techniques that make that game stand out as something much closer to cinema. It should come as no surprise, that the director and writer of Uncharted 3 is Amy Hennig, who has a background in literature and film studies. Creative director and writer for The Last of Us, Neil Druckmann, does not have any kind of film background and it shows. Hennig makes use of unusual (for a video game) camera angles to give players a different perspective on a scene (including close ups of characters, in spite of graphical limitations), draws the players eye to impressive background art through wide shots to give players a sense of scale, and even makes use of screen wipe transitions between scenes that are surely a nod to Star Wars and Lucas’ propensity for them (after writing this sentence, I learned that Hennig’s fondness for both Star Wars and Indiana Jones has been documented). Every scene transition in The Last of Us is a hard cut from black that makes the player feel like the game booted up just in the nick of time.
Watch the famous plane crash scene from Uncharted 3, notice when our hero Nathan Drake grabs on to a flying piece of cargo and attempts to deploy a parachute. The camera spins around the large supply crate and Drake in a disorienting fashion. It adds tension to scene, and resembles actual Hollywood technique, for example, this scene from Mission Impossible 6. This entire sequence in Uncharted 3 is phenomenal. It’s no surprise that what appears to be a shot for shot remaking of this scene will feature in the Uncharted movie. Further along in the scene, Drake lands safely in the Arabian Desert, where he plucks a gun out of the hand of a fallen soldier, buried in the sand. He surveys the wreckage of the plane, and wide angle shots zoom out to reveal how stuck Drake is. A shot of Drake alone in the desert rotates slowly, revealing the vastness of the landscape before the player is given control and allowed to actually move Drake through the scene, merging the gamic with the cinematic. This game is one of the VERY few examples of games as film done right. It can be done. Going back and revisiting Uncharted 3 was a delight, it’s awesome. Games as film is a viable path for video games looking to increase immersion and emotional investment through cinematic narratives. The problem is that most games trying to do this are still stuck in their teenage years, throwing in a lot of “cool” ideas or what people may think is cinematic, without having the expertise to actually pull it off. Can we get Christopher Nolan to direct a video game? It’d probably be pretty wild. Heck, when is Amy Hennig’s next game?
Having said all that, the very notion that the only way for video games to gain narrative legitimacy in the mainstream and deeply connect with audiences is to make use of the cinematic action genre framework is the real problem we are faced with. Video games don’t have to be films in any way, shape, or form. Video games can present amazing narratives and deeply affect players without using this cookie cutter format. But this format persists because money talks.
Deltarune Chapter 2 | Toby Fox
Be a Big Shot
There is a sense that gamers have been conditioned to believe the hype when the next cinematic action game launches. Massive marketing budgets from billion-dollar video game publishers like EA or Take-Two Interactive sell the idea that these blockbusters are what gaming is all about. The marketing budget alone for Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) has been estimated at between $200 and $300 million, a campaign that plastered giant billboards across the world and featured fluffy profile pieces about the game’s creators in Vulture. These men (and let’s face it, it’s almost exclusively men) are elevated to auteur status, and their creative genius is lauded for making the gaming equivalent of popcorn flicks on the backs of thousands of designers, animators, and technicians who endure soul-crushingly long hours through nightmarish development cycles.
This model of production is a perfect encapsulation of our late capitalist system, and one that the media and giant corporations continue to enable. The end result are games that are bombastic spectacle that distract us, and by vaguely importing the affective qualities of film—aesthetic signifiers that in our postmodern landscape we can identify loosely as a sort of “essence of film”—we are presented with video games that seem to be game & film, but are almost neither. There is a hollowness to the whole exercise. But we’re not supposed to think critically about any of this. As Jay Bauman of Red Letter Media succinctly puts it (with a great deal of sarcasm), “Don’t ask questions. Just consume product, and then get excited for next product.”
The video game industry is big money. The market value of the industry in 2021 was $178 billion, and in order to keep those revenues streams flowing, more big games need to be released. There is no time to dwell on how a game made a player feel, the model is simply to move the player on to the next thing. This pattern is repeating across the media landscape where folks need to continue consuming in order to keep the whole system running. Looking at how this manifests in other media, remember Squid Game? It was all everyone could talk about when it released on Netflix last year. The amount of ink spilled would have one believe that The Wire was going to be dethroned as the greatest TV show of all time. Then we all basically forgot it. We are trapped in an endless cycle of consumption, followed by quick hot takes, and aren’t given the opportunity for any deep reflexivity. The insidious structures and systems in place lock us into habits and patterns, and the big video game companies are more than willing to hold us down and shovel more AAA goodness down our throats.
Undertale Alternate Universe Fanart | JOT
Fandom Floodgates
Video games can offer an escape from this media hellscape we find ourselves in. They are a unique medium that can provide us with immersion and investment removed from capitalism’s slimy tentacles. Game worlds are amazing because we, the player, are able to move through their digital space, and interact with them in (almost) any way we want. This returns us to the idea of what games are, and what play is. There is a freedom of expression inherent in play that video games can unlock, breaking the cycle of consumption and opening us up to not merely be a consumer, but a producer. One only need look at the fandom behind games like Undertale and OMORI to see the passion in taking back the means of production and in doing so, finding a community to belong to.
Popular fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) gives fans a place to craft their own stories based on the film/book/video game series of their choosing. This creative commons of ideas reveals, at least to some degree, the lasting impact a media property has on the fans who consumed it. To watch a movie, read a book, or play a game, and be so struck by it to want to write a next chapter, or a side story involving minor characters, or send the characters of Harry Potter into the Marvel Cinematic Universe shows a very high level of emotional investment in a work. When we look at The Last of Us and its sequel, the two games have sold over 25 million units combined, and on AO3 there are currently 2922 fan-written stories available. OMORI, for which sales data can only be gleaned from Steam at approximately 500,000 units, has 3501 stories on AO3. Already more than two best-selling, major studio releases. Red Dead Redemption and its sequel have sold over 60 million units combined, and have been written about 8111 times on AO3. Undertale has sales of between 3.5 and 4 million units, and has a hefty 43,328 fan-written works up on AO3. Including sales data is relevant here, as it gives a sense of how many people are playing these games, and how many fans are then taking their love of the game and diving into fandom to continue living in that world.
What is surprising about this information is how relatively few people feel compelled to re-engage with the worlds of The Last of Us or Red Dead Redemption. These stories feature a number of characters that players could write fanfiction for, as many characters are left with open-ended plot threads that could be tied up neatly with fanfiction. The ending of The Last of Us: Part II leaves a lot up in the air for Ellie, and should be the perfect jumping off point for the exact kind of fanfiction that populates the very active OMORI boards over at AO3. Yet it doesn’t. This lack of fan engagement also can’t be chalked up to media properties that are more realistic not generating fanfiction, as The Walking Dead TV series—at one time, the most-watched program on TV—has 22,183 works on AO3 to choose from, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (over $25 billion in box office revenue across 27 films) has a staggering 439,015 works.
Back to video games with Undertale, which has one of the deepest, most convoluted fandoms of all, where whole Alternate Universes exist, necessitating a wiki of nearly 500 articles explaining all the permutations that have spun off from the original game. Searching YouTube generates hundreds of videos trying to understand the themes of Undertale and OMORI, from big overarching elements right down to the tiniest, and most (seemingly) insignificant details of these game worlds. There are even videos that try to make sense of Undertale’s fandom itself, removed from any analysis of the game from which this new fan-made world has emerged. There are switch up AUs where all characters take the role of a different character in the story—the artwork above is from the Fellswap AU, which is a Cold War-era 1984-styled universe. There are continuity change AUs where events of the game take a different turn and the result is an alternate universe where characters behave differently. The bulk of the fanfiction is more straightforward “future events” style writing that imagines what happens to the characters after the events of the game. Tens of thousands of stories, and millions of likes on Tumblr for images depicting all these character variations show that fans have taken Undertale and made it their own.
This kind of long-term engagement shows that these games stay with the people who play them. Yet, somehow, far fewer folks seem to care what happens to Ellie.
The lack of engagement with these cinematic prestige video games seems to say that underneath it all, there isn’t much there. Despite the fact that the pieces are there for fans to pick up where the game developers left off, the fan-driven content fails to materialize. There isn’t time to write fanfiction for The Last of Us, we’ve already heard about the next big thing. Major game studios and publishers don’t want fans to stay stuck on last year’s game. We need to be good consumers and simply buy the latest and greatest. As we go through the motions with these games, we finish the game, feel like an experience was rewarding, but before there is any chance at reflection, the next game has already booted up, the words “Press Start” enticing you to begin the cycle again.
Kentucky Route Zero | Cardboard Computer
Hanging Around in Indietown
With Undertale and OMORI, their game worlds are designed in such a way that once the final objective is completed, the impulse for many is to return to the start and experience it all over again. Players are excited to dig further into the game, read and translate the symbols that litter the game, seek out lore that they might have missed on a first playthrough, and also to simply hang out in the world. Something stuck with the player as the end credits rolled that pulled them back into the game. The sense of immersion created by the game’s designers, and the connections the player made to the game by way of having to do a little investigative work of their own, is why these games seem to elicit such strong emotional responses.
Undertale and OMORI are just two of many examples on the indie scene where a captivating narrative and immersive worlds actually connect with players. Life is Strange ups player engagement and investment through subversion of character archetypes and a time-bending narrative featuring choices that matter; Kentucky Route Zero’s near deconstruction of narrative and gameplay invites more questions than even it has answers for; or Florence, which presents the mundane everyday and the life events that are part of that everyday through an animated comic book aesthetic. These games all engage something different than the rote narratives and game design of major studio offerings. Celeste just celebrated its fourth anniversary, and the Twitter replies to the game’s creator, Maddy Thorson, show that the game had—and continues to have—a huge impact on many of those who have played it.
OMORI | Omocat
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
What so many of these games offer is not only the opportunity to experience an interesting narrative, but also a chance to reflect on ourselves. This, I feel, is the biggest sticking point when there is online resistance to games like Undertale and OMORI. We play video games to escape our boring realities, to then have to put the mirror up and look at ourselves is a challenge for many. But video games can do this for us in a wonderful way. There are countless memes about “indie RPGs about depression” on social media, posted by people who are likely too scared to confront themselves, to have an honest conversation about who they really are, so they project and make fun of those who do find something meaningful in these games. Self-reflection is hugely important for us as humans, and this is where indie titles are taking game narrative into new (and sometimes weird) places. Exploring a topic like depression through a video game can be therapeutic, the physical (through the controller) and emotional connections made by players in games that focus on creating real characters facing real issues is where video games can really shine.
There are people out there who say that Undertale changed their lives. I absolutely believe that. The fandom behind the game reveals this. Scholar Kristina Busse says that writing fanfiction or drawing fanart “often tailors to our very desires, our innermost fantasies, sexual or not.” It’s an exploration into our deepest selves, to find and express who we really are. That so many folks are creating fan content about Undertale shows that through this game’s world fans are perhaps addressing themselves, looking inside and using Undertale to come to an understanding of self. It is a game that can be interpreted in so many ways. It can be a love story, it can be about learning compassion and empathy, it can test one’s morality and conscience, it can be about identity, it can be about exploring one’s sexuality, the list goes on and on. The symbols found in the game are so dense, yet malleable enough, that almost any reading of the game can be correct. What players take away from Undertale comes down to the relationship between the game and the player, and the player’s relationship to the self.
Video games occupy a unique space in our media landscape, and the myriad ways that they can be constructed make it a fascinating medium to explore. Not quite literature, (maybe) not quite art, not quite cinema, but ultimately a medium that can combine all of these by taking the best parts and blending them into something that is then actively experienced by the player. There is so much potential for immersion and narrative in games that could take the traditional structures of the past, and remix them into entirely new experiences. Games as film is one way this is currently manifesting, as it attempts to mimic a medium that came before it, but once video games stop trying to be like their big brother to impress the adults, maybe then the medium can come into its own.
I don’t know if there is any more that can be said. Try an indie game. Go in with an open mind and an open heart. Immerse yourself in a game world. Hang out in it. Soak it in. Meander through it. Reflect on it. And when you’re done, it’ll have been worth it.
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. Reach out to me on Twitter!
