Are you not immersed?
A war cry for the sake of an entire genre, with apologies to Spector and Church.
When playing a racing game, aboard some vintage Group C machine, hurtling towards Indianapolis corner on the Le Mans circuit at around 200mph and anticipating the exact moment to dive rightwards, I am very much immersed in that simulation. Likewise, when I’m engaged in a fierce dogfight in the skies of some made-up euroname nation in an Ace Combat, or when I was fending off space pirates in 1987 while playing Elite, I was also very much immersed in those simulations. As if I need to hammer this point any further, it needs to be said that at any fucking point in any fucking game where you are wholly engaged intellectually, then guess what? You are playing a simulation that can be labelled ‘immersive’.
For the poor, maligned, neglected genre of spectacular merit that has been unfortunately branded with this miserable slab of utterly opaque jargon, the term is a total disservice. It tells you nothing of the wonder and the glory and the romance of Deus Ex or Bioshock or Prey. It actively reduces them. It undercuts every perfectly constructed environment and delightfully balanced play mechanic. It insults every intermeshing system and expertly-authored character. It criminally undersells transcendent atmospheres and complex worlds where exploration, experimentation and curiosity are rewarded. Let’s be honest - it’s a shit name.
It’s not as if there wasn’t already a perfectly suitable term for the genre. I remember System Shock 2 being referred to as a ‘first-person adventure’. And that perfectly describes the entire canon. If you want to go wild, you can add additional adjectives and nouns. Fancy that! A sci-fi horror first-person adventure. I mean, can you imagine the gleaming utopia we could have if we only dared to call them FPAs? If only we could accord them the same status as we do for unrelentingly retrogressive AAA fodder from developers like Rockstar, where production values nearing the decadence of the Romanovs having a ‘spend more money’ orgy provide emperors’ novel garments of such splendour that nobody seems to care about the complete lack of innovative or beautiful interactive design. Despite having the resources and the creative freedom, we’re fed low-grade muck dredged from the barely serviceable cesspits of abandoned 2004 PlayStation 2 projects, developed in utterly grey near-empty business parks orbiting post-industrial wastelands, where even the Nandos seems to beg for the merciful euthanasia of bankruptcy and working out how much crypto it can buy with Universal Credit. But hey! Sometimes Trevor wears a dress! John Marston comes from Westerns!
If we can’t appropriately name those things we value, we have to ask if we really care about them at all. Do we really want more, or do we accept a terrible label because it’s easier, and hope none of the grand consolidators of the modern Videogame industry decide there’s just not enough incentive to carry on the honourable long march that the first-person adventure is undertaking? Or do we hide from the cold stare of commercial reality, promising ourselves that some underground future awaits where AI and better, easier tools make entire games from a few voice prompts? Or do we hang on for the scraps, like we did with Square Enix - a company that managed the heroic task of completely fucking up three legendary IPs in one dev cycle. Those two pitiful copyist-hack Deus Ex clones it issued forth, like so much foetid alimentary ejecta, were so timid in their concepts, so conservative in their designs and so trashy in their narrative summations that they deserved to die there and then, alongside the bastardised ‘re-envisionings’ of Thief and Hitman. These great IPs were exploited, homogenised and blandified for POPULAR APPEAL and then ultimately abandoned. It’s a genuine tragedy that only IO had the commitment and passion to never give up, to pick up the cast-off pieces of its own beloved IP and rebuild into a glittering, modern, uncompromised triumph (with totally unnecessary online requirements). Will Deus Ex ever get that chance again? I doubt it. Not when the last ones needed batteries for stealth takedowns and tiresomely dull plots that end with deciding the fate of the world by a shit boss fight or, even worse, with THREE FUCKING BUTTONS IN A SINGLE FUCKING ROOM. I mean, if this is the level we’re dealing with, a climax even more simplistic than its progenitor - a game that’s now 23 years old - and yet fans forgive it, then perhaps we’re right to hang IMMERSIVE SIM over its head as a label for how bland and unadventurous it actually is once the nostalgic legacy of a name is peeled away. I mean, what do I remember most about Mankind Divided? How cross the shopkeepers were.
Those shopkeepers were as cross as I was. I harboured the same disgust. But I had more than a little resentment for the players and critics that allowed such mediocre tedium to pass as acceptable, with not a single passing nod to what made Deus Ex so great. It wasn’t just the way it held together and what it offered, but what it broke; the boundaries of the genre, the boundaries of the imagination. Nothing was said of this for Human Revolution, as all it aspired to do was match its grandfather. A task it failed at. After Deus Ex, a template was forged for assured greatness that’s all too rarely used, and Square Enix barely seemed to care. But why should they? Where were the protests? Once upon a time, it seemed that we, as players, actively asked for more from our games. We saw the trajectory from Wolfenstein 3D to Half Life and demanded it didn’t let up. The critical body, and players alike, wanted to indulge the aspiration, to encourage that unstoppable march forward to some unseen horizon. We had no idea where or what the horizon was, but the point was the motion towards it and our minds brimmed with possibility. Deus Ex’s template gifts us a pair of shoes to keep us walking towards that horizon. It’s sad that so few developers dare, or are allowed, to wear them.
Edge famously asked of Doom, “if only we could talk to these monsters”. Despite the derision, that happened. The monsters became companions and suddenly you’re banging around with Fawkes, a Supermutant buddy in Fallout 3. While those Bethesda open-world RPGs don’t match ideally with the vague collection of features that binds System Shock to Deus Ex to Bioshock to Prey, they are all First Person Adventures (although there was some allusion to Oblivion being more Immersive Sim than RPG). If Skyrim can long-tail to over 30 million sales, can we not formally associate the deeper, more intricately crafted adventures with the Open World RPG? Would that be nice? Can we unite them under the First Person Adventure banner and abandon the junky jargon? Can that bring in a bigger crowd? Who fucking knows. But I fucking care and while I have to accept a sweary rant on an insignificant substack is unlikely to sway the entire critical faculty, I can but try. I can dream, too. I dream of a bounteous open-world Deus Ex with a city every bit as detailed as Cyberpunk’s, with life simulations instead of miserably shit sub-X-Files conspiracy theorist/terrorism storylines. I can dream of a unified Arkane universe, where the void clashes with the Typhon, with the whole of Dunwall opened up as its playground. IN THE ARKANE TAKE ON THE NINETEEN FUCKING NINETIES.
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