What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?

[Apos]

Credit to @faraday for making me think of this. Immersion as a subject is something I've had a lot of difficulty putting a finger on, because it seems to mean very different things to different individuals, and it can be hard to even describe why something feels immersive to the point it is impossible for a game owner that isn't into that stuff to know what anyone is talking about.

Now people can talk about individual features they found immersive or what they like, but that still leaves a dev just picking from a really wide scattershot of confusing things and asking, 'why on earth do people love this IC messenger thing that is basically functionally identical to @mail' and even the people that like it can have a difficult time articulating why. I think it's worthwhile to take a shot at that, because it lets owners put in easy to implement tools that aren't disruptive to their own design philosophy and are nowhere near as manpower intensive as things that would need them to radically alter their games from things they do like.

So I've noticed people have really different comfort levels in RP areas that come up all the time on here, but aren't usually articulated as the actual issues. This is stuff that I think causes a lot of fights when people are really different in what they like. I'll start with one, ambiguity.

Ambiguity: People vary wildly in how much of a setup or how much contextual clues they expect to have, and more importantly, how much ambiguity they enjoy dealing with in their rp. This comes up all the time. Take part of a set that includes, "Two people are fighting at the bar." Some people wouldn't blink at this. It doesn't matter, it's a minor detail, they ignore it. Some people would be driven crazy by it.

Not having the contextual clues and information that their character would possess that would inform their decision making usually means one of four things happen for players that care:

1. They ask oocly for clarification. "Did my character see who started it? What are they fighting over? Is one bullying the other? What do they look like?" All things that would inform their decisions and character actions. They break character to ask.
2. They roll with it, and make a guess, even if they know it might be inaccurate for their character. "Well, I guess I'll break up the fight, and assume that it was truly violent and not an argument, since my character wouldn't want someone to get really hurt." And they don't break character to do this, even if it's jarring for them since it could result in their character acting in a way contrary to how they are.
3. They don't respond at all, even if it's something their character might respond to, because they don't want to take the risk of doing something jarringly out of character due to a lack of information. Like #2 this doesn't break character, but it's still jarring because they don't have context.
4. They make up the details themselves. This comes across as twinking or godmoding, so isn't normally done, but it's common in other RP formats when little detail is provided and people are expected to build on it.

Now this isn't often a case of bad writing or anything like that, but two players having different expectations of what they should be giving each other to work with. Someone that's more immersion focused I think expects others to give them context that is sufficient for them to build on and run with, without the need for asking questions or clarification, and expects to do the same for others. Other people that don't mind ambiguity, see that as totally unnecessary, because hey we're all writers and if something is confusing, just ask.

Now where immersion really comes into play here, is when the game is the one to reduce that ambiguity and give the player more context. Now the most extreme example of this are RPI MUDs. I had been RPing on MUs for a few years and I had never heard the term 'set' for 'setting a scene' until I tried the Reach. That might sound outlandish and bizarre to someone that's only RP'd in MUSHes, but the reason is simple, in that all the context is provided by the game and the environment they cultivate. Understand, I'm not advocating that at all, but I think it's important to understand the stylistic differences in storytelling. Basically in something like those MUDs, context is incredibly narrowly defined. Painfully narrow. Any action of characters must have some coded response which shows. If characters are injured, they display injuries when looked at. Everything the characters are wearing or carrying has a coded equivalent. Everything in the room has emits or something responsive. There's no context outside of what is coded, so this also means anytime someone enters a room, they have the context they need to immediately roleplay, which makes sets unnecessary.

Now obviously we all play MUSHes, not MUDs, but we should know that the more freeform nature comes at a tradeoff of ambiguity. We use that to tell more powerful stories that aren't limited by code, but it does mean that for some players, it would be very helpful to provide more context to them from the game. So as an example, let's look at IC messengers versus @mail or page.

Functionally, they should be identical, but here's some important differences, forgive me for the general variations from game to game:

Mail:
TO: Stella
FROM: Bob
Subject: Hey we should meet
When are you next free? Please hit me up.

Messenger:
Stella's wrist communicator lights up, signifying a new message.
From Commander Robert, to Ensign Stella, sent at 10:37 am yesterday, IC time.
"When are you next free? Please hit me up."

Okay so the content is identical, but the context is different. For the mail, does the player of Stella have any idea whether that is IC or OOC, and whether they should respond ICly or OOCly? Probably not. It would be likely decided by the environment of the game, but what if she's new? All those two little lines around the functionally identical messenger does is provide context immersion. Some players absolutely would not care, some would eat it up, particularly for some because it's one less thing for them to worry about. They do not need to seek clarification, they can just RP immediately. Which is what a lot of them want.

There's a ton more to it, but this is getting long, so I think I'll get into other parts later.

[Kanye Qwest]

Fuck you BOB I will never be free because you blew up my planet.

[Thenomain]

Immersion on Mu*s to me is the same as Immersion in tabletop play: If I think the character as something with its own life, the world as something with consistent rules even if they're different from reality, if I can imagine the game as existing in its own right.

The more someone tries to push the "IC is the only thing that matters", the less immersed I am. I do not forget that I'm in front of a computer screen reading text. The more a game tries to tell me to ignore this, the less immersed I get, a Role-Play Uncanny Valley.

[faraday]

@apos said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

For the mail, does the player of Stella have any idea whether that is IC or OOC, and whether they should respond ICly or OOCly? Probably not.

Great topic. I would just clarify one minor bit here that folks like me saying "mail and messenger are functionally equivalent" are assuming that you use the tool to provide proper context. So it would be more like:

Mail:
TO: Stella
FROM: Bob
Subject: --IC Message-- Hey we should meet
Stella gets an IC message on her wristcom:
From Commander Robert, to Ensign Stella, sent at 10:37 am yesterday, IC time.
"When are you next free? Please hit me up."

I bring this up not to quibble, but because I think it's important in any conversation about immersion that the alternatives be functionally equivalent. Otherwise yeah, you get confused players.

To use another example of immersive code - +knock.

Bob uses +knock.
Stella sees: Someone is knocking on the door.
Stella uses +peephole to see that it's Bob.
Stella uses +shout to say "Who's there?"
Bob sees her shout. Shouts back. Etc.

versus

Bob pages Stella, "Hey, Bob's outside your door knocking."
Stella now has context and doesn't need to use any commands to figure out what's going on. Stella pages Bob, "OK, she looks through the peephole and then opens the door."

or

Bob and Stella just get in the room together immediately because they know they're going to do a scene and OOC chatter some establishing details so then someone can pose:

There's a knock on the door. After a brief exchange establishing that it's Bob outside, Stella opens it. "Hey Bob. What's up?"

As I mentioned on the other thread, I don't feel immersion in MUSHes. Ever. So to me, the messenger or knock code is just a PITA because it adds absolutely nothing to the game for me, but it's a whole other set of commands I have to learn just to do things I can otherwise already do. And as a coder, that's a whole other set of commands I'd have to code just so people can do things they can otherwise already do.

But I do understand, at least in an abstract way, that there are people out there who get something out of this stuff. It's just hard to relate to since I'm not one of them.

[Pyrephox]

For me, it's a lot more about setting building than mechanics. The more a world or setting 'holds together' and operates by consistent rules (even if they're complex or hidden from the players), the more that I get excited about it, and the more 'immersed' I feel in it. Mechanics rarely enhance or detract from that, for me, unless they're really egregious or contradict the 'fluff'.

[peasoupling]

@thenomain said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

Immersion on Mu*s to me is the same as Immersion in tabletop play: If I think the character as something with its own life, the world as something with consistent rules even if they're different from reality, if I can imagine the game as existing in its own right.

This is pretty much it for me too. It's not so much about the code as it is about some kind of verisimilitude (even if this is genre-dependent) and the feeling that the world makes sense.

Now, code can be useful to have because sometimes it helps streamline things like communication and sharing information, and because the usual OOC commands can be clunky. So special IC commands can be more useful, but I don't know if it's a matter of immersion.

In fact, taking Arx as an example, sometimes the IC messenger system is kinda... not immersive at all, if I take it at face value. How is this baby badger running back and forth across the city at the speed of light to deliver messages and suits of armor? (I am sorry if anyone has a badger messenger, this isn't aimed at any one adorable animal messenger in particular!) So I don't take it at face value, I have to ignore it or mentally substitute the coded reality for something that actually makes sense. It's just more practical than mail, and helps separate mostly-IC from mostly-OOC communication. And I say mostly because a lot of IC messages include things like: 'OOC: Clarification on that thing I mentioned'.

[ThatGuyThere]

For me immersion is less of a code issue and more of a feel issue. I find myself immersed in games when it seems like the game has an story that goes beyond my characters that can effect their lives but also that characters can effect the story as well. A kind of give and take, for example there was a power plant blown up in plot x, so an announcement gets made to the game that a black out occurs. This impacts the immediate scene I am in and is out of my control but I can dig into what caused the blackout and so on.
So I guess to try and put it in a simple phrase an adaptive world that also forces my PC to adapt to it. that is what makes a game world feel real to me. Now code can certainly help it or make it more difficult but in the end it is the interaction between world and character that does it for me.

[Thenomain]

@peasoupling

And that's where the game part of Role-Playing Game comes in. In fact I find MUDlikes to be the least immersive of these games, specifically because the code overrules the situation, but it's a fun part of a game. Full ANSI art is not immersive to me, but man it is fun.

@faraday and I were just discussing how code can easily push you out of immersion in situations where you have to stop what you're doing to remember the "IC" way to do things, when you have other methods already in your culture and the culture of most the people you're playing with. That isn't fun, and so it takes you out of the frame of mind that immersion is meant to bring you into.

So...yes. That.

--

edit, because of this thought:

Immeserive: Day/night cycles on games with vampires. But this was so annoying for so many people for so long that I personally celebrated the day that we stopped this. Now a scene is any time of day you want it to be. Someone might be able to tell that you're playing a vampire from that, but that information was never as secret as anyone wanted it to be. Now the onus is on the players to not abuse the knowledge, something supported by the current culture, and I hope always will.

[Apos]

@thatguythere said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

So I guess to try and put it in a simple phrase an adaptive world that also forces my PC to adapt to it. that is what makes a game world feel real to me. Now code can certainly help it or make it more difficult but in the end it is the interaction between world and character that does it for me.

That was going to be the second thing I think of immediately when people talk about immersion, but I think it might be a little bit wider than that. I think it is both seeing the world reflect the consequences of actions, an adaptive world like you said, and also interconnected permanence.

What I think drives home immersion is some kind of mechanics or ways for actions of any characters to have influence or effect on the game at a whole, or vice versa, and then also players feeling confident that whatever happens sticks, and isn't limited to the ability of players to self-police and keep track of what happened.

What I think destroys immersion for many players is having something that would cause some major response or shift in the world, and then it just failing to do so. Or anything that would cause permanent change in characters or storylines, and just not sticking because it isn't written down anywhere, or shown in any mechanics, and is just gradually forgotten.

By contrast, what reinforces immersion can often be unexpected reinforcement, by getting news of what happened in something players had no personal involvement in, or seeing storylines overlap accordingly, or having the world respond in unexpected ways.

[Seraphim73]

@apos said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

Ambiguity

I tend to prefer Option 1 (although not usually in that level of detail unless it's really important to the character), but I also prefer to do it in pages unless I think there are going to be a lot of other players interested in the information, because I find pages less disruptive to RP than I find OOC comments. Yes, I know that's odd.

If it's someone I feel particularly comfortable RPing with, I will make up the details as I go, assuming that they will do the same so that we are fully collaborating on the scene rather than one person essentially GMing the scene and the other one "just" playing.

So as an example, let's look at IC messengers versus @mail or page.

To me, unless there's something about the method with which the message is delivered that's important, I see no need to have anything beyond mail. Like, if you can stop a messenger going to or from a certain person, that would be awesome, and a serious reason to have a messenger system. But generally, I prefer mail, it doesn't interrupt the scene (unless you want it to, in which case you can just emit a messenger or a text message arriving), and it gets the job done just as well. It also encourages things like "when are you next free? Let's plan a time to get together and talk" and taking said request OOCly, which I think is important because our online times are definitely OOC, and if it's a critical issue, you shouldn't have to say "I'll see you a week from Friday" just because you the player are going out of town.

---

Now then, on to the more general question: Immersion for me is being able to believe that my character is in the world. So I want as few things to interrupt my character's experience of the world as possible. I agree strongly with @Thenomain and @Pyrephox (and others) that the thing that ruins my immersion isn't a coded command, it's whether or not the setting and characters react to the actions of my character(s) in a way that seems reasonable based on my understanding of the setting. It's the consistent rules that are important to me when it comes to immersion.

The "adaptive world" that @ThatGuyThere mentioned is a huge part of it, but for a world to be immersive, I also want to be able to understand it well enough to have some idea on how the world might adapt to my character's actions. If the setting doesn't hold together and I can't hazard a guess at how a character, faction, location, whatever might react to an action taken by a character, then I won't be immersed in it.

[Misadventure]

Consistency of context helps, by which I mean that the importance placed on a given thing is fairly consistant, so a character's actions are placed in context. I think that many games resort to its the end of the world because they don't know how to make lesser things seem universally important to players.

Is killing someone a big deal in a realistic modern suburbs setting? How about in a swords and sorcery setting? When you stand up for racial or cultural respect, are you in an 1830s England, 1950s US, or Federation of Planets setting?

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@pyrephox said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

For me, it's a lot more about setting building than mechanics. The more a world or setting 'holds together' and operates by consistent rules (even if they're complex or hidden from the players), the more that I get excited about it, and the more 'immersed' I feel in it. Mechanics rarely enhance or detract from that, for me, unless they're really egregious or contradict the 'fluff'.

I'm the same way. I can RP with a decent degree of immersion even in something like a Gdoc, which I know a lot of players can't, because there's no skeleton of a world to hang anything on. But if I feel like the internal consistency of the setting doesn't have any meaning, or that my actions as a player don't carry any weight? I lose it, whatever systems are in place.

Players who I don't feel are playing thematically are a far bigger problem for me than staff or code most of the time, I will just own that. I've been in this game long enough that I'm quiet about it and try to tune it out. I don't have the strength to be a scold in me. But, it is a thing.

[Arkandel]

@apos For me immersion means simply that I feel comfortable with the setting to plot a character's background, make plans, play that PC in the setting and not worry about whether I understand it or not.

At the point that intimate understanding of how the world feels and works becomes intuitive, and I only ever need specific points clarified, I am immersed.

[Apos]

@three-eyed-crow said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

@pyrephox said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

For me, it's a lot more about setting building than mechanics. The more a world or setting 'holds together' and operates by consistent rules (even if they're complex or hidden from the players), the more that I get excited about it, and the more 'immersed' I feel in it. Mechanics rarely enhance or detract from that, for me, unless they're really egregious or contradict the 'fluff'.

I'm the same way. I can RP with a decent degree of immersion even in something like a Gdoc, which I know a lot of players can't, because there's no skeleton of a world to hang anything on. But if I feel like the internal consistency of the setting doesn't have any meaning, or that my actions as a player don't carry any weight? I lose it, whatever systems are in place.

Players who I don't feel are playing thematically are a far bigger problem for me than staff or code most of the time, I will just own that. I've been in this game long enough that I'm quiet about it and try to tune it out. I don't have the strength to be a scold in me. But, it is a thing.

There's kind of a sliding scale there for what will ruin someone's immersion by seeing characters that in small ways or big contradict someone's understanding of the setting. I find that most of the conversations about Wrong Funning people come from this, of some character that's just too contradictory and snaps other people out of it with a, 'Okay yeah but that character can't exist though' type vibe. Like the movie star perfect looks in a post apocalyptic setting without running water or whatever.

[Ashen-Shugar]

I always cringe when someone mentions Immersion within MU*'s.

Main reason, after a given time, it appears to always be taken to extremes by at least one party in a group and it just drives things uncomfortable. Granted, it doesn't happen all the time, but enough to make me wary of it.

So for the most part, whenever anyone brings up Immersion in a mush environment, I always envision this:

[Kay]

@ashen-shugar What extremes were those?

[Misadventure]

@Ashen-Shugar I actually thought along those lines as well. I got what the OP was talking about, but I couldn't help but think about how immersion isn't really a thing, as you can't throw all the information at players to constantly remind them of the setting and its realities, physical, social, economic and so on.

Then I realized that if you think about immersion along the lines of a person sinking into water, you can say you are immersed, but you aren't a fish. We can do more to make you feel like you are a fish, but you won't be, and its all just illusion and willingness to focus on what is in the fiction over whats in the real world.

That worked well enough for me.

---

Meanwhile, things like current shared weather, population levels and what they are doing in this place at a given IC time are always helpful to me. I would love things that told me how cultures and groups are relating, what has the populaces attention, what am I hearing and seeing on the streets, all moderated by my skill levels and perhaps what my area/region/culture thinks is important to pay attention to. It's a lot of work and the emits get intrusive.

[krmbm]

@thenomain said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:

@faraday and I were just discussing how code can easily push you out of immersion in situations where you have to stop what you're doing to remember the "IC" way to do things, when you have other methods already in your culture and the culture of most the people you're playing with. That isn't fun, and so it takes you out of the frame of mind that immersion is meant to bring you into.

This is me, 100%. This is why, when people start talking about a bunch of systems and code to do a bunch of crap, I can probably guess that this isn't the right place for me.

Unless those systems are so seamless that I never have to look up a command to run them, then they are actually killing my suspension of disbelief. I don't want to have to read a help-file in the middle of my death scene so I can remember if it's +death or +die.

This holds true with theme issues, too. If I have to stop and look up the IC word for Tuesday, it's going to yank me out of the moment. So let's just pretend we're using whatever the IC word for Tuesday is, and not sweat the details, k?

For me, immersion is the emotional or cerebral response to whatever scene we're creating. All of the coded bells and whistles may be nifty once or twice, all of the theme minutiae someone was nice enough to document is great, but the meat of it is reading what someone else wrote, having my own emotional response to that and then translating my response into my character's response: I may be appalled by something a character does while my PC thinks it's amazing, and - to me - the immersion comes when I'm able to have some kind of response of my own and then know how my character responds.

If my response is somehow tampered with - because I'm having a hard time finding the right command to run, because there's something about the theme or setting that isn't clear, because I have to question if what I'm doing is "right" - it's going to ruin my suspension of disbelief.

Basically, I just prefer to RP with cool people who are happy to hand-wave the minor stuff so we can get on with the good stuff.

[Lemon Fox]

By and large, I do not get immersed in games. I play very casually, almost to the point of barely being there. I don't feel a strong connection to the game and not much is lost if I walk away from it--except for when I played Arx. This surprised me, and I found myself deeply missing that universe, and comparing my experiences on Arx to other attempted games gave me a bit of a baseline for establishing what had immersed me and what did not. What I found were three major differences that, when absent, regularly broke my sense of connection to the game.

1. Do my actions matter?
2. Do the events of the world actually impact my character?
3. Does the world feel alive?

So, most games will immediately claim that they have all three of these aspects, but if it is true at all, these things usually only apply to plots, events, and scenes. Plots can hurt you. Events can impact your character. Big GM'd scenes make the world feel alive. Arx wasn't like that. I could submit little actions and put in little tasks, and without ever having to wrangle six people together for a big adventure, I could poke the world along in subtle little ways. That made me incredibly happy.

Furthermore, poking at the game via +investigate came with costs that were separate from disasters striking the land or three CR 3 assassins leaping out of dark shadows. Like a Lovecraftian investigator, the next door opened could actually contain a SAN-check encounter, just for me. Not something to be fought with a sword for XP but something to be survived for life and forbidden knowledge. That was wonderful. I truly felt like the game was moving and reacting to me. Sometimes I discovered something breathtaking. Sometimes I very nearly died because I did something stupid, without having to truck along for a six hour adventure with eight people. That's immersing.

And you know what? It absolutely is because of the little coded details. Not the functions themselves, but the form they have taken. You don't get a @mail about your success or failure, you receive a neatly folded vellum letter in the mail that makes your heart stop. You don't get a package of XP slapped onto your sheet for a job well done solving the riddle, you gain wisdom, clues, and another X appears somewhere on the Raiders of the Lost Ark-style map.

It's that presentation that made Arx so magical. People can swear all day long that my actions matter on another game, but as soon as they tell me to get some people together and run a PrP to make the change happen, the bubble bursts. When all the social role play involves drinking at a bar, talking about the last big adventure, or setting up for the next big adventure, I slowly tune out and drift into the background, immersion lost.

[DeadEmpire]

With me it's pretty simple and it's actually very easy to get immersed, but a few things need to happen to really draw me in. Things need to feel connected, or else it just feels like nothing matters. It's why rp rooms disconnected from any kind of larger grid just don't work for me, it makes it all feel so much less alive for day to day rp. The option to create a room for one off scenes works great for events, or prps, but a grid where people could wander through your square because they were in the neighborhood? Maybe you leave a room because you hear shouts from outside and see that a fight has broken out in a separate scene. In a system of rooms, those two scenes could never interact in such a natural and fluid way. The lack of a grid makes everything feel so much more rigid and disconnected. A well made grid can make a game spring to life for me. I think the simple approach to Arx's grid is rather perfect. To start? That's really all I need. A world that feels consistent and real.

I also need real consequences. If I charge the big bad while naked and unarmed, I shouldn't be able to just say that I don't consent to my death. Losing a character has never been easy for me, I'm an emotional person, after all, but without that risk of death, it all feels so inconsequential. I mean, if I'm not going to die anyway, what's the point of showing up to the battle? To show off? (I'll add I appreciate the approach that Arx has to PK, in that you're not likely to be ambushed and murdered for no immediately apparent reason)

A roster system I've also found helps. Gives a sense of permanence to the characters, instead of a rotating door of OCs that never stick around.