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.
- Do my actions matter?
- Do the events of the world actually impact my character?
- 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.