Argh! Just lost this post. Right, so there are games that try to be more than "games" (not that games without stories aren't great fun) ie. these games try to put you in the middle of a world and being able to participate in a story. But often when you play these games it is easy to just think of the characters as play pieces and the things you do as actions in a game. How do we bring the fiction to life? and immerse them in the situation as opposed to it being 'just' a game? one idea is to get round the cliches and create new ways of dealing with them. ie. think of RPG, you almost certainly have to talk to everyone to do well in the game. this reminds me that it is just a game, and often becomes tedious http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=221091 We need to be more organic in our content, maybe providing other tools for the player to do what they want. ie. several ways to find ut about subquests, missing cat adverts on poles, hearing child sobbing for their cat etc. food for thought http://cube.ign.com/articles/501/501970p4.html see bomb shop example. [edited by - Ketchaval on April 23, 2004 8:52:36 AM]

In the past, lame graphics or no graphics at all (text games) used to work well for this - if the player had to use his/her own imagination during the game that really added to the immersiveness. Of course, nowadays no one even bothers to take you seriously if your graphics are not polished.

I agree with the avoiding of cliche''s and other cues that keep reminding people that it is ''just a game''. I think an important thing would be to not just innovate in the details but provide some fresh gameplay. When I am strafing around corners shooting guns at stuff I can not help but feel like I am playing ''just another FPS'', same with other genre''s - if people feel they''ve done this stuff before, they won''t be immersed.

Something interesting to consider about RPG cliche''s is which ones you seem to be accidentally following. To use the example of having to talk to every NPC to figure out what the next part of the story is, you''ve already settled into the cliche'' that the player''s PCs are some ragtag mercenaries or adventurers who set out with no goal in mind. If you remember Final Fantasy 6, the game opens with the first PC marching into Narshe, taking down their patrol force and entering the mines to claim the uncovered Esper. What I''m bringing up is the issue of Clear Objectives. If you play FF6 through, rarely do they leave you without a sense of direction. Some people would claim thats too linear, but we are talking about presenting a story, and stories by their very definition are a sequence of events.