By the way, I'm writing this with dialated pupils late at night. I can almost gauruntee that it will not make sense. This title is misleading, I must admit. This post isn't about contrasting realism in games and immersion, but about finding the balance between the two. Videogames are meant to provide a beneficial experience to the user, whether that be basic happiness and pleasure or other benefits. On the bussiness end, a corporation or publisher wants to market and sell fun games so that people will buy them. Therein, developers, for a number of reasons want to provide fun games. With this precedent established, here is the problem: 1.) A game must have some meaning to the user in order to inspire emotions. If you were to watch a movie, such as Braveheart, except all of the actor were replaced with stick figures who spoke French, it would loose its historical merit, and thereby have less meaning. A game must resonate in some way, this is where realism comes into play. 2.) Life sucks. It's a generalized statement, I know, and not true, but bear with me. Things that are real have impacts, both fun and not. A game must strive for realism so that users can have a believable experience (This is in the context of fantasy RPG's, first person shooters, and other games that aren't aiming for abstract or puzzle like concepts...such as Katamari Damacy and Tetris, respectively). If you want to create a sword and sorcery RPG, you still have to give the game some attributes that are realistic, in order to give the player a believable experience. You don't laugh at things for no reason unless you're on drugs. You can tell the difference between imagination and waking events while awake. Therein, game need enough reality to suspend disbelief. Now, how does a person craft a game that has both a vast, realistic world, and can still appeal to players who like to play in a Diablo II style hack n' slash atmosphere? How does a person allow players to play with different styles simultaneously, without giving another player an advantage? This is a two part problem: Create an immersive world that is realistic but still fantastical, and then give players the freedom to go as deep into the world as they please while still confining them to realistic boundaries. Alot of concepts are very idealistic, such as giving the player total control over various in game events and places. Where do you draw the line? Let's give this some context: MMORPG covering thirty different civilizations in an adequately sized world (real world porportions given the size of thirty civilizations). How detailed does the history have to be? How detailed should character combat be? Where do you draw the line between hack'n slash point-click-kill gameplay, and slower paced story-development driven wait and level styles? A slower pace is more realistic, but more complicated. A simpler, faster game offers quick gains but often lacks gameplay depth. How can you put players in a world that offers a balanced play style, an immersive (On the level of Tolkien's Middle Earth detail) game world, and unorthodox gameplay without stepping too far into the abstract void? Even if you don't understand what I'm trying to say (I sure as h*ll don't.), comments would be apprecieated.

You can't be everything to everyone. You have to identify your audience(s), and know what they want to see and do. Along the way, you may be able to introduce some things they wouldn't expect and which may be completely novel. But, anything new should still be able to be placed in a category according to what need/desire/etc. you think it SHOULD fulfill. One game can, in theory, appeal to many different groups (though certainly not all), but you have to know your audience. If you are putting together a major project and you don't know your audience (and exactly what they want), your odds of failure are high.

i absolutely agree 100%

mmorpg's are filled with disbelief. There is no structure, just lots of people killing monsters which respawn, noone has jobs and there is little sign of government or infrastructure. You say to yourself, this world is silly and could never exist ever. Wolfs/rats drop gold, WTF!

Its the same for the matrix. The first matrix suspended disbelief and then the 2nd and 3rd just made it totally silly and nothing made sense.
Why did the machines not gas the humans?

The same goes for LOTR, hobbits walk all that way in bare feat. Apparently they have rubbery feat, evolution would not support this. People without rubbery feat would have developed shoes and thrived just as well as those with rubbery feat. This is what i call a story hack - something the author did after the writing of the story because there is a plot whole or put no thought into.

Alot of fantasy writers think they can have whatever they want because it is fantasy.

All imaginary worlds must have economic/physical/social rules which must be followed.

I agree with Ned_K, you have to identify your audience because there is a whole range of acceptable realism levels. Some audiences prefer minute historical detail, some prefer realistic character psychology and story logic but wildly creative sff worldbuilding, and some prefer zany characters and surreal metaphorical worlds. If you know what story you want to tell, and pick the type of gameplay best suited for telling it, then study the psychology of the audience which plays this particular type of game, it should be pretty clear what level of realism is appropriate for your particular game. So if you are debating the level of realism it's probably because you don't have a clear idea of what story you want to tell, and you or your lead writer should work on that.

I also want to point out that designing a MMORPG with 30 playable cultures described in even the most shallow amount of detail would be an insane amount of work, much less if you wanted them to have depth for the players to explore. In 7 months of working on Xenallure we have managed to describe 3 cultures in a medium amount of detail (detailed for an RPG, but not for an MMORPG), and that's only a written description and some concept art, the development and implementation will probably take twice again as long!

I'm not sure if this is considered off-topic, but I feel it it at least very closely related. And forgive me for using very flammable examples; I don't use them in order to hijack the thread for arguing about off-topic subjects, but because they are good examples.

Realism is a perilous word. Curing yourself to "full health" with painkillers after been shot with a shotgun is not "realistic". Then again, having your militia unit being defeated by a phalanx unit in Civilization can be quite "realistic". Just if something has a greater level of abstraction doesn't mean it couldn't be realistic. After all, any human concept is more or less abstract — I don't just consider the keyboard I'm typing with a collection of atoms that just seem to co-operate with me (the less abstract description). I consider it an input device — an abstraction that makes life so much easier. Is the concept of a keyboard or an input device less realistic than the collection of particles it consists of?

And I disagree with the argument that games should strive for realism — killing dragons is not realistic. It can still be immersive. The obvious philosophical argument for this is the point that within the game world killing dragons is very realistic, but then again, why couldn't you imagine a game world in which death wasn't permanent? In such a world respawning could be mind-staggeringly realistic. Realism is good when it gives the player a familiar frame of reference which makes it easier to believe in the game world. Of course, realism can bring in a lot of good with it gameplay-wise as well, but I'd rather say that one of the actual problems is the fact that in many games different levels of abstractions are used in parallel, making the game incoherent.

One of the most controversial situations is using a stat like hit points with another stat like stamina. Now, the concept of hit points is originally a very abstract concept, and not having a lot of hit points would mean things such as having small wounds, fatigue, bad luck, and what have you. Having no hit points would mean that you'd be still alive and kicking (well, alive anyway), but not in the condition to actually get anything done. It does not mean that you were lying dead on the ground with your limbs severed. Stamina, on the other hand, while still being somewhat an abstract concept, is not on the same level of abstraction than hit points; in fact, the concept of hit points already includes effects of fatigue, provitionally. Thus, by using partially overlapping elements from different levels of abstraction in parallel, you can create quite a lot of discussion and argument on "realism". The original concept of hit points wasn't all that unrealistic, it was just a very statistical concept, combining a lot of different things. The concept of stamina is neither unrealistic as such. It is the combination of the two that makes the system as a whole incoherent.

Note that I'm not saying that using things from different levels of abstraction is bad, per se. Just mixing them in an incompatible way makes it difficult to appreciate the beauty of abstraction or even create true paradoxes and inconsistencies.

Not only you can have different levels of abstraction or realism in the game mechanics, but also between the game mechanics and, say, graphics, or whatever components you might think of. A game with blocky graphics can still be realistic gameplay-wise. A game with flabbergastingly unbelievable gameplay can have the most astounding graphics. It is not good to mix these with impunity either — rts games are notorious for their seeming lack of realism (e.g. having people the size of buildings etc.) which is caused by the fact that abstact units are displayed in a very mundane, "realistic" way. The actual game has much more than meets the eye going on. Another example is surprisingly enough evident in almost any game in which you can kill creatures. After a while, the creatures killed just fade away. I mean, they literally fade with a cheesy fade effect right before your very eyes. In a game which has (relatively) ultra-realistic graphics, this is the very first thing that kills the immersion; at least for me. Of course, considering the quantum-mechanical tunneling phenomenon, it could happen in real life as well, but it's not very likely. In games it happens all the time. Again, representation has a different level of abstraction than the game mechanics and that causes disbelief.

Wow. Thanks for the constructive criticism. (NOT sarcasm. I am genuinely appreciative.)

Grim, I understand what you're saying, and I agree. But, I think I need to clarify what I meant in regards to realism:

I meant to phrase realism as a method that game developers use, not an end in itself. Game developers create realistic games to either convey a certain feel, or to give the player a familiar and understandable surounding. Games only need to resonate with the human mind, realism is just an easy way to get games to do this. An abstract game can resonate just as well in some cases, but not as well in others. While by very definition any concept is abstract, certain cues clue the brain into the fact that something is a reality. If you want to create a game in which a player feels as if they are in a familiar setting, even though it does have some scientifically impossible concepts (like dragons, for instance), you could make the game somewhat realistic so that the brain would see cues of reality and the player could become more immersed. This may not be the only way, but it is basic and sometimes neccesary. The human brain is programmed to respond to certain cues, and abstractions (E.g, concepts that can only exist in the human mind, and have no real world counterpart. The concept of a keyboard as keys is not an abstraction in this sense, since a key is an actual physical structure, though, on another level, it is composed of atoms. The concept of finding the derivative in Calculus is an abstraction, since it has no physical counterpart, at least in this context. Abstraction may be reffered to under diferrent circumstances as different things, but in this case, I use it to separate perceptions of reality from purely cognitive concepts.) --abstractions tend to lack such cues. Depending on the effect of the game, you could aim for realism, or for abstraction. I'm aiming for a certain amount of realism, as this project is meant to conform to a sword and sorcery setting, not a more abstract, high-concept type of game.

P.S. I'm not developing the story as a storyline for the game. I find that most stories created expressly for that purpose are weak. I'm creating literature, and then I'm going to create a game based on the world I've outlined.

Quote:

Original post by Nytehauq P.S. I'm not developing the story as a storyline for the game. I find that most stories created expressly for that purpose are weak. I'm creating literature, and then I'm going to create a game based on the world I've outlined.

IMO, it's not creating stories expressly for a game that makes them weak, it's letting oneself be trapped in the "oh, this is just a game story" mindset. Writing a story as literature first is one way to avoid that mindset, (and writing a story from scratch is probably easier than wriing a game script from scratch), but you will run into some definite problems.

A lot of things that work great in a story don't work well in a game, and vice versa. The translation difficulties from a verbal medium to a visual medium has resulted in some excellet books having lame movies made of them. Going from a story to a game is even harder because on top of that there is the addition of interactivity. In trying to force a real human being into the central role of a story which was designed around a main character who probably had a completely different personality, there is on one side the danger of frog-marching your player through the game without giving them any choices, and on the other side the danger of giving them choices and then losing plot coherence when they go off in a direction you didn't anticipate.

Not to mention that you aren't taking advantage of the unique strengths of an interactive multimedia medium. Personally I like writing for games because games are so great at wish-fullfillment. "You want to be a handsome muscular warrior who slays the dragon, saves the kingdom, and wins the heart of the fair princess? No problem! Would you like a side order of evil villain bashing with that?" Our job as game writers is to provide a structure to help the player create vivid daydreams. So, my point is that writing specifically for games is only a problem if the writer lets it be a problem, and can instead be an advantage if the writer can use it as an advantage. Why not try a mix of both techniques and see what works for you?

Hmmm. Those are all valid points. However, I'm not setting the game in one of my storylines, I'm setting it in the same world. The section of game content will simply be a list of historical occurences at first. The game world will progress through the historical occurences, and it will allow flexibility so that players can be factored into the storyline, if I so choose. Any story written during the same time period as the game's events would simply take a slice out of the universe. This avoids the problem of turning a story into a game. The game is simply based on the larger, more detailed world. Therein, the present, future, and past is already planned out. This is how Bungie maintains storyline consistency in Halo, they use the Halo Bible as a basis for all the events in the game. Therein, no hassle due to converting media forms, and you still have a coherent story.

Well, that's not bad then. :) Personally I find it more effective to create the story first and then contrive the history to support the story, but I know several writers who prefer to do the history first.