1. Immersion
I recently wrote a little taste manifesto, outlining what kinds of games appeal to me and why. In it, I said that “I like games that whyproof their gamier elements,” and the more I think about that statement, the less satisfied I am with it. In my enthusiasm to use droqen’s recent thoughts as a prompt for the piece, and then to use an old post of his to flesh it out, I sort of misrepresented what whyproofing is, as well as what’s interesting about it.
To briefly review, whyproofing refers to providing in-world explanations for what would otherwise just be videogamey abstractions. For example, games with combat generally require the player-character to die but not stay dead—and as droqen points out, rather than hand-waving this bit of weirdness, “Majora’s Mask handles death by trapping you in a time loop: it doesn’t really matter what you did in life anyway, so why should death matter?” If the player finds themself asking why death is impermanent for Link, then well, that’s why! And it’s a meatier “why” than “because it’s what the developer wanted” or “because it’s a game, stupid.”
What I failed to engage with is that, in its original formulation, whyproofing is closely tired to immersion, which in this context is generally understood to be a feeling of escapism, of isekai, of falling into a fictional world and being there, staying there, undistracted by the medium through which one has accessed that world.1 The “immersive sim” genre uses a robust interplay of systems (that’s the sim part) to create a credible fictional space (that’s the immersive part). But absent that genre designation, when we say that a game is immersive, we usually mean simply that it grabs the player and won’t let them go, for whatever reason.
Whyproofing, then, is posed as a way to keep jarring, narratively unjustified abstractions from breaking immersion, from taking the player out of the experience—from reminding them that they’re playing a game rather than doing the more interesting thing that the game is about doing. As with any form of suspended disbelief, there’s some tricky disavowal going on here. To be immersed is “to hold on to a slippery, struggling fish,” says droqen, and in my experience some audiences will be more apt than others to hold on.
Indeed, there’s probably a useful continuum of audience engagement at play: at the low-immersion end, audiences who are constantly aware of games as games; at the high-immersion end, audiences who lose themselves completely and who genuinely forget, for a while, that they’re playing games at all. As is basically always the case with continuums of this kind, neither pole would be desirable or functional: You wouldn’t want to be completely unable to suspend your disbelief, nor would you want to literally lose the ability to differentiate a game from reality, on some Mazes & Monsters shit. Virtually all actual experiences of playing games will fall somewhere in between.
Still, most discussions of immersion seem to assume that it’s desirable to be as immersed as possible, as often as possible, and for the longest possible stretches. And if that’s what you look for in games, then all good! But the honest-to-God reason why I skated right past the question of immersion in my previous post, despite how important it is to droqen’s original argument, is that personally, I just don’t care about immersion all that much. Noticing that I’m playing a game (or reading a book, or what have you) doesn’t take me out of it in the same way that it does for others. If anything, it helps me to appreciate the craft on display! I can appreciate a design better when I notice it’s designed.
So what I like in games is not whyproofing per se, but rather the moment of recognizing some clever, or emotionally impactful, or otherwise resonant bit of craft: that moment of (for lack of a better term) Ah, I see what you did there! And don’t get me wrong: Properly whyproofed gameisms (and therefore, immersion) can provide that moment—ah, so that’s why I’m immortal!—and so too can the interlocking systems of immersive sims.2
But that same feeling can also come from things that are anti-immersive, which is to say, things that remind you that you’re playing a game. To experience the feeling of Ah, I see what you did there! is to acknowledge both and you and and I: that is, to think of games less as worlds we step into and more as conversations we have with each other.3
2. Telepathy
During his interview in the text adventure documentary Get Lamp, Richard Bartle offers us “a little thought experiment.” He goes through an escalating list of multimedia elements that could help make a virtual world more convincing, from vivid visuals and audio, to headset-based VR, all the way on to some hypothetical future form of virtual reality that completely overtakes your senses via neural spike—and then he dismisses all of those technologies, past, present, and future, as being lesser versions of what pure text can provide:
All the senses that come into your brain, they’re all filtered, and they’re used to create a world-model inside your head, in your imagination.
But if you could talk straight to that imagination, and cut out all the senses, then it would be impossible to ignore it. You couldn’t say “Oh, that’s just an image of a dragon.” That would be a dragon.
And if there was some kind of technology which could enable you to talk straight to the imagination—well, there is: It’s called text, and it’s been around for thousand years. And I have seen people leap out of their chairs when a line is said in front of them: “There is an immense fire-breathing dragon here.”
We could take this as a cheeky suggestion that the humble text adventure (the kind with a parser, Bartle specifies) is secretly the most immersive game genre of all—that our experience of every artform ultimately takes place in our heads, and that stimulating the senses is therefore a mere proxy for stimulating the imagination; and that activating the imagination is what really allows a game, or anything else, to grab us and not let go.
But for our purposes, it’s more useful to ask what Bartle might be talking about if he’s not talking about immersion. Our good buddies over at Game Studies Study Buddies recently connected Bartle’s description of “talk[ing] straight to the imagination” with an especially succinct formulation from Stephen King: “What is writing? Telepathy, of course.”
There’s a directness and a purity to text, which is why it’s as close as you can get to one mind speaking directly to another across time and space, across cultures, across wildly different ways of living. And while to be clear, Bartle and King are both talking about specifically the unique properties of text—which I think they’re right about it! That’s a big part of why I’m communicating with you in text right now—there’s something more than that going on in this idea of telepathy, I’d argue: text is the least mediated medium precisely because the ways in which it is mediated are so obvious. There’s no disguising that text is text. Text wastes no time pretending to be anything else. It gets right down to the telepathy.
With the undisguised nature of text in mind, we have a way to uncouple that moment of Ah, I see what you did there! from immersion, and perhaps to uncouple whyproofing from immersion as well. If the telepathy of text works because text doesn’t disguise its nature as text, then perhaps there’s something to be said for undisguised mediation more generally—for games that remind you, contrary to the principles of immersion, that you’re playing a game. This could mean fourth-wall breaks, where the characters realize that they’re in a game, or where the game talks past the player-character and directly to the player. Or it could mean that the game uses the form of games to comment on games as a form, as with droqen’s own The End of Gameplay. I love that kind of stuff, personally!
But undisguised mediation, as I’m calling it, could simply mean assuming that the player comes to the game with some knowledge of how games work, and then using those expectations as the basis for a conversation. Often this takes the form of twists on genre conventions, as in most if not all of the games in the UFO 50 collection, a project which seeks “to combine a familiar 8-bit aesthetic with new ideas and modern game design”—a framing that assumes you’re conversant enough in game design to notice which ideas are modern and new, and which come from the 8-bit era. These games rely on being recognized as games, and on players being able to place them in a history and an alt-history of other games.4
Another approach could be that when the player asks “why?” the answer is “because that’s how the protagonist sees things,” tying discordant gameisms to a rich, medium-spanning tradition of unreliable narrators. A recent and resplendent example would be Consume Me, where daily life takes on the stressful time-management, stat-grinding, and harsh looming deadlines of a Persona game, as an expression of the player-character’s anxiety and disordered eating. Not only are we meant to notice this connection, the character is aware of it, too. When she tells her long-distance boyfriend that their relationship “takes 3 poison damage” each day that they don’t talk, he’s baffled. But we as players are not baffled. We’ve been dealing with that mechanic all in-game week.
Note that this is a bit different from a traditional fourth-wall break. This isn’t a character who knows she’s in a game, but a character who sees her world as a game, and has drawn us into that point of view. Although Consume Me has the sorts of interlocking systems we might associate with an immersive sim (coffee gives me more time, but too much caffeine gives me a headache, which makes the actions I take in that time cost me more Energy and Mood), the game foregrounds mechanics-as-metaphor in a way that is not immersive, exactly. Rather, it’s whyproof in an anti-immersive sense.5 It’s me hearing the developers speaking through the game, and saying Ah, I see what you did there!
If you like, it’s just a bit telepathic. And maybe that’s what I’m really looking for: A conversation. A game not just in the usual sense, but also in the Marcel Duchamp sense in which “art is a game played between all people of all periods.” I don’t want to forget that I’m playing a game. What I want is to be reminded why I’m bothering to play a game, and why people bother making them.
- Olden-droqen stops just short of saying that immersive and whyproof are synonyms. ↩︎
- This Bluesky exchange got me thinking along these lines. ↩︎
- AAA games and VR experiments have long promised true immersion, a teleology of ever-more-convincing, ever-more-all-encompassing virtual worlds. The idea (often implied, sometimes stated outright) is that immersion in its ultimate form would be unavoidable and non-optional: no longer a matter of voluntarily suspending one’s disbelief, but a matter of being swept away whether you like it or not, and with no mental effort on your part. I would find this line of thinking pretty sinister if I thought that it had any chance of succeeding. ↩︎
- You could of course come to UFO 50 without an intimate knowledge of the 8-bit era, or of the early 2000s scene from which the collection also draws. And the “modern” design sensibilities are enjoyable on their own merits. But there are layers of meaning missing from your UFO 50 experience if you’re not contrasting these games with other games, at least to some degree, or else using UFO 50 games as trailheads to go and get familiar with what they’re riffing on. ↩︎
- We’re poking at something else here: While the framework of immersive whyproofing works reasonably well for parkour, it’s more limited when it comes to menus—for as a memorable Calvin’s Dad meme has taught us, all games are either parkour or menus:
Notably, droqen’s core examples of whyproofing (like Majora’s Mask) and my own (like Nier: Automata) are parkour, not menus. This is at least in part because menu-based interfaces inevitably, unavoidably place abstractions between you as a player and the game as a place you can walk into. Navigating menus (and by extension, games that are menus) won’t let you forget that you’re playing a game.
The possible exception in droqen’s original piece—the example of whyproofing in a game that might be menus—would be the save frog in Mother 3. But because that game’s combat has prominent rhythm elements, and also because the game does involve moving around a little guy, the question of whether Mother 3 is in fact parkour or menus is left as an exercise for the reader. ↩︎