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Comment by ranprieur | Hacker News Reader

Photorealism does not equal immersion. Immersion happens in the mind, not the eyes. The games I've been most immersed in were made in the 90s, when the graphics were not as good but the gameplay was better.

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Absolutely! I remember playing Quake 3 and whatnot back in the day. As I became immersed in the game, keyboard/mouse/1024 would eventually disappear (figuratively).

Strangely enough, I feel like there is more friction for me to play video games of this era (and i don't) despite the advancements in and availability of technology to interact with said games. Perhaps the friction I feel has more to do with the bombardment of content (ads, microtransaction, social-media, etc) that gets in the way of and distracts from actual game play.

Then again, maybe I'm just getting old.

Perhaps this is what the author is trying to get at? If we could immerse ourselves in a similar way when we were using "primitive" games and hardware and therefore were subjected to all the temptation and risk, then what is different or relevant?

The quantity of those immersed and additional layer of (arguable harmful) content?

I don't know if I've ever been more immersed in a game than Cataclysm Dark Days ahead, in ASCII mode. I usually die pretty early but, one time, I survived over a year. Built a huge base, a maxed out RV, explored all the lore I could find, and I was basically indestructible in standard combat. I ended up dying while driving really fast down a road I'd driven hundreds of times before, it was supposed to be clear. A big floating, laser-shooting eyeball hit my my RV. That's was over 5 years ago and I can still "remember" that world, the crazy things that happened in it, and all the scary monsters I fought, as they existed in my imagination at the time, prompted only by ASCII characters and short description of what they were supposed to represent. I guess it's like reading a good book, but I'm in control of the story. There's obviously other ascii based games similar to CDDA, but there's so much detail in the mechanics, so much you can do to affect yourself and the world in a meaningful way, and open-ended lore to spark the imagination, that it ends up being way more immersive than similar games. The game has tile sets you can use instead of ASCII, but I find they put my imagination into cartoon mode, which isn't as deep an experience for me.

This is true of games, but not other applications. You need photorealism to have immersive video calls -- as if you are meeting in person. Here is a tech demo by Google; see how users respond to the realism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q13CishCKXY

So we do need more immersive technology; just maybe not for games.

Something I should have probably addressed in the article but didn't get to it for brevity: there are at least two kinds of immersion, and people tend to conflate them. (I'm not immune to this.)

There's intellectual immersion. Flow. You can be intellectually immersed reading a book or playing chess.

Then there's sensory immersion. Put a VR on, you're immersed this way.

I've said before, that immersion is not the same as investment.

I don't want to be immersed in Amnesia The Dark Descent just because it would be "more realistic", I can already shit realistic-enough bricks without drowning in the sensation of "I'm going to die".

I want to be invested in Link's journey to save Hyrule or my party's progress in Baldur's Gate and investment's worked fine before headsets were a thing.

I can just imagine the abuse headsets will enable for microtransactions. Got my popcorn ready to go.

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