Videogames are often praised for their “immersive” qualities, but what exactly does this mean? It’s an odd metaphor to choose. A game is not “immersive” in the same way as a jacuzzi: a jacuzzi induces blissed-out relaxation, whereas a game ideally provokes massive levels of adrenaline-fuelled stress alternating with triumphal relief. (Such emotions could in theory be had in a jacuzzi, but you’d need the help of other people.) Immersivity in videogame terms, on the other hand, seems to be code for a feeling of actually “being there”. But is being there always enough?

One way to enhance the feeling of “being there” is to render your gameworld with massive poly counts, beautiful textures and so on. Konami’s intriguingly flawed Shadow of Memories, for example, builds its mittel-European city with impressive love, and increases the sense of a persistent, actual environment because it changes informationally over time - the seed that gets planted in medieval times becomes a gnarly old tree towering over the town square in the game’s present. But its stilted, prescripted conversations betray the carefully wrought illusion.

Shenmue’s trump card, on the other hand, is that it allows the player to make a wide variety of redundant choices. Which flavour of soda shall I drink? Shall I have a look at that photograph? Most of the time, these choices simply don’t matter. Hence a certain species of immersivity: the feeling that you can noodle happily around in a gameworld that contains information not directly relevant to your quest. After all, whatever popularisations of chaos theory tell us, it is clear that we make hundreds of redundant choices every day in real life. This species of immersivity is most powerfully provoked, perhaps, by Miyamoto’s two N64 Zelda masterpieces.

But a highly immersive game must also convince the player that he or she really matters to the gameworld. The flipside to redundant choices must be the option of making other choices that have immediate and important effects. Shenmue fails here, because it effectively leads the player on rails through the whole game. Deus Ex, on the other hand, is a paradigm of rich and meaningful choice, because it boasts both a consistent gameworld and a plethora of strategies and gadgets with which to assail its objectives. It offers the player a wide selection of things to “say”, then listens to him very carefully, and renders a trail of believable consequences.

So far, these standard strategies of immersivity have been one-way: let’s draw the player into the gameworld. It is often thought, indeed, that the player’s psychological involvement in a videogame is a kind of fragile spell, a suspension of disbelief, that must not be broken. Yet there is an alternative paradigm that deliberately breaks this rule. It has only been rarely tried in videogames thus far, although it has been exploited in other artforms for hundreds of years. It rests on the idea that exposing the illusion makes the illusion stronger. Let’s call it counter-immersivity.

Take, for example, Mark Z Danielewski’s brilliant recent novel of weird topography, film studies and intellectual terror, House of Leaves. Where the fat, panoptic novels of the 19th century aimed for transparent believability, Danielewski’s tale is told by a gaggle of eccentric narrators, and the novel continually acknowledges its own status as a crafted, printed text. “Hey, I’m just a novel,” it keeps saying to the reader, but that doesn’t make it any less thrilling. Our will to believe, as consumers of art, is so strong that we continue to hover in a delicious semi-believing state.

This kind of thing is often called postmodernism, but it has been around a lot longer than that. Shakespeare, for one, was very fond of staging audiences watching plays within his own plays, and using characters (often clowns) to comment ironically on their own status as fictional characters. It seems that an artform needs to attain a certain level of maturity in order to have the confidence to start pulling such tricks, and so the example of Metal Gear Solid’s wry jokes about being a videogame - the advice to switch joypad ports to avoid Psycho Mantis’s unerring aim, and its sarcastic comments on how often we save - is encouraging.

Such playfulness should be cherished for two reasons. Partly because it reminds us that videogame narrative does not have to be stuck in a neutral, declamatory 19th-century style. And partly because it represents a fruitful reversal of direction in the psychological relationship between player and gameworld. Traditional tools of immersivity work to draw the player into the virtual space, but counter-immersivity draws the artwork outside its frame, and takes it into the same space as the viewer.

The use of hardware peripherals in videogames, of course, invokes a simple, mechanical counter-immersivity, the twin screens and sniper rifle of coin-op Silent Scope being a prime example. But, as when the world of Metal Gear Solid temporarily leaks out of the screen, counter-immersivity can also take more subtle, structural paths. The cleverest design aspect of Shadow of Memories is its hint of counter-immersivity in the way it weaves the familiar repeated-death videogame cliché so carefully into its narrative framework. And if EA’s Majestic fulfils its promises, then counter-immersivity delivered through voicemail and email messages will add yet more this-world texture, as is already the case with the viral marketing campaign for the Kubrick/Spielberg film AI.

The most brutally disconcerting recent use of counter-immersivity in cinema occurs in the Japanese horror film Ring. More than any other film, it is designed to work its black magic when watched on video, alone, in a darkened room. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but it can be seen to hint at a more cunningly manipulative future for electronic entertainment. Videogames may become ever more pleasurably or terrifyingly immersive if they can just learn to crawl out of our televisions more often.
Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy (Fourth Estate). Email: trighap@hotmail.com

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