Case Study Immersive Simulations

-Slide 1: On this topic of the Digital and Material, I’m going to talk about Immersive Simulations, both in idea and with some specific examples. Immersive Sims are any construct that is made to simulate an alternate reality to our own. Immersive sims can be crude or advanced, physical or digital.

-Slide 2: What matters is that they are constructs which give the illusion of another world. “Hermetically closed-off image spaces of illusion” (beginning of chapter 2 of In-Game) Oliver Grau.

-Slide 3: So what are some traditional examples of immersive sims? I’m sure we all could come up with some from our past. Most kids growing up will build immersive sims of their own; you know, building forts from couch cushions and pillows, building a treehouse, building a playset, building Legos… all of these are immersive sims.

-Slide 4: Personally, my brother and I would take up entire rooms building our own, crude “VR chambers.” Science fair project boards and blankets were our favorite materials. We loved building worlds, doing so by reconfiguring a lot of the material objects around us.

-Slide 5: Even when we just ‘think’ other worlds – fantasizing – we are creating simulations. Our own mental imagery makes up the building blocks as we augment the reality around us or construct new worlds.

-Slide 6: So there are plenty of examples of how we create immersive sims growing up. Pretend, play, escape – these are each very deep down, basic human emotions. But now I will consider a prime example of immersive sims, unique to our current world: digital games.

-Slides 7: I’m writing my paper in here on narrative construction in a certain game, and have done some research in the field of Game Studies. One scholar I’ve read, Gordon Calleja, makes a good point: digital games—video, computer games—cannot properly be understood as just games.

-Slide 8: After all, it’s not an adequate comparison to draw a line from, say, an Elder Scrolls games to a game of baseball. Both are ‘games’, true, but digital games can’t be understood as just that. They are primarily virtual worlds, worlds that have several, various games embedded in them.

-Slide 9: ‘Digital’ is the key distinguishing factor between video games and traditional games. Digital graphics allow computer game designers to create the imaginative worlds we used to create with only our minds, or by reconfiguring physical material around us.

-Slide 10: Looking Glass Studios is my favorite game developer, and they were foremost in pioneering computer games as immersive sims. Looking Glass took a very academic approach to game design—they were a bunch of MIT graduates who wanted to discover new ways of understanding games.

-Slide 11: And their chief focus was, in most cases, on creating narrative rich gameworlds. The game that had inspired the founder of Looking Glass, Paul Nuerath, was Dungeon Master, a 1987 computer game and a culmination of several trends that had all aimed towards constructing immersive worlds.

-Slide 12: A first-person, or “through the eyes” perspective, 3D graphics and 3D movement… these trends and others were all in favor of making games more immersive. The idea was to focus on escapism. This was certainly true of Looking Glass’ first game, Ultima Underworld, directly inspired by Dungeon Master.

-Slide 13: Ultima Underworld was a landmark computer game release—it had the most impressive 3D graphics engine at its time, 360 degrees of movement, a world to explore full of backstory, monsters, and characters to interact with. If you’re a gamer in spring of 1992, Ultima Underworld is the future.

-Slide 14: Looking Glass filled the setting of the game, “The Stygian Labyrinth”, with scrolls, pamphlets, and plaques that you could read, and friendly humans, and other creatures, that you could hold extensive dialogue with. They didn’t just make a game, but a world—something that they would do again in their third game, System Shock.

)-Slide 15: System Shock’s world, a space station, called “Citadel Station”, is a fantastic immersive sim. The story is that a rogue AI has taken over Citadel Station—and as you, the player, explore it, you can read and listen to PDA audio logs, survey gruesome remains, and through these and other environmental story pieces, put together the backstory of the game.

-Slides 16: And this is what’s key to immersive sims—a sense of story. A place that’s believable. Looking Glass constructed these worlds to great effect in Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and other of their games. Prior to computer graphics, making such worlds would have been difficult.

Slide 17: Making worlds, or games, was impractical as it’d require the use and reconfiguration of a lot of physical material. But computer programming allows us to meld together both virtual worlds and games to create the perfect immersive sims. It isn’t easy, but it is practical, given the power of computing.

-Slide 18: In the reading for this week, in chapter 4, [the author] shares something he discovered via YouTube—that making digital craft and sharing it isn’t as hard as one would think. This has certainly been the case for me. Just as my brother and I made worlds out of physical material, so did we too via digital means.

-Slide 19: We’d make games in PowerPoint –simple point and click games. My brother would use Egyptian graphics to build these tombs and Pyramids you could explore. He called these games “Explore a Temple”, and they serve as an example of how accessible it is to create immersive sims in digital environments—you can even do so through PowerPoint.