作者：Keith Stuart

你如何知道自己沉浸某游戏当中？有很多显而易见的指示：未察觉时间流逝；未察觉身边的人或事；在惊悚或激动环节心跳加快；同情游戏角色……但虽然我们能够轻易说出其中症状，其原因何在？为何有如此多作品表现得不尽人意？

《恶魔之魂》沉浸性近来在Chatterbox备受关注，我决定穿插些许相关内容。这或许有些不着边际，但关于视频游戏沉浸性，我也不过是泛泛而谈。

回到2010年5月，当时Toby Gard（游戏邦注：视频游戏《劳拉与光明守护者》设计师）曾发文叙述开发者如何破坏沉浸氛围。一个例子就是研究粗浅，在游戏环境中植入不相称的小道具。这意味着美国路标将出现在欧洲城市，80年代汽车模型出现在以70年代为背景的游戏。这些错误或许非常细微，但就像Gard写到的：

每个人的脑海都存有简化现实模型；汇集周围世界核心功能的图式。我们通过既有图式认知和诠释所经历事物。当我创造游戏世界时，唯有说服玩家空间具有真实性，方能促使他们沉浸其中。若屏幕核心功能不符合玩家脑中图式中的模式，那么他或她就不会轻信游戏。

Fallout 3 from wordpress.com

他还谈到布景及通过背景细节叙述故事的重要性；扶手或墙上海报或许会有血迹。他举例《Fallout 3》说明游戏如何将叙述性生活带入每个游戏环境，但我还要补充《生化奇兵》和《FEAR》系列——这些游戏都设有解说装置回望玩家，奖励探索是沉浸体验的基本验构建模块之一。

Gard还提醒慎用“随意空间”：这是植入机制挑战的环境特色，不适合“真实”背景：

当玩家莫名其妙进入没有朝拜地方的寺庙，或没有棺材的坟墓，他或她绝不会相信他们是在探索一个真实的地方。最糟糕的关卡初始场景是呈现系列毫无特色的无用箱子和走廊，在其中穿插系列机制目标。

有趣的是，我们通常在不知不觉情况下把握这些线索——我们无需通过掌握整个游戏环境获悉未能促使我们沉浸其中的元素。的确，在第一人称射击游戏中，被射前，我们通常只有几秒钟熟悉周围环境，我们无法把握整个环境。神经系统学家和心理学家在此存在分歧，虽然很多人都认为我们一次能够记住所看到的3-4个事物（游戏邦注：换而言之，我们只锁定若干分散事物），但其他人则认为我们具有丰富知觉，能够把握所看到的所有事物，即便我们无法存储这些信息。所以我们能够知道自己处在不足令人信服的糟糕环境。

但沉浸性绝不仅是回应游戏设计师所创造的内容。约克大学人机交互高级讲师Paul Cairns目前正在研究沉浸性及其如何同人类的注意力、想象力和沉浸性相互联系。他表示，“这是个常见的词语，人们总是通俗理解其含义。但如今我尝试以更科学的方式探究其含义，研究人们沉浸其中会出现什么情形。我们观察玩家体验游戏时的个性、眼部追踪和时间概念。我们要仔细研究上述方面，因为游戏《俄罗斯方块》非常有沉浸性，但玩家进入游戏对此浑然不觉。”

但他发现，玩家自己在沉浸性方面也付出许多努力。更倾向幻想和做白日梦的玩家（游戏邦注：例如具备更有吸引力的个性）会更融入游戏世界。Cairns表示，“我们在沉浸性中观察的一个元素是情感投入。沉浸其中部分是由于你非常在意结果，所以你需要一定的情感敏锐度，方能同游戏建立联系，产生形成这种联系的欲望。”

所以虽然我们常被告知，玩家是数字娱乐的非理智被动玩家，但我们其实非常富于想象和情绪化——我们需充分利用数字空间，它是游戏反映现实生活强度的唯一途径。2010年初，Cairns调查了欧洲《街头霸王》冠军Ryan Hart，询问其体验这款游戏时的想法和经历——结果表明Hart的技巧不仅在于灵敏度、手脚协调或记住按键顺序，完全融入游戏当中亦起到同等重要的作用。Cairns笑着表示，“Ryan令我吃惊的是，他似乎是个非常普通的小伙子！其实他常敏感和情绪化，和想象中的《街头霸王IV》冠军形象截然不同。”

Second Life from blogspot.com

优秀游戏能够通过微妙人类暗示帮助我们创建沉浸情感反应。同角色创建可信赖关系就是个典型例子。几年前，《华尔街日报》发布一篇文章，询问读者已婚男士在《Second Life》虚拟世界中同另一女子结婚，算不算对妻子不忠。文章引用斯坦福大学通讯学教授Byron Reeves说过的话，“我们的大脑并非专门服务21世纪的媒介。大脑并未设有某开关告诉我们，‘这另当别论，现在是在荧屏’。”

的确，斯坦福大学虚拟人机交互实验室的实验表明，在虚拟世界里人类倾向维持标准人际协议：他们会在交流中移动头像以同其他居民进行眼神交流，或当其他角色靠太近时他们会移动自己的位置，对侵犯个人空间行为做出反应（游戏邦注：即便这个个人空间是虚拟的）。富有沉浸性的视频游戏含有能够逼真反应玩家存在的角色——《半条命》中的喃喃自语科学家，《质量效应》中的微妙沟通，Yorda在《Ico》中牵你的手。这些暗示通常很不起眼，但它们将我们带入游戏，因为我们从自己的情感生活中发现它们。

Mass Effect 2 from uuhy.com

当然，这并不是说明我们如何把大量个人活动和行为带入游戏当中的复杂科学，但思考想象力带给行为和感受的影响很有意思。Cairns表示，“能够通过游戏想象和思考行为，体验不同内容非常有意义。有人提出这样的疑问，‘暴力游戏是否令你更暴力？’关键是，它们确实令你接触暴力，它们或许也引发你进行想象，想象身处那些情形会是什么样子，但你怎么做完全是另外一回事。有人也许会认为，‘这就是我想做的，我就是想那么暴力’，但多数人会认为，‘哎呀，我从来没想过交战’。游戏令你接触新内容，让你以和电影一样的方式思考这些内容。”

Cairns目前正在研究我们沉浸游戏时如何弄乱时间。他接着表示，“人们总认为玩家在游戏中投入几小时，其本身浑然不知，但研究结果同此相左。经过很长一段时间，玩家似乎总能准确估算自己玩了多长，所以我感兴趣的是玩家的时间概念何时消失，何时又被记起？我希望游戏存在这样的功能，能够告诉你时间如何消失，玩家退出游戏后如何填出这些时间，判断自己身在何处，现在几点。”

沉浸性似乎有些不可思议。我们在游戏中迷失自我，但我们又能够塑自身活动和反应方式；我们常常忘记时间，但一段时间后，我又重新知晓自己玩了多久。我非常确信自己是这种情形，但我认为是游戏结果开始给我们有关持续时间的暗示。在在线FPS中，我们通常被告知在某个地图停留多久，我们在某阶段停留多久。但当我们玩《侠盗猎车手》之类的游戏时，体验过程就更毫无缝隙，我会投入其中好几个小时，却浑然不知。

游戏邦注：原文发布于2010年8月11日，文章叙述以当时为背景。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

What do we mean when we call a game ‘immersive’?

by Keith Stuart

Some games seem to grab us by the brain and won’t let go. But it could be that we’re doing a lot of the work ourselves…

How do you know you are immersed in a game? There are lots of obvious signifiers: time passes unnoticed; you become unaware of events or people around you; your heart rate quickens in scary or exciting sections; you empathise with the characters… Basic stuff. But while we can reel off the symptoms, what are the causes? And why do many games get it wrong?

Stimulated by all the Demon’s Souls obessives on Chatterbox at the moment, Gamesblog decided to jumble together some tangential thoughts on the subject. This might not make a whole lot of sense. But then neither does video game immersion…

Back in May, Toby Gard, the video game designer responsible for creating Lara Croft, wrote an interesting feature for Gamasutra in which he listed some ways in which developers often accidentally break the immersive spell. One example is poor research, the placing of unanalogous props in a game environment. That might mean an American road sign in a European city, or an eighties car model in a seventies-based game. These errors may seem trivial but as Gard writes,

Everyone stores simplified constructions of reality in their mind; schemata that codify the critical features of the world around us. We use our schemata to recognize and interpret everything we experience [...] When we are creating worlds in games, immersion is only possible for the player if we can convince the players that the space is authentic (whether stylized or not.) If the critical features on screen don’t match up with the critical features of the player’s schemata, then he or she will not be fooled by it.

He also writes about the importance of set dressing, of telling a story through background detail; it might be blood stains on a hand rail or propaganda posters on the walls. He cites Fallout 3 as a fine example of a game that brings narrative life to each environment, but I’d add Bioshock and the FEAR series – wherever you look in those games, there’s a narrative device staring back at you, and reward for exploration is one of the basic building blocks of an immersive experience.

Gard also warns against the use of ‘arbitrary spaces’: environmental features that are obviously included for gameplay challenge and serve no purpose in the ‘reality’ of the setting:

When a player enters a temple that has no space for worship, or a tomb with no burial chamber nor rhyme nor reason behind its layout, he or she will not be convinced that they are exploring a real place. The worst starting point for a level is a series of featureless, functionless boxes joined by corridors into which gameplay is inserted from a list of gameplay goals.

The interesting thing is, I think we pick up on most of these clues almost unconsciously – we don’t need to process a whole game environment to understand what it is that’s making us feel unimmersed. Indeed, in the midst of a first-person shooter, where we often get mere seconds to assess our surroundings before being shot at, we can’t process the whole environment. Neuroscientists and psychologists are divided on this, but while many accept that we’re only able to hold three or four objects from our visual field in our working memory at any one time (in other words, we zone in on a few sparse chunks of detail), others believe we actually have a rich perception and that we’re conscious of our whole field of vision even if we’re not able to readily access that information. So we know we’re in a crap, unconvincing game world, even if we don’t know we’re in a crap, unconvincing game world. If you see what I mean (and I only occasionally do.)

But there’s more to immersion than simply responding to what a game designer has created. Dr Paul Cairns, a senior lecturer in Human Computer Interaction at York University is currently studying immersion, and how it relates to human traits of attentiveness, imagination and absorption. “It’s a very common term and people colloquially understand what they mean by it,” he says. “But now I’m trying to understand, in more of a scientific way, what exactly is happening when people are immersed. We’re looking at personality, eye-tracking, people’ sense of time when they’re playing games. We have to be very careful with terms, because a game that’s very immersive is Tetris, but there’s no sense that you’re IN the experience.”

Generally, though, what he’s finding is that players do a lot of the work toward immersion themselves. People more prone to fantasising and daydreaming – i.e. more absorptive personalities – are able to become more immersed in game worlds. “One of the components we look for in immersion is emotional involvement,” says Cairns. “Becoming immersed is partly that you really care about the outcome, for whatever reason, so you need some sort of emotional sensitivity to be able to connect to the game and want to have that connection.”

So while we’re often being told that gamers are drooling, passive consumers of digital entertainment, we’re actually highly imaginative and emotional – we have to be to get the most out of digital environments that can only hint at the intensity of real-life experiences. Earlier this year Cairns studied European Street Fighter champion Ryan Hart, questioning him on his thoughts and experiences while playing the game – the results seemed to suggest that Hart’s skill is as much down to his ability to become fully immersed in the game as it is about his dexterity, hand-eye coordination or capacity to remember sequences of button presses. “What surprised me about Ryan was that he seems to be a really normal bloke!” laughs Cairns. “In fact, quite a senstive and empathic bloke, and that flies in the face of what you might expect a Street Fighter IV champion to be.”

The best games help us to build immersive emotional reactions through subtle human clues. Believable relationships with other characters is a good example. Three years ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article in which it asked if a married man was cheating on his wife by wedding another woman in the virtual world, Second Life. The article quoted Byron Reeves, a professor of communication at Stanford University, who said, “Our brains are not specialized for 21st-century media. There’s no switch that says, ‘Process this differently because it’s on a screen.’”

Indeed, experiments conducted at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab showed that people tend to maintain standard interpersonal protocols while in virtual environments: they move their avatars to make eye contact with other denizens while in conversation, or step away when another character gets too close, reacting to an infringement of personal space, even when the personal space is virtual. Some of the most immersive video games include characters that react realistically to your presence – the muttering scientists in Half-Life, the nuanced conversations in Mass Effect, Yorda taking your hand in Ico – often the hints are miniscule, but they drag us into the game, because we recognise them from our own emotional lives.

Of course, it’s not rocket science to suggest that we take a lot of ourselves and our own behaviours into games, but it’s interesting to consider the extent to which our own imagination shapes what we do and feel. “Being able to imagine and think your way through and experience things differently via a game is really valuable,” says Cairns. “People say, ‘don’t violent games make you more violent?’ The point is, they do expose you to violence and they do make you imagine, perhaps, what it might be like to be in those situations – but what you do with that is another thing entirely. Some people might think, ‘that’s what I want to do, I want to be that violent’, but most will think, ‘crikey, I’d never want to go to war’. Games expose you to things and allow you to think about them in the same way that films do.”

What Cairns is looking into now is the way in which we lose track of time while immersed in games. “People always think gamers spend hours in front of games and don’t realise it, but the research is quite ambiguous about this,” he continues. “Over long periods people seem to be able to give quite good estimates of how long they’ve been playing, so I’m interesting in finding out when does the time vanish and when does it come back? I’m hoping to be able to say that there are these features of games that are telling you how time is getting lost and also how people are then compensating for that when they come back out of the game and work out where they are and what time it is.”

Immersion, it seems, is weird. We lose ourselves in games, but our selves also shape how we act and react in them; we also often misplace time, but after a certain period, we apparently start to understand again how long we’ve been playing. I’m pretty sure I do this, but I think it’s the structure of the game itself that starts to give us clues about the duration of the session. With an online FPS, we’re constantly getting told how long we have on a map, and how long we have between each stage. But when I play something like GTA, which is more seamless, I can lose hours to it without really getting a sense of it.

So the inevitable question: how do you define video game immersion, and how much of it is down to the gamer?（Source：guardian）