Interesting article
Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 6:41 pm
From Pop Matters, it's an editorial on metagaming and immersion; I thought it was interesting and I wanted to share. 
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/13361 ... me-ending/
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/13361 ... me-ending/
(And after giving some more examples from Fable III:)To start with something fundamental, consider enemy respawn. An experienced gamer knows that if he comes back to an area again after a given amount of time, enemies will reappear. He’ll also observe where the hotspots are, what the enemy party will be comprised of, what weapon works best against which class of enemy. But a player who disregards studying the finer details might be surprised every time or will keep using the same weapon. It might take until the latter player has heard lines being repeated that he’ll get a sense of just how pre-scripted and limited the entire encounter is. Once he does, the mystique is gone, and the latter player starts to resemble the former.
Nothing could be more tired in games discourse than a Matrix analogy, but bear with me, as I’m going to use one anyway. It’s a little like becoming Neo. Once the player starts that transformation—in fact, as soon as the player even becomes aware of the possibility—his relationship to the game irrevocably changes. The mere thought that the player is inside a system that can be bent to accommodate less than obvious solutions begins to lend power to the act of play.
Recognizing the patterns in simplistic AI programming is one example of how a changeover can occur, but there are many that we could list.
At that point, the game had ceased to be anything except the gleeful abuse of a system that was clearly unprepared for aggressive extremes. The game was no longer a fight for Albion or differentiating myself from my sibling but was now a battle against what I saw to be an unfair binary, in which I could be a savior or a humanitarian, but not both. So with endless enthusiasm I turned the game in on itself, flaws and all, and beat it. Utterly. But was that worth completely objectifying its components, shattering the illusion of a living world?
And yet, games are frequently about those impossible accomplishments, which by their nature break with the same logic that gives rise to them as problems. Thus, the dichotomy. Why design games to be fluid, seamless, and immersive if breaking that immersion is needed to be good at them? It isn’t enough to simply fight my way through an onslaught of bodies in God of War; I need to adapt to the delay between command and action, memorize combos and Rock Paper Scissors-like rules of what works best, look for any amount of give or slipperiness that the mechanics will allow. In Assassin’s Creed, I must rely on the terrible attention span of the city’s populace to practice and perfect my skills in the first place. Realism takes flight the first chance it gets.
) and then proceeded to run a 100 day campaign that saw me ruler of all Rhodok fiefs. Then the three neighbouring factions declared war (basically the germans, the arabs and the mongols) and I beat the pants, the underwear, the socks and the darn boots of them. Then I skinned the enemy leaders, from the toes... down.