Back around 1990, there was a school of game design that said that a game should be immersive, and to be immersive, it should stop reminding you that it’s a game by making you throw away all real-life conventions. So this school of game design said things like:
You should not have to examine everything in the game. You should do just fine in the game by examining only objects that a reasonable person would examine.
You should not have to die in order to learn something needed for the game.
You should usually be punished for theft, breaking and entering, and other crimes.
You should not need to pick up lots of junk and carry it around because it’s going to be needed in the endgame for reasons no one could have foreseen.
Unfortunately, this school of game design died. It was only ever really popular with non-commercial text-adventure designers.
Exactly—and I don’t think it’s just structural. A lifestyle of killing sentients and taking their stuff might or might not be a pleasure in the real world, but it seems to satisfy the imagination.
Back around 1990, there was a school of game design that said that a game should be immersive, and to be immersive, it should stop reminding you that it’s a game by making you throw away all real-life conventions. So this school of game design said things like:
You should not have to examine everything in the game. You should do just fine in the game by examining only objects that a reasonable person would examine.
You should not have to die in order to learn something needed for the game.
You should usually be punished for theft, breaking and entering, and other crimes.
You should not need to pick up lots of junk and carry it around because it’s going to be needed in the endgame for reasons no one could have foreseen.
Unfortunately, this school of game design died. It was only ever really popular with non-commercial text-adventure designers.
Exactly—and I don’t think it’s just structural. A lifestyle of killing sentients and taking their stuff might or might not be a pleasure in the real world, but it seems to satisfy the imagination.
Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times is about what can be deduced about the early tech whose products don’t survive for millennia.
Even then, people were looking to fill time as well as to use it.
You’d think people would evolve towards maximum-reproduction utilitarianism, but I’m not seeing it happen.
Deus Ex is the last good example I can think of, of a game immersive in this sense. Depending on how the prequel goes, it might not be dead just yet.
Edit: As pointed out downthread, there are of course Bethesda’s RPGs too.