What Not to Do in a Campaign

Dynamic campaigns are very important in creating a sense of immersion - partially because they generates a feeling of importance (even responsibility). If nothing else, they create the absence of scripting, which is an advantage in and of itself.

The key factor in the role of the dynamic campaign is that its plot (at least in theory) is infinitely branching - and the player is at least partially responsible for how it changes. In a campaign where there are countless shades and styles of victory or defeat, every action the player takes matters over the long term in some way.

  Take a jet fighter sim for example. If the player maintains an air dominance posture, his ground forces may be completely unimpeded by enemy airpower, but the enemy will still be operating at full capacity behind his own front lines. On the other hand, taking a methodical approach to destroying enemy air defences may pay off in allowing deep strikes against lucrative targets, but without decisively maintaining control of the skies, the player risks very damaging counterstrikes.

  Either way, in a true dynamic campaign, each unit in the air or on the ground has some significance in the greater picture, so defending it or destroying it has more meaning than racking up bonus points, picking up a new medal, or getting access to the next mission in the campaign.

The pre-written (scripted) campaign has its advantage in that the designer has total control of the structure and aftermath resolution for each mission. This allows missions and the campaign to have some creative "plot twists". Unfortunately, once the mission has been played once, the player has a good idea of what to expect, even when random variables are thrown in to attempt to add variety. Once your mission falls into the "rerun" category, the game ceases to be an adventure - rather, it becomes a sequence of decision points where you try to outwit the enemy.

Perhaps the biggest reason that "canned" or pre-scripted missions destroy immersion is not merely because they lack the persistence and continuous flow of a dynamic campaign, but because too many of them fall into the "puzzle" trap. I'm sure that almost any hard-core gamer knows what I'm talking about. If you could finish a given set of canned missions quickly, the whole game would be over very soon, and you would feel like you didn't get your money's worth.

  Mission designers get around the lack of replayability by making the missions extremely difficult so that you usually need to play each one many times over - you eventually find that you have to be at a certain place at a certain time doing a certain thing in a particular order.

It doesn't take long before you realize that what you're doing isn't playing a simulator, you're solving a puzzle. Even the greatest games ever made can shock players into losing their suspension of disbelief over a game world if they realize that the mission design requires that they try again and again until they figure out which weapon goes with which enemy at what time. Certainly this kind of "try, lose, repeat, try, lose, repeat" business has less to do with simulating warfare than it does with Myst.

Time Flies...

The issue of temporal displacement comes up. No, it's not an episode of Star Trek, but sim players seem to agree that a really good game can throw you many hours into the future without having noticed. So does this make super-addictive games like X-COM more immersive? It's certainly not that realistic. There isn't any use of a first-person viewpoint anywhere. In fact, all things considered, it's just a strategy game. Yet for the time you are playing it, it tends to completely encompass your world.

The dynamic campaign helps suck the player in because of it's persistence and continuity. But there is another fundamental aspect of dynamic campaigns that is frequently overlooked. One of the critical aspects of really holding a player into the game is - for lack of a better term - "newness".

  This is not quite the same thing as randomness and variety isn't exactly the right word, either. A mission generator can put various random enemy units in random locations, there is nothing really special about that. Instead, "newness" is the promise of surprise: that as long as the player keeps on playing, he will constantly encounter new things.

  Strategy games like Civilization and X-COM do this by implementing technology trees. Sims with pre-scripted missions make a futile attempt at doing it by introducing new enemy units and targets in each mission - but that newness really only lasts for one attempt at the mission.

(ADF Paratrooper Attack)

Achieving surprise over the long haul is very difficult, especially without crutches like progressive technology trees. So the ideal dynamic campaign must try harder to create the necessary variety - for example, an enemy airstrike may be two lone craft, or it may be a strike package of a couple dozen craft of various kinds. They may try hiding from radar, hiding in the sun, sneaking up a six o'clock low, or flying brazenly. They may try deceptive tactics or try to burn their way through at top speed. The strike may turn out to be a flight of heavy bombers, helicopters, a gunship, a cruise missile, maybe even a cargo craft dropping airborne units or making an unprepared field landing.

  Equally important is the human element. Human beings don't always respond in predictable ways. A fatigued driver or pilot may react differently than the same driver or pilot on his first flight. Perhaps a tired pilot will get lost or be separated from his fllight. Maybe they will make a mistake in the heat of combat. If the situation is bad enough, it should be possible that they will break off and flee. This special kind of unpredictability makes the player think "what will the next mission bring?" and it is at this point that a player can find himself up at 4:30AM on a Monday morning wondering what happened to the weekend.

Click to continue . . .

Realism: Foundation, Rooftop, or Swimming Pool?

One thing that is important to clarify is that in the same way that the words "realistic" and "complicated" are not necessarily interchangeable, neither are the words "realistic" and "immersive". Realism's role in immersion is to ensure the suspension of disbelief that is so important to simulations. However, realism by itself does not necessarily draw the player into the experience. This is where much of the art of simulation development lies.

The old bugaboo of physics comes into play here. While it is important that the simulated vehicle behave like the real one as far as performance figures go, it is even more important that it reacts to various inputs in an accurate manner. Not everyone may notice whether the M1's top speed over hardpack terrain is 50 or 70 kilometers per hour, or whether the F-16 stalls at 160 or 130 knots, but it will be very clear that something is wrong if the M1 simply "pops" over a bump with no inertia or the F-16's controls are just as responsive during a stall as they are at cruise speed.

(A-10 Cuba Belly Landing)

Even so, having true physics realism is very important to immersion because the world must behave the way you expect it to, even when it enters special situations that the programmers may not have originally envisioned (and there are many of those). The programmers at Parsoft may not have envisioned the possibility of skipping the massive A-10 Warthog across a flat body of water the same way a child may skip a stone, but it was A-10 Cuba's comprehensive physics modeling that allowed a wounded 'Hog to just make it safely onto dry land when a double flameout over the water forced desperate measures.

Furthermore, in the latter case upon reaching dry land, one wingtip dragged on the ground, hauling the 'Hog around and threatening to cause a violent ground loop. This kind of flexibility allows the players to think according to their real-world intuition rather than trying to guess whether the "rules of the game" allow someone to do this or that. Indeed, there are more than a few flight sims where even the most gentle contact with a light object will cause a catastrophic explosion, or a damaged aircraft will behave in a very random fashion rather than accurately modeling it's damaged flight characteristics.

When it comes to the avionics/electronics, managing the game design elements of on-board equipment on a modern combat craft continues to pose a stiff challenge. Accuracy is important not only for its own sake, but also because it will be more consistent for experienced gamers who are already accustomed to things like radar search patterns and weapons delivery techniques.

  Yet there are players who want to experience the same set of considerations in employing their equipment without being stuck in the details, and there are players who don't want to think about switchology whatsoever. An immersive simulation must not force novice or action-oriented players to use the full-fidelity electronics suite, but the game shouldn't stick experts with cartoon-simple systems either.

Putting it all together

So what kind of conclusions can we draw from all this? It would seem that we can readily identify several distinct components of immersion:

- Physical Immersion - This is the effort, through gameplay interface, controls, visual, aural, and tactile stimuli, to give the player the sensation of physically being present in the virtual world. It can be something as simple as a better padlock, more detailed graphics, more believable physics, or informative force-feedback - but in all cases it's directed towards "the feeling of being there."

- Environmental Immersion - This represents the modeling of a game world that behaves in a believable manner, where actions and mission results can have far-reaching effects, thus giving the player the perception of a struggle for dominance as well as a sense of responsibility to protect his assets. This can be as simple as resource management, or as complex as a totally modeled war.

- Temporal Immersion - Simply put, the consistent and uninterrupted flow of gameplay that pulls a player in and keeps him there. It is important for a game to not suddenly and gracelessly lose the perception of the world between actions, and equally important to make one mission flow seamlessly into the next. The sim must attach the importance of the greater cause at hand and yet continue to maintain variety to keep its hold on the player's attention. This continuity, while difficult to achieve, is perhaps the most telling goal of immersion, since it usually means that at least one or both of the previous categories have also been implemented well.

To their credit, most simulation developers achieve at least some portion of these goals. However, as the responses to our questions show, the immersion that makes players revere a simulation long after its first year is really the result of the *synergy* between all these various aspects.

The Future (?)

As strange as it may sound, the ultimate expression of the search for immersion may eventually result in a role-playing game. Current efforts towards improving immersion have resulted in integrating the strategy side of combat operations with the simulation side. Conceivably, the next step may be to try to emulate the life and career of the pilot to some degree and thus add role-playing elements.

Certainly there have been a couple of tentative steps in that direction, and the Producers of Team Apache have taken pains to try to emulate the limitations of a human crew (one early concept even considered the idea of running to the flight line to get to your helicopter during a scramble mission). Falcon 3, Red Baron 2, and other sims had a pool of pilots - complete with names - who have skills which developed as they survived one mission after another. As our sims begin to reach a certain level of maturity in recreating the conflict, the next step to making players feel truly involved with a game may turn out to be simulating the men behind the machines.