Taxonomy of Engagement
Instead of complaining that the rose bush is full of thorns be happy the thorn bush has roses. -- Ancient Proverb
The number of virtual worlds you can experience range from immersive simulations to stories of linked events. This site attempts to categorize something intangible by starting with the relative point-of-view.
Experiencing the underglimmer of an interactive world depends largely on how you can interface with it (enough to imagine yourself within it) and how open-ended the world feels so that your imagination can employ leaps of intuition within your game-play. When you find the world that engages your emotions and imagination in just the right way you will build new experiences for yourself that you could never feel in your everyday life.
Games have evolved so much over the last 20 years that trying to differentiate genres of games is becoming more and more pointless. So I will try to partition them first by how the camera works. That sounds odd but it's more relevant than you immediately realize.
Regardless of what kind of control device you use in a game, be it a keyboard, mouse, joystick, console style controller, or virtual reality devices. What you are TRULY controlling is a camera. Computer Gaming requires you to put your real-world awareness behind a virtual camera and imagine all the blind spots in between. It must “fill in the blanks” by smoothing over the gaps in your awareness. So finding a comfortable medium between the hardware you use to play, the camera angle employed for you to “see” into the game, and achieving a suspension of disbelief at the world being represented inside the game is the goal.
POINT-OF-VIEW
Camera views can be described in a variety of ways. I will describe some of them here in increasing difficulty of the factor of “suspension of disbelief”.
| Perspective | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Common in First Person Shooters (FPS) and Virtual Reality (VR): This method is the easiest way imagine yourself immersed in a game universe but can cause physiological rejection when you play the first time. It may cause nausea because your brain may not rectify what your eyes are registering as movement. It’s possible to overcome this motion-sickness with practice, but for many, it can create initial negative experiences. | ||
| Third person perspectives allow you to separate your “self” in the real-world from the character that you are controlling in the game world. The methods used and the way the camera angle is controlled can lead to some challenges but as in every game environment, you can practice your way into feeling like you’re in control without physiological rejection of the experience. | ||
| An easy mode to play for most first-time computer gamers is the top-down model. If you have ever played a board-game like Chess or Checkers it is easy to understand the camera. You as the player simply look down from above, and direct your character or token around on a board. It can make immersion more difficult in these kind of virtual world. Finding an underglimmer in these worlds is possible with strong imagination. | ||
| The side-view scroll is famous from the days of early arcade style computer games. By controlling the movement of an object as it scrolls across a left-or-right world. You can easily follow the game-play and the point of awareness follows you around just as in top-down play. Games like this tend to be about action. Your reflexes determine how well you do and that is all. |