By Design: The Power of Immersion

Recently, after recovering from a week-long bout of a horrendous stomach bug, I went in search of a "comfort game" - something familiar, enjoyable, and immersive to aid in my recovery. Like so many gamers before me, that comfort game ended up being The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

On close analysis, Skyrim isn't really that great a game, especially 13 years after its release. The RPG mechanics are half-baked. The story is bland and derivative. The combat is boring and unbalanced. In comparison to contemporary open worlds, Skyrim is small and lacking in reactivity. The dungeon designs consist almost entirely of repetitive linear funnels to a generic objective (kill boss, get item). Yet Skyrim endures and somehow, in spite of all its flaws, every time I am pulled into the world and filled with the same sense of awe and wonder I felt when I first played it over a decade ago.

No Skyrim run is complete without a Frankenstein-esque cobbling together of mods, and many of these help to smooth out some of Skyrim's rougher edges. Still, all of these mods are built on a solid foundation, and it is the base game that has inspired such a vibrant modding community.

An Ephemeral Pillar of Design

Immersion is one of the more ephemeral pillars of game design. There's no metric for it, and every player's immersion threshold is different. There's no instruction book on how to achieve it. And I'd wager that for many larger AAA projects under corporate oversight, it would be difficult for a developer to push a game's release back purely for improving something so intangible. Yet immersiveness can sometimes make or break a game.

In a gaming context, "immersion" is essentially a game's ability to enable and enhance a player's suspension of disbelief. It is the quality that allows a player to have a kind of out-of-body experience, to live within their character, and embrace the fiction of the game in much the same way as a tabletop RPG player or stage actor might refer to the feeling of being "in character".

Different games take different approaches to achieving this. In some cases, it involves leaning into realism. Bohemia Interactive's Arma series provides a good example, incorporating several mechanics and features that emulate the battlefield to the most minute detail. Another strategy is to achieve it through interactivity and detail, much like the sandbox design of Larian's recent RPGs, and before them, the Ultima series (particularly Ultima 6 and 7). Closely tied to this is player agency - giving the player freedom and choice that somewhat mirrors the freedom they feel in the real world can similarly elevate the immersiveness of a game. This is where the appropriately named "immersive sim" dominates, and titles like Deus Ex, Ultima Underworld, or System Shock reward creative thinking.

Skyrim, as with all the main Elder Scrolls games, has many elements of the latter two strategies and employs these methods quite well. You might argue that it is the possibilities unlocked by this design that inspired many of the popular mods, such as the various survival mods or the Alternate Start mod, which allows the player to begin the game in a different way, such as being a landholder, a tradesperson, or stranded in the wilderness. Skyrim's rich modding scene is likely responsible for the emergence of immersive survival-crafting games in the years that followed mods like Frostfall.

More than Mechanics

Narrowing down Skyrim's immersiveness to something as simple as player agency and interactivity doesn't sit right with me. After all, plenty of games meet or exceed Skyrim in these areas. Yet Skyrim remains a cultural touchstone, with a meme-like quality as an endlessly replayable (and re-sellable) game, hiding in the corner of many a gamer's mind ready to pounce on the smallest shred of that "what to play next?" feeling.

I think part of what it comes down to is the richness of the world. The Elder Scrolls series has been chugging along for thirty years now, beginning with 1994's The Elder Scrolls: Arena. It is a series steeped in lore, and while a great deal of that lore is pretty generic fantasy fare, there have been many points along the way where The Elder Scrolls has defined itself with unique twists on the standard Western European Fantasy inspiration. Quite notably, Morrowind in 2002 eaned heavily into alternative fantasy motifs reminiscent of the 50s, 60s, and 70s era fantasy, which was often influenced by science fiction or gritty sword & sorcery.

The rich lore of The Elder Scrolls is accompanied by a soundtrack deeply inspired by the lore of the games. Jeremy Soule, one of the greatest videogame music composers of all time, injects Skyrim with musical works that are so rich and vibrant that you can almost feel the deep history of the world as you walk through it.

Skyrim is the sum of its parts, but the thing that elevates it as a pillar of immersion is the glue that holds it together - deep lore, believable world-building, and an enchanting soundscape that practically transports you to the frozen tundra of the Nords' homeland.

Not to be Ignored

There is a big focus in game critique on mechanics, structure, and the technical aspects of game design. While criticism does often discuss the less tangible elements like sound design, music, lore, and writing, these elements are not often given their due recognition for the critical role they play in holding all the other elements together. Yet we're constantly served games that are held together almost entirely through a mysterious balance of design elements that elevate that ephemeral quality that we all somehow recognise as immersion.

My father once told me a quote that has been variously attributed to Mark Twain, Andre Maurois, and E.B. White (the likely originator):

"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind."

Likewise, critics can dissect games as much as they like - and while that may have some merit in certain circles, games are, for the most part, best appreciated as a whole. In a way, that quote has undermined the entire premise of this article. But on the other, it is an allegory for how much of what we love in games is a sum of parts difficult to define and quantify.