"I love games that immerse me in a simulation"
please do not take this too seriously. please. but i put together a list of factors that determine whether or not a game is an imsim. you know, a deus exlike. you can interpret this, to figure out if a game is an imsim.
the list of factors
- first person perspective
- space on a representation level at least equivalent to wolf3d, as opposed to how abstract doom is. a tendency to ask "why would the characters have placed this here" when building levels
- air vents you can enter
- bathrooms, especially with flushable toilets
- audio logs or at least "datacubes" or something
- branching paths
- keypads/combination locks/computers that are more than just doom-style switches
- menus that are a part of gameplay like dedicated inventory screens and so on
- limits on carrying capacity beyond just maximum ammo
- player can lean
- hacking and/or lockpicking
- What If You Could Talk To The Monsters
- AI that reacts to sounds and so on
- a focus on systems, whatever that means
- it means spreading fire
- hand crafted narrative and levels
- a general attempt to put you emotionally into a space, not a tonal piece like Quake
- a focus on letting the player Choose or Express Themselves, whatever that means
- player is more than a regular ass human, even garrett is a bit special
- some form of leveling-up beyond just more guns or whatever
- some vague attempt at moral choices, usually not framed as obviously star warsian good evil like in a lot of other genres. it's still usually half assed
- you can get poisoned or irradiated
- boxes you can either pick up or push
- some of those boxes explode
- no spaces obviously blocked off by invisible forcefields
- currency
- areas defined in terms of levels or zones with clearly delineated barriers between them at small constrained connecting points
- theres a plague
- item wedged into tiny hard to see area behind furniture
let's do some data
so that's 28 factors right. what if we did science. some data. the numbers don't lie. they're objective facts. that's what i heard anyway. let's see how games rank on the imsim scale
| imsims | score |
|---|---|
| iji | 20/29 |
| system shock 1994 | 21/29 |
| vampire bloodlines | 23/28 |
| thief | 24/29 |
| weird west | 24/29 |
| system shock 2 | 27/29 |
| deus ex hr | 28/29 |
| deus ex | 29/29 |
| deus ex 2 | 29/29 |
| dishonored | 29/29 |
| prey17 | 29/29 |
| non imsims | score |
|---|---|
| doom | 4/29 |
| grand theft auto 3 | 7/29 |
| various zachlikes | 8/29 |
| duke nukem 3d | 9.5/29 |
| blake stone | 10/29 |
| red faction | 10/29 |
| doom 3 | 11/29 |
| xcom ufo defense | 12/29 |
| half life | 15/29 |
| ashes2063+afterglow | 17/29 |
| hitman series | 18/29 |
| gunpoint | 18/29 |
| wildfire | 18/29 |
| morrowind | 19/29 |
| caves of qud | 19/29 |
| stalker 1 | 19/29 |
| tabletop rpgs | ? |
we've proved it with numbers.
