You know, speaking of the desire for attention, something I appreciate about Disco Elysium is that constantly belittling the protagonist works because, even if negatively, the world responds to you and what you do authentically and with detail. The attention you get is fulfilling even when at your expense. So many games heap suffocating praise on the player to convince you that you are important and special, but getting praised all the time no matter what you do feels like placation, not attention. Maybe that's why so many enjoy even meaningless or annoying ways to get the game to respond to them, like choices that go nowhere or NPCs that scold you for acting weird, the same way a misbehaving child acts out for attention. Maybe we should think of "immersion" as something more like the illusion of the world responding to you, which is just "attention" by another name.
Trying out different platforms atm
- They/them
21+ | PH
Weeb, book enthusiast, amateur artist. Dabbles in a lot of things.
in reply to @mammonmachine's post:
The first thing I think of is petting the dog or the cat. If you had the prompt, and could press it, but then nothing happened, it would feel worse than if you couldn't even make the attempt. The animal has to respond
me fully immersed in metal gear solid by making snake rapidly knock on the door to his jail cell to make johnny yell "shut up in there will ya! shut up! shut up! shut up in there will ya! shut up!" over and over again
petting the dog and annoying the boy are two sides of the same coin
YES huge agree. reminds me of with BG3 how players will go out their way to lick a dead spider multiple times just to see Gale basically go "what the FUCK are you doing". Or in stardew valley, if I go through a bin in front of an NPC they think I'm a weirdo for it. if I'm being annoying or weird or doing dumb shit in a game, I want the characters to notice.
This is what keeps me from replaying Mass Effect 1 and 3 (and 2, to a lesser extend, but 2 is my favourite part so it gets more slack) - everybody is praising Sheppard to high heavens while all he did was to win a single skirmish here and there, and occasionally be in a right place in a right time. It is suffocating, just as you said.