Top 5 Things That Ruin A Game's Immersion

Jon takes a look at features of video games that take away from the experience of the game.

Synopsis
Jon is in space holding a gun. He welcomes the viewer to the galaxy. He discusses the beauty of the Milky Way galaxy. He reaches Earth and breaks the immersion by pointing out that he is in front of a green screen, and the background is removed.

Video games has an ability to bring the player in to their world, making us feel like we are apart of the adventure. However, there are also things that ruin this immersion - the annoying stuff.

'''5 - Cheap Deaths. '''You gotta love cheap deaths - wait, no you don't. It doesn't matter what era the game is from, a cheap death will take the immersion out of the game. You just want to play the game for the experience, then all of a sudden - death. Jon can do without cheap deaths.

4 - Repetive (Repetitive) Gameplay - In this age of mobile games, computers and Glee, people don't want to do boring stuff any more. We don't want to be bothered with boring gameplay and repetitive fetch quests. There's nothing that snaps you out of a game more like "Go and bring back 6 walrus hides and I'll give you some gold or some shit like that...". Why does it take so many hits to kill enemies in Devil May Cry. Is that necessary and fun? Games should be in the form of Thought > Action > Reward. Not mundanity.

3 - Long Boring Cutscenes. Too many long drawn out boring cutscenes. Jon's looking at Final Hallway XIII! A great way to ruin the flow of the game is to make a cutscene every ten minutes. Maybe it was a hardware limitation then, but today games like Fallout 3, Half Life 2 and Mass Effect and Dead Space are removing the traditional cutscene for a more player-controlled style. It's easier to feel like you are in the game, being in control at all times. How can you relate to a character anymore when they do something cringe worthy. When used correctly like in Final Fantasy IX, cutscenes can make a game stand out. But it is a fine line.

2 - Bad A.I. Jon sees a man run back and forth. Is there anything more hilarious and annoying at the same time? Whether it is co-operative AI that won't co-operate or enemies that are stupid, how can you stay immersed when the characters are glitching out? Good AI is possible and makes the game a lot more fun to play. Jon could have sworn Alex from Half Life 2 was a real person!

1 - The Loading Screen. Jon is about to announce number 1, when a loading screen pops up for a few seconds. A game has to do what a game has to do, but it ruins the flow of the game. It's fine if it loads the whole level like in LittleBigPlanet, but it happens in Dead Rising 2 7 times right at the beginning!

It's just frustrating after a while. It's mainly technical, and Jon doesn't know how to program, but many games seem to do it right, so it must be good planning. Jon guesses that the PSP should be called the non-immersion machine then! All it does is load!

Trivia

 * This was Jon's first spotlight from the Game Station network.
 * During the outro, PBG sneaks up behind Jon.