Providing a More Catered Immersive Experience

How much immersion is too much immersion? That might honestly be a more thought-provoking discussion than many of us game addicts would truly like to unpack. When you become too immersed in a game, the lines can easily get blurred, but without some level of it, the game feels empty and cheap. So, obviously, immersion can play a huge role in the game experience, but I believe a large portion of us gamers don’t take enough time to think about what actually creates that immersive experience we all seem to chase.

Aside from any notable and novel elements of a title’s gameplay experience, what actually sets it apart from other games in the same genre? It might take you a moment to come up with the answer, and believe it or not, that’s by design.

You see, if the game designers have done their job properly, you probably didn’t even notice the little things that drew you into the experience. It could have been the subtle shift in saturation as you moved from one scene to another. Perhaps it was the eerie silence that set in after the door closed behind your character. It might have been that one flickering street lamp off in the distance, or maybe, it was a combination of all these things, working in tandem, to paint a more full picture of the game’s intricate details.

Generally, all of these subtle elements are built into the storyboard of the game, engineered into the experience from the start, and the thought put into them can be what sets apart a masterpiece from a throw-away title.

All of that is in a world where the immersive elements are planned out ahead of time though. What if we could take things a step further and better cater the experience to individual players? All of us have habits that we pick up as we progress through a title, and a generative AI model can identify those, perhaps even more quickly than we can. That provides us with interesting opportunities to adjust immersion on the fly.

Rather than constructing a static player experience, the designers could develop different groups of audio and visual cues, which the AI model could then be responsible for calling upon when the player exhibits certain behaviors or tendencies. This could present us with some interesting possibilities across a variety of genres. Imagine for a moment that you’re playing a horde survival game, and you pick up your favorite weapon.

Suddenly, the music changes to something more upbeat. The AI model has become your hype-man. In contrast, maybe you’re playing a horror game, and the AI determines you’re spending a little too much time just looking at your inventory. So, it plays an eerie creaking sound that makes you want to close that inventory and look around, re-investing you in the experience.

These examples are only scratching the surface of what a well-trained model could achieve. Health conscious designers could even train the AI models in their games to provide periodic lulls in activity, giving players that might have grown a little too invested subtle but clear opportunities to get up out of their chairs for a few moments and stretch. After all, no matter how immersive the game might be, it is still a game.