What makes a movie or videogame “immersive”?
We often throw that word around at media, but I’ve been thinking about the films and games that I consider immersive, and what makes them so. What makes something immersive, and what is the distinction between immersion and realism?
Let’s look at a few games/films I consider immersive, and see if we can pinpoint what exactly is contributing most heavily to the immersion.
VIDEO GAMES
I’d like to start with video games, mostly because I think they are one of the most immersive forms of media. It makes sense: being involved in the world—having agency in it—is a very compelling way to create immersion. But, even though you have an active role in video games, some pull off immersion better than others. The same goes for films. Why?
Dead Space
I played Dead Space back when it came out in 2008, and it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my adolescent life. I was new to survival-horror, and this game opened my eyes to one of my now favorite genres.
I think a lot of people believe immersion can only be achieved in first-person games where you yourself become the main character, adopting their POV. But, paradoxically, a lot of the games I find immersive are third-person.
There’s something about that now prestige over-the-shoulder POV that I absolutely LOVE. Seeing the body of your character, watching them move through space and react to the environment, is just something that you just don’t typically get with a first-person POV.
Bodies are what Dead Space excels at. The enemies aboard the USG Ishimura (the necromorphs) are straight out of John Carpenter’s The Thing, a myriad of uncanny limbs, flesh, bone and sinew. The way they move—erratic, like some mimicry of human movement—adds a whole layer of body-horror grotesquerie.
However, apart from the enemies, controlling protagonist Isaac Clarke is one of my favorite parts of Dead Space. The weight of his engineer suit is palpable, making each step heavy and slow. Getting into melee encounters is visceral—Isaac pants and grunts and swears as he swings his weapon or stomps his foot, fighting against the weight of his suit to pulverize a necromorph. For context:
Another aspect that makes Dead Space immersive is how the game plays narratively. It isn’t bogged down by tutorial screens, or hint pop-ups. Instead, it uses narrative design to tell players what they need to know. Famously:
I love how this scene invokes a whole life. You can picture this poor sucker: on his last legs, using his own blood to warn the next damned soul who comes along, hoping they fare better than he did.
Narrative design also goes for Isaac himself. The game utilizes his background as a senior engineer to create a believable protagonist. He’s likely repaired many planet-crackers like the Ishimura, and knows his way around a plasma and line cutter, the flamethrower, telekinesis and stasis modules. It gives us a reason to believe he’d be able to survive the outbreak the way he does.
And let’s not forget level design. The sound, lighting, and set design in Dead Space work in tandem to create the essence of dread, making you wary of every shadow, every vent, every doorway, and, especially, every elevator. The game rarely lets you feel safe. I swear, for three games straight I’d have my plasma cutter out and aimed at the hatch in the ceiling of every elevator Isaac got into.
Metro: Exodus
I’ve played all of the Metro games, but none have achieve the heights of immersion that the most recent game has.
Metro has always been committed to immersion. Whether you’re dwelling through the Russian metro systems, or exploring the irradiated surface, you always feel the sense of destitution of nuclear war juxtaposed with the resilience of humanity.
Again, the narrative design drives a lot of the immersion here. Metro is based on the sci-fi/alternate history novels of Dmitry Glukhovsky. The games are set in Moscow’s metro systems, where its inhabitants fled after the nuclear decimation of the surface. As such, much of your time playing as Artyom is spent using mine carts to get around settlement to settlement, and taking dangerous excursions to the surface—all the while dealing with the world’s new mutated creatures and bandit factions.
Since humanity has been driven into the metro, they have to make do with what they can salvage. This in turn results in one of the staples of the Metro franchise: makeshift weaponry. Almost every weapon you brandish throughout the games are thrown together pieces of anatomical hardware. Penny shotguns; pneumonic rifles; jerry-rigged flamethrowers. The ingenuity of the weapons and the shanty-cities all speak to not only the resiliency of humanity, but the ever inextinguishable drive of conflict.
Similarly to Dead Space, Exodus opts for an unabridged player experience. Everything from putting on your mask in radiated areas, changing filters, using a lighter to clear spider webs, fixing your mask when it gets damaged, charging up your flashlight with a dynamo, pumping up your pressurized weapons, is prompted by the player. The game makes you entirely responsible for Artyom’s survival in the post-nuclear world. Your objectives are even written on the back of your map, which you have to pull out and turn over to check. There’s something about this interactivity that really pulls you into the world of Exodus, really makes you feel like every aspect of Artyom’s livelyhood is in your hands.
Again, the world design pulls a lot of weight here—a recurring trend. The buzz of mechanical lights, the grungy metro inhabitants, the exposed mechanics of the weapons. Everything has a layer of dilapidation, the world reminding you that Earth doesn’t belong to humanity anymore.
The first-person perspective really works in this game’s favor. The way your gun sways as you walk, the way you wipe your mask clean. Environments are dark, making your flashlight integral—keeping it charged as well, naturally.
Also, the game looks fantastic. The environments are varied and unique, and the lighting and textures look amazing. Just make sure you’re playing the game in Russian; nothing breaks the immersion quite like everyone speaking English with Russian accents.
FILMS
The Batman (2022)
Matt Reeves pulled no punches bringing his Batman vision to life. The Batman makes the brilliant decision to hit the rewind button, throwing us into a fresh-faced Bruce Wayne still learning the ropes of being the caped crusader.
The film adopts the gothic feel of early Batman, leaning heavily into the noir of the original comics. The Batcave is an old abandoned subway, Wayne manor a pointy gothic dwelling. Gotham is grungy, and perpetually wet; the rain is a ceaseless force, a part of the city itself. The atmosphere of this movie makes you want to dwell in the streets of Gotham long after it finishes—and it is not short.
A common thread with the games I’ve discussed has been sound design and lighting, and that’s no different here. The score rules. Nirvana’s Something in the Way is tuned for different purposes, letting us know that this is a dirtier, angstier Batman than we’re used to seeing on the silver screen. I love how kind of primitive the bat suit is—steel plates for armor and heavy combat boots. The youtuber Thomas Flight has a great video analyzing the sound of The Batman, which I’ll embed below.
Apart from how great the film looks and sounds, I really like Reeves’ narrative elements. Bruce Wayne is an angsty, angry, loner—basically still a child emotionally. Pattinson weaves this dynamic perfectly with his laconic but vulnerable performance.
What’s great, too, is how Reeves’ subtly invokes Bruce’s privilege into the narrative. His ultra-wealth is not just used as a glancing critique; it has real consequences in the film. For example, one of the Riddler’s clues is only deciphered when the Penguin corrects Batman’s Spanish. It would have saved Bruce a ton of time if he had even rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, but feasibly he never had to learn a second language. This happens again when Batman has to learn from a Gotham police officer what a carpet tool is.
All of these little narrative elements coincide to create a believable Batman, no matter how ridiculous the initial concept may be.
The film also gets bonus points for having one of the most badass car chase scenes of all time.
The Green Knight (2021)
The Green Knight can be—and has been described as—a frustrating film. The narrative is discombobulated, out of sync. A scene will end and another will take its place seemingly without any threads connecting the two. It’s a retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian tale from the 14th century, and it takes place in a world of burgeoning myths.
It can be hard to follow the film if you are watching it with a conventional eye, because it’s kind of being cheeky about the the hero’s journey. Gawain and the whole world of The Green Knight are in the process of becoming. Gawain sets off on his Quixotical journey to find the Green Knight, encountering a myriad of myths and legends in the process of rarefication, unaware that he himself is on his own path of mythicization.
The cinematography and set design all add to a sense of symbolization. If you get overly concerned with parsing for plot, this film will bog you down. Instead, it’s all about Gawain learning what it means to be a knight; learning what honor, duty, and loyalty mean. It’s this sort of dance through time, legend, prophecy, and meaning that enthralls you in the mythos. You need to yield yourself to it.
The film also just looks damn great, too.
Conclusions
It should be said that performance plays a huge part in immersion. Bad acting, voice work, and stilted dialogue are surefire ways to pull the viewer from the story. It should also be said that just because something is immersive, doesn’t mean it’s good, and vice versa. For example: I think Devil May Cry is great, but none will admit to it being immersive. Exibit A:
DMC is pure camp, and in a lot of ways “camp” seems to be the outright refusal of immersion—perhaps even its antithesis.
Getting back on track, I think a common misconception is mistaking immersion with realism. A key component of realism is verisimilitude. The French word comes from the Latin verisimilitudo, meaning “likeness to truth”. Verisimilitude is a quality that many novels strive for, attempting to replicate a likeness of real life in their pages. This is most often noticeable in the pace, dialogue and plot of the narrative—written with an eye towards the austere, the “everyday” details of commonplace reality. Of course, as one’s lived experience differs from others, so too will what media one finds verisimilitude within. But, for the most part, verisimilitude is really an empirical quality. Its business is painting a “realistic” portrait of what it’s like to walk and breathe on planet Earth as a human being; its Truth is how accurately it can get in its descriptions of life.
What all of our examples have in common is a consistency and commitment to the principles of their world. While realism can contribute to immersion, it seems that immersion operates on a different form of realism—a speculative realism—that makes the player/viewer use the media’s own internal logic to reason through its reality. In a sense, realism and immersion work in tandom: the former providing a grounds for the viewer, usually visually or sonically. No matter how fantastic our examples have gotten, there is always something grounded about their presentation, something the viewer/player can relate to. Once that grounds is established, the viewer/player can begin to grasp the principles of the world and accept them.
At first I thought immersion required a suspension of belief, but the more I dwell on it, the more I think belief is actually a key component of immersion. To be immersed is to adopt the principles of a world, to embody its logic. It requires an almost meta-belief, ie., the desire to believe. The media’s job is to convince you it’s worthy of this desire, or to perhaps implant it in you subconciously. Believability is driven by a consistency in the world’s principles—an utter commitment to them. The empirical data—the realist elements—drench you in the world, and the narrative design—the world’s principles—give rise to an internal logic, the adoption of which yields immersion.
All this is to say: Immersion is subjective. I’m sure the stuff I find immersive is different from someone else. Personally, sound and narrative design do a ton of the heavy lifting. But, in the very least, a common thread of immersion is consistency. Inconsistencies lead to lapses in immersion—moments that pull one from the speculative realism and make one overly analytical.
I know saying consistency is important to immersion isn’t the most profound observation, but I think it’s useful—especially as a writer or creator—to look at the media we love and enjoy and try to disseminate what works, what doesn’t, and what sets them apart from others.