Hi everyone! I am Alexander, and I use he/him pronouns. A quick fun fact: today is actually my 21st birthday!
My favorite game of all time is Prey (2017) by Arkane. I love this game so, so much because it is (in my opinion) the pinnacle of the Immersive Sim genre. If 100 people play a Mario game, then they will all have extremely similar experiences in terms of gameplay. If 100 people play a choice-driven story game, then they will all fall into a few different buckets (the “good” path, the “bad” path, etc) and have extremely similar gameplay experiences as everyone else in their bucket. If 100 people play an Immersive Sim game that utilizes Emergent Gameplay, they will all have wholly different experiences in terms of gameplay! Instead of pre-defined choices that follow story beats, the choices of Immersive Sims are ever-present, and a player is constantly making them as they interact with the game’s environment and world. As an example, imagine you come across a locked door in an Immersive Sim. This problem has several “solutions”: you could hack the door open, you could use your upgraded strength to push a nearby bookshelf and reveal an alternate path, you can climb into a vent and crawl through, you can use an explosive to force the door open, you can shoot a door override button inside the room through a crack in the wall, you can use a magic ability to shrink yourself and climb through that same crack in the wall, etc. The list goes on and on and on. Although there are many solutions, a player will only actually be able to interact with a couple of them due to how they approached previous problems. If you invested all of your resources into extra ammo, health, stamina, etc, then you may only be able to shoot the door override button or crawl through the vent; this type of gameplay progression is called Emergent Gameplay. In my opinion, the best part about Prey (2017) and all Immersive Sims that utilize Emergent Gameplay is that these different paths are not explicitly communicated to the player. Take the “shoot a door override button inside the room through a crack in the wall” solution; the game never tells you that this is an option. For most players, they may think that the override button can only be manually interacted with when they are already inside of the room (to permanently open the door as a shortcut). However, players who pay close attention to how everything in the game’s world interacts with each other may intuit that they can shoot the door override button since a foam bullet logically has enough force to push a button on a touchscreen without breaking it As such, Immersive Sims constantly push players to “break” their systems only to reveal that it was an intentional game design choice and reward them. By the end of a playthrough, every person who plays the game will have “mastered” a very specific and very small set of the game’s mechanics, and this makes each player’s experience wholly unique in terms of gameplay. That is why Prey (2017) is my favorite game of all time!
Recently, I have been playing a lot of Civilization VI! Civ VI is a board-game-like strategy game; I have always described it as “Settlers of Catan with one million mods.” My friends and I played a massive game of it together over Spring Break, and it has been our go-to game for a while now! I enjoy it a lot because I have always had an obsession with playing games “optimally” or even “perfectly,” and Civ has helped me break out of that play-style. Do I have a limited number of really powerful items? In the past, I would horde them until the end of the game, but I am now much more open to using them when they are needed—even if it is not “optimal.”
As you can probably tell, I love games (especially those with knowledge-based progression systems) and studying their systems and mechanics, and I am super excited to learn more through this class!
