It is said that one of the most imperative tools of any storytelling is the suspension of disbelief. The ability for the Storyteller to present an idea or situation and the listener to sit back, nod along and go with the flow. And it all comes down to the very tepid and ill-shaped thing known as 'believability'. "Can I buy this", "Does the story do enough to suspend by perception of what is real and what isn't." Without that there is always a distance between us and the story, a film behind which we observe ourselves more than we observe the story- and when you're in that state it's near impossible to be driven emotionally, feel the adventure, react to the stakes. It is the death of immersion.
But how does the act of 'believability' translate into gaming? That's actually something more of a nuanced question, because the very nature of a game does not engender itself to 'true to life depictions'. You create a game where the character needs to eat and sleep and go to the toilet in order to function in their day to day and 9 times out of ten you've made a boring gameplay loop that people don't want to engage with. One bullet deaths? An unfun overly brutal game. But there is still a balance to be struck, as evidenced by the philistine spread of that mostly misunderstood concept coined as 'Ludonarrative Dissonance' that bevies of half-educated luddites cite as though proof reading their own dissertations. People can sense when something doesn't feel right, even if they can't quite verbalise why that is.
The very nature of how most modern games play out means that we can never really create a one-to-one parity. When a gameplay loop is built around shooting bad guys- it makes sense to throw dozens of enemies at the player even though a sensible mind will tell you that one guy in a fight against several bigger dudes is never going to work out for them. At moments like that what is 'believable' shifts in perspective to how we are presented with these scenarios- what little branches are offered to the audience that they can sell themselves into this world. A world were one men armies exist and bullets sting like a wasp poke.
Given that I've been playing through them recently, the Mafia games come to mind when I consider this. Games with their fare share of ridiculous explosive set pieces- but set against fairly comprehensives crime narratives about the nature of organised crime and how the desire to always get more eats away at yourself, those around you and very nature to enjoy the life you thought you wanted. Mafia tempers it's more explosive moments with a relatively sedate pacing for a video game, where the evolving and devolving life of these mafiosos are placed in contrast to the bursts of violence and death. It's a great sobering device to keep us in the frame of mind to 'believe' in this world and the consequence of our brutality. Then Mafia 3 kind of spat on all that, but we're focusing on the positives today.
Tomb Raider, the remakes, are one such game that gets brought up often- largely because of half-heads who can't comprehend what stakes in a narrative are. I always found that new Lara to be very well attuned to realism in the manner of 'consequence'. They went as hard as they could into the explosive set-pieces and insane magical insanity- as long as they could back everything up with grounding consequence on the otherend- and it really worked out! Lara had to kill so many to survive that original island, and watch all her friends die or drift away after the fact- landing her in therapy. She saw supernatural happenings before her very eyes, making her an intellectual outcast after the fact. She learned of a great secret society praying on the hidden world, making her a paranoid recluse. Living in a world where A equals B is a great tool for having that world feel like it matters.
And on the more extreme example side we have the likes of Borderlands. Yes, I know- "Borderlands? How is that a game that can sell a believability to it?" And to that I would like to reiterate- we're talking about the player's ability to buy into this world of belief. It's all about being believable within the space you've created. If there's a wacky world in the ass-end of the universe were bullets are more common than water- then I want to believe in everything that comes with that sort of setting. A dusty and rustic world were civilisation are all but tiny rare pockets against a land gone mad- that sense of prevailing isolation amidst the crazed wackiness of the local power players. When you start softening the edges of a world like that- you lose that carefully crafted image. Suddenly Borderlands no longer feels like Borderlands anymore now that it's just a bad-joke factory.
Of course this works best with a game like Grand Theft Auto. One that bills itself around capturing, and then mocking, the state of modern life. Rockstar do this immensely well, bringing entire cities to life and extracting just the right slices of culture for mockery- but if we take this to the other degree and talk about immersion than it would probably be the Red Dead Games that take the cake from the catalogue. Lean slices of the mid-to-south west brought to a interactive playspace that feels weighty. Where you track and hunt, pick up bounties, get drunk and start bar fights: Red Dead delights in spicing up the mundane to be just exciting enough- striking this careful balance between the realistic and the playable. A masterclass, some might say.
At the end of the day all this talk about what is and isn't believable amounts to little more than a studying of tools- tools with which artists create entertainment that grabs and moves us. Breaking through the tough skin of the fictional becomes harder as we move into an age of more all consuming entertainment but as artists it will forever be our duty to stay ahead of all of that and sink our teeth into the real next level ways our work can snake into the hearts of the public. Immersion is just another one of those tools that can cut through so much of the doubt and dissention when used right, to the right audience and create the truly unforgettable.
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