
Ask HN: Are great old games more immersive? - forgottenacc57
I can&#x27;t help feeling more immersed in older games.<p>Am I just an old fogey, or are older games more immersive in some way?<p>If yes, why? Can it be quantified?
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dkersten
I don't think they're more immersive across the board. There are many many old
games that I didn't find particularly immersive (any shooter/action game
really) and plenty of recent games I found super immersive (some recent ones:
The Last of Us, The Witcher 3, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Life is Strange).

I think that as azeirah says, nostalgia is probably a big part of it.

About two years ago, I played Final Fantasy 7 again for the first time in 10+
years. This was a game that 12/13 year-old me spent countless hours on and a
game I considered to be one of the most immersive games I ever played.
However, when I played it again, I found the game to be quite weak. The dialog
is super super weak, the story is quite formulaic (although I obviously
already knew the story so its hard to evaluate fairly), the gameplay wasn't
amazing by modern standards etc etc. Its still a good game, but it showed me
how much games have advanced, across the board (not just graphics) and I
didn't find it at all immersive playing it again now.

So, there were immersive games in the past and there are immersive games now,
but how they immerse you has likely evolved over time too.

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willstepp
In some ways, I think so. To appeal to wider audiences, game makers have added
a lot of hand-holding features over the years that in my opinion make the game
world itself less immersive, since you're constantly being reminded what you
should be doing and this is how you do it...etc. I'm thinking of games like
the Zelda series, Elder Scrolls. There is less of sense of discovery and
exploration and figuring out the rules of the world on your own. This is
partly why the world of Dark Souls series feels so immersive. In some ways it
doesn't feel like a game at all. It feels like a world that doesn't care about
you, and that draws you into learning about it.

~~~
cauterized
I'd agree with this. More constrained and directed gameplay has been a major
reason I found a few recent remakes of my favorite classics disappointing.
It's as if the entire game is now a tutorial, with enforced "balance" between
choices and fewer significant degrees of freedom.

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FroshKiller
Without some kind of qualifications here--what constitutes an "old" game, how
do you define "immersive"\--I'd have to say you're probably an old fogey. I've
played video games since the Atari 5200, and while I've enjoyed games like Ms.
Pac-Man, Joust, Frogger, and Dig Dug, never once did I feel immersed.

Compare them to Metal Gear Solid 3, Shadow of the Colossus, or Skyrim. They
all feel like worlds I've inhabited. The surface area of those games is alone
enough to make contact with all sorts of places in my mind.

~~~
Clubber
I agree with you, but perhaps the novelty of those old games help to make them
immersive when we were kids. Once the novelty wears off, they lost that
feeling.

~~~
FroshKiller
I started at two years old with the 5200. I got an NES for Christmas when I
was five in 1986. I haved owned or played every major handheld and console
released in the US to date since then with very, very few exceptions. Believe
me when I say that I didn't feel immersed in a video game until Wolfenstein
3D, and that immersion didn't deepen until Quake.

Novelty doesn't really create immersion. A big part of immersion is a sensory
experience that supersedes "real" stimuli. First-person games like Wolfenstein
3D were immediately more immersive than, say, Donkey Kong or Mega Man because
it was easier in a real-time, first-person perspective to displace your
sensory experience onto the video game avatar.

What really makes a game immersive isn't just the sensory experience, though.
Your brain has to engage with the game's systems to large enough degree that
the world outside the game takes a back seat to it. When I am truly immersed
in a game, what I'm supposed to do tomorrow becomes what I'm supposed to do
for the next quest. The part of my brain that keeps track of what I need at
the grocery store keeps track of what I need from the weapons vendor. The urge
to clean up the kitchen is supplanted by the urge to clean out my inventory.

Older games were constrained by simpler hardware platforms and paradigms. They
just weren't complex enough to be nearly as immersive or even immersive at
all, let alone more immersive than more recent games.

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WorldMaker
Some of it can be age related in a number of small ways that add up: nostalgia
is the obvious one (and others have mentioned), but there are all the little
bits of things that add up to change what you can spend time and attention on.
When you are in your early teens with "not a care in the world" it's very easy
to deeply immerse yourself in a work, but as you grow older you gain
responsibilities and cares and can't afford to spend as much time or
attention.

Immersion requires you to spend time and attention. To some extent immersion
is a sensation of attention grabbed with time slipping away. To be immersed,
almost by definition, you need to give the game your full and almost undivided
attention, and be able to let time flow freely without notice. That can
undoubtedly get harder as you age and get more things demanding that you spend
time or attention on them; more things demanding you box your time or your
attention means less opportunity for play, for immersion.

Nostalgia plays into it because you become more willing to shuffle your time
and attention around for things that your brain already knows it can enjoy.
New things are a risk and if you are already so aware of how many things
require your time and attention, it can be tough to take that risk on
something new. There's a Catch-22 there as well that because you feel you are
gambling by playing a new game, if you set immersion as your quality bar,
you'll never reach it because the gambling instinct to hedge your bets against
"heartbreak" hedges your time and attention from even being able to reach some
of those levels necessary for immersion (thus almost guaranteeing "heartbreak"
by trying to avoid it).

Beyond time and attention there are a lot of aesthetic and subjective factors
you can explore. It is quite possible that, for instance, you prefer the lack
of graphics detail because you can fill in the details with imagination.
Obviously there are people that will always love books more than films, but
those same people can still enjoy a good film and kind find things to love in
cinematic arts. The more you can figure out what it is subjectively that you
love in older games, the easier it can be to find the parts of new games that
cater to your aesthetic or even entire new games built specifically for your
aesthetic. (Circling back around, the more that you can find things that are
flavored in a way that meets your subjective desires, the easier it becomes to
spend time and attention on them and thus find yourself immersed.)

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mrits
I just hope I never run into another game as addictive as WoW was when it
first came out.

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Mz
"Ninety percent of everything is crap." So, we look around us at the handful
of excellent stuff that still survives and compare it to the schlock that
surrounds us today and conclude "They just don't make them like they used to!"

But new games do seem to suffere from having an excess availability of
computing resources. Old games had to focus on game play and be disciplined
about what they included. Newer games may not have anymore programmers than
older games, but they often have a huge leap in art resources. This does not
necessarily enhance the game play and can be detrimental to the experience
when misused.

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matt_s
You might find games that don't have a monetization method built-in may be
more immersive, depends on the content obviously. I would venture to guess
that most mobile games can't be very immersive.

It would be hard to quantify immersive since that is a feeling, you could look
at time spent in game as an indicator.

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eswat
Might be a mix between rose-tinted glasses and acknowledging that games these
days aren’t always made with the same intent[1] that studios from years or
decades ago had.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13165780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13165780)

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RandomOpinion
Have to concur with others regarding nostalgia being a part of it.

Another big aspect, however, is ennui. The original Doom was engaging because
it was something entirely new. After having played dozens of FPSes though,
there's a tired sameness to all of them. "Oh boy, it's time to save the world
again with your pistol / shotgun / assault rifle / sniper rifle / rocket
launcher; how exciting" ... yeah, sorry, no. It really takes superlative
execution for me to even consider buying another FPS these days and even then
I'll wait for it to be in the bargain bin before buying it.

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azeirah
Nostalgia might play a part here, try playing a great older game that you
haven't played before. Don't take one that's in the same series as you often
like, e.g., no old zelda game if you're a zelda fan.

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Someone
Other possible explanations:

\- Younger people can stay focused on games better.

\- Social media make it harder to get immersed.

I think the first may be the largest factor. For those do doubt this: go play
a game of Concentration
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_\(game\)))
with a four year old.

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summadat
Half-Life 2, immersive storyline with good pacing, action/tension and
puzzle/problem solving.

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bfuller
I recently bought an USB controller shaped like the snes one. Having recently
sold my ps4 for lack of playing it, I can say for sure at least for me, and
this is probably because I grew up playing these games, that the snes and Sega
Genesis generation of games are much more playable for me

Sure graphics processing is miles ahead now, but I always seem to get bored.

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nanospeck
I wonder the same. I still love aoe more than any other game.

~~~
Fjolsvith
Mine is Railroad Tycoon, the original. I love to set the difficulty on max and
play to buy out the other competing railroads.

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calferreira
More immersive ? Maybe not. More fun ? Hell yeah.

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etherealmachine
This one is easy: no.

