Overcoming any ludic challenge, if it actually is challenging, requires a degree of investment. Naturally, the more challenging a ludic obstacle, the more investment of time and skill the player will have to pay in order to overcome it. This would indicate that shooting too low in terms of difficulty actually decreases potential player investment, especially over time.
From the above we should be able to reasonably conclude that, contrary to conventional wisdom, it is better to make a game too hard than it is to make it too easy. This is only valid, however, when the player actually sticks around long enough to see through the difficulty curve. It would help, then, to have something which relies on the player (and not the difficulty, narrative, genre, etc.) to create investment.
An investment device that is hardly dependant on content? Sounds crazy, right? Oddly enough, such a thing actually exists in something we might call “ludic immersion.”
Two Sides of Immersion
Immersion as a goal in game design is a difficult task because of its conceptual vagueness. We can adopt a more objective approach, however, once we separate two related yet very distinct immersive experiences: narrative/aesthetic immersion and ludic immersion.
Narrative immersion (which we commonly equate with the whole of immersion) occurs when the audience becomes absorbed in the protagonist’s identity or the ambience of the environment or setting. This is the feeling one gets, for instance, when one fears for the life of a character in a horror film.
On the other hand, ludic immersion (not to be confused with engagement) occurs when the work addresses our own already existing and internal sense of identity. This is the feeling one gets when one watches a horror movie to see just how much horror one can handle. Any situation about which we find ourselves wondering how we would fare is a case of ludic immersion.
While in the former, we are empathizing with the protagonist’s values, in the latter, we are testing whether own values can stand against or within the work. In other words, ludic immersion is the experience of willful self-expression through restraints authored by a third party.
All of this is still pretty ambiguous though, and the type of suspension of disbelief in ludic immersion is somewhat involved, so it is useful now to examine a case study for better definition.
Ludic Immersion Case Study: Facebook
Let’s (reluctantly) jump on the bandwagon for a bit and talk about Facebook. Actually, Facebook is quite helpful to us because it provides perhaps one of the clearest cases of ludic immersion to which we can refer. Facebook makes ludic immersion obvious in that, while there’s hardly any narrative immersion involved, an automatic and nearly complete suspension of disbelief still takes place.
In Facebook, we mostly allow ourselves to believe that every profile is a direct and undistorted portrayal, whose truth is accepted at face value despite the obviousness of the immense hours spent on meticulously sculpting them1. This immersion is so natural and thorough that many users have difficulty conceiving, or at least acknowledging, that their own Facebook profiles are not in fact complete and true reflections.
Part of this immersion is really an extension of everyday social behavior. We grasp intuitively, emotionally, and unquestioningly that certain aspects of ourselves are simply more presentable, and that the lesser aspects must be obscured to create a “true” depiction of ourselves2. Of course, what this really means is that we are unable to value all aspects equally, that we are loathe to even observe, let alone bring to light, an actual and true presentation of ourselves.
(Consider the studies which have indicated that subjects ”in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat,” or the one in which “Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker
Posted 10/15/10 09:09:00 am
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