feotakahari

I think video games are actually the least immersive genre, and one of the multiple reasons for this is Game Overs. You fight a boss, learn a little of its patterns, and die. You fight it some more, learn a little more of its patterns, and die. Then you fight it again and win. But how did the character win, when winning involves patterns the character had no way to know in advance? The only way to make it work from an “immersed,” Watsonian perspective is to treat the battles as abstractions that only exist from the player’s perspective, things that didn’t “happen” in relation to the rest of the game’s universe. If you’re trying to create a consistent “reality” for things like fanfiction, the broad strokes of the battle still “happened,” but they didn’t and couldn’t happen exactly the way you played them.

(Disbelief is also affected by the illusion of choice, but this post is long enough.)