Nick Jackson

I reckon next year I should be able to collide my robotics/AI units with my elective Games Design unit and build an exmersive game, or at least an interface to one. What is exmersive you say? Simple, it’s the opposite of immersive.

There has been a trend in gaming to bring gamers deeper into the gaming world. This is awesome for some games whose worlds are amazingly crafted with some stunning story and environments. FPS like the Half-Life series and Bioshock instantly spring to mind as worlds which are carefully built for the player to just drop into. Likewise with RPGs and pseudo-RPGs such as Grand Theft Auto 3 (VC/SA included) or World of Warcraft. Even some top-down simulation  such as Command and Conquer can really drag you in with its amazing backstory and the work which goes into keeping the ‘world’ working and believable even though when you sit back you realise it’s only a few pixels on a screen.  Immersive gaming is taking that same world and trying to drag you into it through means such as VR glasses or enormous projected screens. Alienware have a big curvy screen which fills your peripheral vision and is a good step towards taking this into the home.

Exmersive gaming, on the other hand, is the opposite. You can go on with your daily life and the game is brought out into the real world, with the computerised ‘players’ (Robots in my case) interacting with normality. There have been some attempts at this collision mostly by puzzles such as Perplex City, but they again try to bring players into believing the game world. Here’s where exmersive is different, for example in this RPG:

You get given your ‘quests’ by robotic or static computer terminals, and the chances are your quests will have a bearing on the real world. Since if this happens anywhere it’ll be round campus, you may well get a quest to take some printouts down to the admin office in return for which you will gain experience (Allowing you to undertake bigger quests) and a reward (Print credit, for example).

Another possibility would be to involve real people as actors in the game (Perhaps clash with some robots somewhere) and only have the computer being a Dungeon Master of sorts, instructing people in what roles to take. Hook up some gadgetry to detect movements and you’ve got yourself a real-life Dungeons and Dragons. Sweet.