Early Video Games: Immersion and Critical Thought

Fig. 1 - Atari joystick!

The kind of gameplay that Roberta and Ken Williams’s interactive fiction game Mystery House offered me as a kid felt oddly familiar and deeply intriguing.  The sense that I was there, in that spooky house exploring and discovering things—and that it would be by my wit that I would survive—offered an immersive feel that Atari’s action games lacked.  Even though the game was fantasy, it engaged a skill, the use and honing of which mattered in the real world: critical thought.

The skills developed in Pac Man or Adventure or Space Invaders weren’t something I could take into the world with me.  My ability to assess the situation with these games and take actions based on that assessment was little more than meaningless in reality.  In Adventure, I was mostly polishing the skill of using the joystick to maneuver a square through a maze with the highest level of dexterity and speed I could manage (see fig. 1).

I knew it was a very stupid thing for my adrenal glands to be reacting to.  I was being trained, in a Pavlovian way, to jones after adrenaline rushes and the reward of being released from fear if I mastered the skill of cupping that little black stick in the soft skin between the base of my thumb and forefinger in order to hug the maze turns just right.  Don’t get me wrong.  Adventure was a helluva good time, but after a while I’d feel hollow and zombie-ish.  I certainly didn’t feel uplifted by having achieved something through self-directed insight.

Fig. 2 - Atari paddle!

A game called Kaboom was the epitome of the adrenaline drain.  In the game, a convict slid back and forth across a high wall dropping lit bombs that you caught in a bucket of water.  Instead of using the joystick, you used the Atari paddle, which turned to the right and left (see fig. 2).  The convict progressively dropped his bombs faster and faster.  Additionally, the splashing noise the bombs made when they hit the water got higher and higher in pitch as you went.  It was a maddening game.  I freakin’ loved it.

To be fair, I did experience a good deal of immersion in playing Kaboom.  But I didn’t personally identify with those buckets.  I didn’t feel proud of myself for having achieved anything.  In fact, I personally, was absent from this experience, which is a different kind of immersion.  I forgot myself entirely and became fused with the system.  The game encouraged me to discard my volition and to, instead, do exactly and precisely what it commanded without fail, or I’d lose (see fig. 3).

Fig. 3  -  Watch and listen to this vid of a Kaboom session and you’ll see what I mean about the adrenaline-driven madness.

The interactive fiction game Mystery House was different, though.  Mystery House asked me to exercise my critical ability—to move my mind toward creative insight for the purposes of solving a problem.  It was a game that taught its players how to think skillfully, how to deduce, how to use curiosity to discover and gain knowledge.  Captivating players with their own abilities to think and act creatively is vital for positive, memorable, connective immersion.