Games, Systems, and Immersion

Observation

I love computer games.

Some games I have played the most:

• Anno 1800 - 2541 hours (~106 days)
• Civilization 6 - 1421 hours (~59 days)
• Civilization 5 - 666 hours (~28 days)
• Medieval Dynasty - 468 hours (~20 days)

This means I have spent at least 213 days or 58% of a year of my life in a game environment.

Contradiction

Naturally, one may think that these games are an escape for me in the same way as they are for many others. An opportunity to be someone different, to adventure, to be a part of something grander.

For me, in fact, the narrative, fantasy, and role-playing aspects of games are often not the most compelling features to me. Often, the simplifications, abstractions, and historical compromises in the games I play end up weakening the designed immersive experience I am supposed to enjoy.

Despite all of that, I still can become deeply absorbed into a game. Specifically though, the system the game has created. The constraints, goals, and options.

Appeal of Constrained Systems

Why?

The games above and many others I have played are similar in that they are often based in history, focus on strategic decision making, attempt to simulate the real world to an extent.

In essence, the games I play are all extremely compressed, flattened versions of reality. People need to eat, wood burns, and one must learn masonry before building castles.

This may sound deterministic enough that there’s no point in playing but there’s often just enough nuance to keep the games interesting over different playthroughs.

Depending on the game, one’s starting conditions are different, different events arise at different times, one’s competitors act probabilistically so not always the same way.

But the ways in which a player can respond to the environment or competitors are limited. There’s always some kind of feedback and it’s often hard to ignore (you die, lose resources, lose game).

The ways in which a player can succeed are limited as well at least within the game environment. There’s no unexpected innovation that changes everything.

One often cannot advance in the game without building up various systems within the game that they can rely on and mental models of their own. These systems take time and effort but the pay off is not only worth it but often the only way forward.

This provides an experience I rarely feel in the real world which is one of more certainty which in turn becomes more confidence.

When I’m playing these games, the noise is less, the feedback is clearer, goals are more obvious as are the paths to achieve them.

I intuitvely understand and accept much better the concept that some things take time and one must setup the right processes so that progress can be made however small to the end goal, day after day.

These games give me a path to commanding a mostly reliable, unambiguous system or series of systems that will assuredly help me achieve my goals.

Reality and Burden of Infinite Salience

Why does this aspect of games speak to me in particular?

I presume a part of it is due to my ADHD and thus a weak ability to assign salience to information in real life resulting in difficulty with focus, attention, and time.

Say I have a doctor’s appointment at 3pm one day. The day will likely go one of two ways:

• I start my day like any other leaving me subject to an unknown direction of my attention and focus opening up possibility of losing track of time. Thus I end up late or missing my appoinment.
• Intentionally or not, I prioritize making the appointment above all else meaning attention and focus are hard to come by until the appointment is over.

Another part of it is likely just the nature of our current modern world with it’s overwhelming number of options, ambiguous feedback, and constantly shifting rules.

I have an inordinate number of interests, projects, and ideas. With a computer and internet access, I can make progress on any one of them at any time from almost anywhere. Any one of them could be a career-shaping success, most of them just interesting, possibly enlightening uses of my time and other resources.

Even if I was given a better ability to focus on command, it’s increasingly difficult to choose one path because of increasing opportunity cost, the uncertainty of future outcomes (e.g. programmers vs AI), and the myriad of compelling distractions competing for one’s attention.

Games as Legible Progress

In life, my goals are based on…

• Is this interesting to me?
• Do I have the skills, knowledge, time, money, energy? Can I develop those?
• Is the outcome desirable to me? In the form of recognition, money, learning, confidence.
• Do I believe any of the above will change before I accomplish the goal?

In games, my goals are largely predetermined. Finish the main quest. Achieve one of a few mostly static victory conditions. It’s not open-ended, it won’t change much if at all.

In life, I’m often uncertain on what steps are involved in accomplishing a choosen goal. I’m unsure how to setup my day to day to make sustainable progress through those steps.

In games, the steps are mostly broken down for you. The day to day or turn to turn work is more obvious and constrained. Distractions rarely occur and when they do, it’s manageable.

In life, what I have done, what my resources are, what I need are all opaque, dynamic, lacking clarity, ambiguous.

In games, I can see every completed quest, I can see exactly how much and where my resources are, I’m often provided a checklist of exactly what I need to accomplish something. Relevant, necessary information abounds in visually obvious places. The information is rarely if ever inaccurate, fabricated, incomplete.

The differences outlined above underscore one of the biggest provision of games which is simply systemic trust. When one trusts their understanding of the process, the outcomes, the contraints then one can more easily exercise patience, delayed gratification, faith.

Delegation, Agents, Background systems

How do the games I play often achieve this?

Most of them involve coordination of various villagers/citizens i.e. agents. Depending on the game these are characters the player can directly command or indirectly coordinate through various systems.

For instance, Anno 1800, isn’t in a first-person perspective so most of the game is coordination of one’s citizens by building up various industries that ultimately produce what the citizens need and want. Decision making is on when, where, and how much to produce and supply and to whom based on demand and profit.

In games like Medieval Dynasty and Bellwright, one has an actual player character in a first-person perspective. One starts out by themselves. Manually chopping wood, hunting, constructing various buildings until they eventually have enough resources to support inviting certain NPCs to become one of their villagers.

Once you have villagers, you can start to delegate work like cooking, fishing, smelting, etc. based on the priorities you assign. You can set the desired output level ensuring your village always has 5 tons of firewood or 3 pickaxes in storage.

You make the decision to build a tavern in a particular plot of your village and depending on their set priorities your villagers will eventually bring the necessary materials from storage and start constructing the building.

At some point, the biggest difficulty for you, the player, is figuring out what to do with the all the available time you have later in the game.

Some quests are blocked due to requirements of materials you may not be able to produce yet.

Some activities you use to do manually like chopping wood may at some point lose value due to likelihood of upsetting the very system you setup. If your villagers are told they only need to produce 5 tons of firewood a day and expect only 3 logs to be provided to accomplish that. Then what happens when you drop off 10 logs suddenly or you go chop up 20 tons of firewood. Either you don’t have enough input or output storage or your villagers now have nothing to do.

Where this is headed

Still unwritten: the implication I keep circling — AI agents and the future of background work. What happens when real life starts offering the same delegation mechanics the games do?