Greg Kasavin Executive Editor	Now Playing: Arx Fatalis (PC), Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Battle Realms: Winter of the Wolf Wanting to Play: Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, Animal Crossing, Robot Alchemic Drive, Steel Battalion

Drawn In

If you've done a lot of reading about games, no doubt you've seen certain ones described as being "immersive." While no dictionary that I've found yet includes a definition of that word, I think it's only a matter of time before it works its way into mainstream lexicon. For example, I'm not seeing a squiggly red line beneath it when I type it into the latest version of Microsoft Word. This same program gently reminds me that "xbox" should in fact be "Xbox." At any rate, you probably have a good sense of what it means for a game to be immersive. It means the game is atmospheric. It means the game draws you into the experience of playing with its sound and its graphics. It means your experience of playing doesn't get interrupted and that the flow of the gameplay is natural and intuitive. Games that do these things are some of the best games around. Of course, they're also rare.

The ingredients that add up to an atmospheric game aren't obvious. When we think of truly great games, and what makes them great, a few things probably come to mind right away: Games like that have fast, responsive gameplay and, hopefully, some really impressive graphics. Maybe a multiplayer mode. However, when we think of what makes for truly great games, we don't as often think of elements like believable surround sound, lack of loading times, or superficial visual details (interactive environments, for example). These things seem like frills.

This game draws you in and doesn't let go.

I could make a number of obvious remarks about Metroid Prime at this time. Suffice it to say that the designers clearly intended to make the game atmospheric, and they succeeded. Had Metroid Prime been structured in a more-traditional fashion--let's say it consisted of 20 distinct levels, instead of one big, seamless world--it would have been a mere shadow of the game it truly is. Also, had the game lacked its small details--things like how you can see waves of heat pulsing from Samus' blaster after she fires off a quick salvo, or how you can see her face reflected in her visor when a bright explosion occurs--the people playing it wouldn't have been quite as impressed. These elements have no specific bearing on the gameplay. It's not like a visual detail, a cool sound effect, or the absence of a loading time has some direct effect on the core action. But these things do play an important role of making the experience of the game cohesive, and that's becoming an increasingly important goal in game design.

I think one of the biggest challenges of game design is the problem of how to handle character death. As I've written in the past, whenever you get killed in a game, that's a little invitation for you to stop playing right then and there. On the one hand, games need to be challenging--easy games generally aren't as fun, and hard games can be extremely rewarding when we master them. So games should strive to be challenging without severely punishing the player for failure.

The Soul Reaver games are extremely well designed.

Who would have thought a game about skateboarding could be so atmospheric?

I really like games that justify everything about themselves. I don't think this is asking for much. In many first-person shooters, it used to bother me that you, as the main character, could for some reason withstand so much more damage than your enemies. It just seemed unfair. And then Half-Life came out and explained it away: You're the only one wearing an HEV suit, which features numerous life support systems and other enhancements that are enough to make the game's main character more than a match for government black ops teams and horrifying aliens and such.

Still, what always bothered me even about Half-Life was that I'd die in it so often. One of the game's greatest innovations was the idea of quick saves and quick loads. You could instantly save your progress, and load up a saved game almost as fast. Other shooters made you sit and wait whenever you transitioned between levels or whenever you died, but Half-Life was the closest shooters had come to being completely seamless. But even so, having to reload my game so often in Half-Life started to put me off after a while. I wish the designers had gone a step further and included molecular reconstruction chambers or something crazy like that, so that I could believe that my frequent resurrections were part of the gameworld, rather than a video game convention. Half-Life answered most all of my other questions.

I don't think games need to be conventional in any way. But I think that, as games continue to look more and more believable, they should aspire to be more and more believable in every other way.