Quote:Original post by Dragoncar
Events of the past are real if you saw them yourself or believe fully that they happened. (ie. religion)

ITYM eg., or am I a religious man because I fully believe in the American revolution?

Quote:Original post by GemuhDesayinah

Quote:Original post by Deleter
Basically I argue that some realism is necessary in order for the player to be able to understand your game and its world, but too much in fact gets in the way.

Hardly anything is realistic in Checkers: you have purely abstract representations on a two dimensional board. Yet millions of people understand that game and its world, as well as the worlds of several other abstract games.

All a good game needs is an internally consistent ruleset. Realism is unnecessary.

I think you need to reexamine checkers, perhaps after reading my article. Checkers may be abstract at first glance, but in fact there is a lot of realism in it. Number one, there are physical rules and existence rules. Checkers has a world, thats realistic. This world has rules as per how you can move and where you can go. This world contains two seperate entities who must do away with the other. There are precise rules concerning the gameplay. These may be small examples of realism, but if you read my article you will see I say how much realism you "need" depends on what type of game you are making, and in fact I argue that you should use the least as possible. So checkers still fits in my arguement.

And as someone else on this thread stated: this thread is useless without linguistic precision as people seem to be using the word "realism" to mean different things ...

Quote:Original post by Deleter
I think you need to reexamine checkers, perhaps after reading my article. Checkers may be abstract at first glance, but in fact there is a lot of realism in it.

Quote:
Number one, there are physical rules and existence rules. Checkers has a world, thats realistic.

Heh? Checkers is "realistic" because it has a "world"?
In that case, your personal definition of the term "realism" is so broad as to be practically meaningless with regards to game design.

Quote:
This world has rules as per how you can move and where you can go. This world contains two seperate entities who must do away with the other. There are precise rules concerning the gameplay. These may be small examples of realism,

They aren't.

They are examples of INTERNALLY CONSISTENT RULESETS. There is nothing inherently "realistic" in having rules.

Let me repeat an earlier post, but this time with clarification:
All a game needs is an INTERNALLY CONSISTENT RULESET, so people know how to play it, and optimize their performance given the rules. "Realism" - the representation of objects, actions, or social conditions as they actually are, without idealization or presentation in abstract form (to use one dictionary definition) - is unnecessary.

Creating rulesets that players are already used to in real life (e.g. how gravity works) may facilitate ease of learning a game, but such rules aren't always necessary (e.g. the way a chess knight moves on a board).

This thread seems to mix two different comparisons. One comparison is between realism and immersion and the other between realism and abstraction (or immersion and abstraction).

Realism and immersion have been compared in this thread enough already, and I have to agree that realism is not an important thing as such for immersion, but what is important is consistency, especially with regard to being consistent with the player's expectations. Realism won't necessarily hurt immersion either. On consistency, I will simply include a quote:

Quote:Oscar Wilde
Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable.

Magic, supermen, and invaders from Mars are impossible; that won't mean I will not be immersed in a world which has them. The lack of consistency creates an atmosphere of improbability, and that will harm my immersion. For example, in most RTS games the game itself is rather abstract (usually one unit really depicts a whole number of individuals), but the representation is rather concrete (the unit is displayed as a "realistically" animated human figure). For me, this makes the game less immersive, because what I see is not consistent of what I would expect from the system by my observation of the rather concrete representation.

Anyway, the original poster juxtaposed a single health measure to several locational health measures. Neither are particularly realistic, but they have different levels of abstraction, so the comparsion is really about abstraction and realism/immersion. Immersion and abstraction don't need to interfere with each other. Tetris can be immersive and it's abstract. Unreal is much less abstract, but can be immersive too.

As for abstraction and realism, I am more than mildly annoyed by the proposed idea that abstractness and realism are somehow opposite concepts. I claim that abstraction will not necessarily lead into non-realism.

Imagine that I was to make a game about running about in forests picking berries (MMOBPG, [grin]). Because the number of berries in the bushes the player encounters has a profound effect on the gameplay, I want to make it realistic. What should I do?

Of course, I could start observing forests and plant life in general and spend all my free time studying about plant biology and the growth of berries. Then I would create a simulation of a forest (using genetic algorithms or what have you for the evolution of the plants etc.) and really make that simulation as good as possible. The end result would be realistic, as it is based on the real world and to an outside observer it would behave like the real world. It wouldn't be perfect, however, because any such model would still be a simplification.

Then imagine I wouldn't do the simulation, but would rather use all that time for running about in forests, counting berries in any bushes I encounter and build up a huge database of berry growth in the local forests. I could then use this data to build a statistical model that would be used in the game to populate the bushes with appropriate number of berries. Again, the end result would be realistic, as it is based on the real world, and it would seem to be like the real world. Again, it would not be perfect, as it is a simplification.

The latter model is easier to control, as there will probably be less parameters to set, and it would be considerably faster. It is also a lot more abstract. Still I wouldn't say it was any less realistic than the former model; realistic in the sense that it is both based on the system it tries to model and also seems like that system to an outside observer.

I'm not saying that checkers or any other similar game would be realistic, necessarily. If you think checkers is realistic, feel free to tell me what real world system checkers models and convince me that it models it well. Still, just because not all abstract systems are not realistic it does not follow that no abstract system is realistic.

Even the most concrete games are abstractions to begin with, anyway. You don't (usually) start by modeling atoms and just letting the game world emerge from this.

If you think my definition of realism is too broad, perhaps you should define something else. In my opinion, defining it as something the brain can grasp and define and explain to itself and put in understanding with other things is not "too broad". However, the original question was about realism and immersion. Although checkers has only the base elements of reality, it is still very fun to play, while a complex simulation can be boring as heck. On the other hand, some games that have come out recently were very realistic while still being just as fun as checkers. Saying that there is a direct correaltion, or really any correlation at all between realism and immersion is incorrect. I suppose I got diverted from this being the point by trying to argue that checkers has realism, but it doesn't really effect it in the long run. I still hold onto that the game itself will dictate how much realism you can add, and how little you at least need. Board games need minimum realism, modern day RTS games need a lot more (in their current flavors at least).