rec.autos.simulators

Elrikk  ;o)

"Immersive". adj. Pertaining to immersing or plunging into something.

Being mentally drawn into a virtual environment has little to do with
what your fingers or toes happening to be doing. The important factors
for me (obviously it's somewhat subjective) are the first person
perspective and the ability to look around freely as I would in real
life. In fact, I find most FPS more immersive than racing games. Using
3D glasses and/or head tracking technology can make racing games even
more immersive, for the same reason.

By *your* definition, car and airplane sims are the only immersive
games. They just happen to have a similarity between real-world and
game-playing motions.

: Nevertheless, being good at sims, you can quite
: effortlessly sit in a real car/kart and do good laps

I bet you could do nearly as well having practiced with only a mouse or
a joystick, and not a wheel. The skills you are learning -- how to
approach turns, when to brake and accelerate, etc. -- are somewhat
independent of the input device.

: In sim-racing, what you do and what you see (but
: [fortunately] not what you feel) is very close to
: the real thing.

Not sim racing, *car* racing (unless you happen to have a full sized,
motorcycle motion-simulator at home). ;)

Sorry, english is not my native language, I thought that immersiveness can
be measured and apply in different degrees... In any case you've brought
"immersiveness" to show correlation between sim-racing and fps and I was
questioning the logic of it, not your use of term immersive.

Consider the following scheme:

car racing sim:
---------------
Computer implemented physics engine -> visuals and sound
-> your "driving" brain paths -> movements of your arms and feet
-> computer implemented physics engine

real car racing
---------------
Real physics -> visuals and sound and G-forces
-> your "driving" brain paths -> movements of your arms and feet
-> Real physics

FPS
---------------
Computer implemented physics engine -> visuals and sound
-> you choose one of the action from offered by the game
(I'd rather move that lamp to blind the enemy when he enters,
but it's not implemented, so I will hide behind that crate instead)
-> you translate desired action into the keyboard/mouse command
that implements it -> computer reinterpretes your commands into
the action -> Computer implemented physics engine

Adventure
---------------
Computer implemented physics engine -> visuals and sound
-> you choose one of the action from offered by the game
(I'd rather move that lamp to blind the enemy when he enters,
but it's not implemented, so I will hide behind that crate instead)
-> you translate desired action into the keyboard/mouse command
that implements it -> computer reinterpretes your commands into
the action -> Computer implemented physics engine

So the flow paths in car-sim matches the flow path in a real driving,
while the flow paths in FPS and adventure are the same and different
from the one in car-sim. Both FPS and adventure (same for RPG) rely on
person's imagination to achieve immersiveness, while car-sim don't.
Actually, car-sims are enjoyable without immersiveness (because you can
just enjoy the process of driving itself)

You think that sim-racing and FPS [positively] correlate. That may be
coming because there's a lot of people playing FPS, which means that you'll
see many people who like sim-racing and FPS, unless there's a strong
negative correlation (like if there was good reason for sim-racing fans to
dislike FPS).

Well, not sure what is the right term then, but they achieve somewhat
different effects using significantly different methods than the other
genres of the games. Actually, in this sense, computer board games (chess,
go etc) are much closer to car/plane-sims in the way they operate. All of
them provide very similar ways of interaction to real life and don't rely
on imagination to create believable experience.

I think that was done intentionally by the game developers ;)

Well, you can probably expand this logic so that the person who have
watched plenty of tennis and played it well on the computer should have
little problem to do well on a real courts. With all those athletic
activities making your body do what you want is usually the main problem
(unlike chess for example). Just think about how many people have
difficulties when switching from a regular car to a sportcar that have much
shorter pedal travel and tighter gears shifter. Or about people who have
hard time to learn left foot braking.

Right, that was car/kart racing that I meant. Come to think, I can do
pretty well in motoracing games, but I can't ride a real bike ;)

Alex.

Immersiveness is subjective. My arguments are more observational, based
on personal experience from a lifetime of *** (since the Fairchild
Channel F days) and*** around gamers (including several years in
the industry).

Immersion, as the name implies, is the feeling of being *draw in* to
something. It's a *mental* state -- the more your mind inhabits the
game world, the more real that world seems, the more *immersed* you are
in it.

What your body is doing has less to do with it than you think. When
you're walking, you don't actively "control" your limbs, you don't tell
individual muscles to contract and relax, you just choose where you
want to walk. When you look around, you aren't actively controlling
your neck muscles or eye muscles, they are a *means to an end*. In a
game, your fingers are the means. You quickly adapt and it becomes
second nature.

We already establish that (it's pretty obvious, right?). That may make
it more effective training for the real activity, but it doesn't
necessarily make the experience itself more immersive. There are other,
more important factors.

Imagine attaching a computer screen to a treadmill. It shows a
character walking through a virtual forest. As you walk faster or
slower on the treadmill, the character walks faster or slower. You
can't look around and can only walk in a straight line, but there is a
100% match between what the character in the game is doing and what
your body is doing. Does that make it immersive? Not really.

Now imagine putting on a VR helmet. You see the forest in first person,
in true 3D, and you can look around freely. Using a controller sitting
in your lap, you can walk anywhere in the forest, climb trees, push
aside plants, explore. That's going to be a *far* more immersive
experience, regardless of the fact that you're sitting on your ass.

Another example: what's more immersive, racing in 3rd person or from
the***pit? Most people find the***pit view more immersive, totally
irrespective of what your hands and feet are doing. You can make a
racing game even immersive making the***pit fully 3D and give people
the ability to look around it freely (just like an FPS).

Racing games still totally rely on your imagination, unless you
normally perceive the world as a small, 2D rectangle floating in front
of your face. ;)

There are a *lot* of different game genres. FPS and sims are closer
than most. They are action games, typically first-person, with heavy
emphasis on hand-eye coordination and spatial reckoning. Fighting
games, platformers, and sports games are more distant relatives,
typically played in 3rd person and more dependent on button-sequences.
Adventure games are even more distant, with less reliance on hand-eye
coordination. Strategy games and RPGs are even more distant, while
puzzle games, relationship games, rhythm games, board games, etc., are
way out on the horizon.

Thank you. I couldn't have said it better myself. I
challenge you to show me someone who finds Yahoo!
Checkers more immersive immersive than Half-Life 2 or Doom III. ;)

No, it's a lucky accident that they were able to do so. It just so
happens that the controls used to operate a car are fairly easily
reproduced at home. Can you say the same thing about a motorcycle
racing sim? How about a sailboat racing sim or a horse racing sim?
Makers of car sims are lucky in that regard.

That was not my logic at all. I was just thinking that going from a
mouse to a wheel is a minor learning curve compared to all the
non-physical things you learn about racing from a simulator.

If you were going to throw two gamers into real cars and have them
race, I would put my money on the kid who spent a year playing Live For
Speed with a mouse over the kid who spent a year playing Need For Speed
with a wheel.

: Just think about how many people have difficulties when
: switching from a regular car to a sportcar that have
: much shorter pedal travel and tighter gears shifter. Or
: about people who have hard time to learn left foot
: braking.

True.

<snip>

The big problem is that FPS severely limits your movements. In the real
life your body is able of a rich spectre of movements, and large part of
enjoyment from the active sports somes from the pleasure of mastering
quick, smooth and efficient movements to achieve the game goals. Computer
games don't come anywhere close to simulate an experience of a nicely done
shot in tennis, or a tricky header in soccer. At best computer games only
emulate the tactic part of the game. FPS, which to large extend are
supposed emulate a lot of physical activity, suffer from the same problem.
These days they're getting pretty good at tactic aspect though.

Sim-car-racing can emulate both aspects quite well.

As you have mentioned immersiveness is subjective.

It's hard to comment, because I can't race in 3rd person. I know that some
people can do it, but I have no idea how to do it. To me personally, making
fully 3D***pit would make no difference. Asides of the gauges I don't
even know how the***it looks. Somehow, there're always more important
places to look at. Being able to use peripheral vision (and turn eyes/head)
would be nice though for practical purposes. Using button to look
left/right feels like a cludge, and it always disorient me for a moment.

Well, that's about how our vision works. There're some focus/out-of-focus
issues and stereo-vision which monitors don't emulate very well, but
otherwise there's little difference.

And imagination is not required component in sim-racing. You don't need to
imagine yourself sitting in a real F1 car to have fun. Driving computer-
simulated car is fun by itself (that's if you like this kind of games).
Games in many other genres (FPS, adventure, RPG) pretty much lose sense if
you don't use your imagination.

So what you saying is that sim-racing and FPS are similar because of hand-
eye coordination and spatial reckoning. If that's the reason for
correlation you should also observe high correlation between people who
like FPS and people who like active [real] sports.

Checkers is just not very exciting game by itself, so you should be
comparing it some very bad FPS :) But if you make choice between HL2/Doom
III and chess/go/bridge I don't know anybody who would go for HL2/Doom III
(here I mean immersion as the feeling of being *draw in* to something). And
obviously, I only considerng those who like and know both kind of games.
So let's agree that they've done it intentionally, and by lucky accident
have succeeded ;)

If they're getting into real cars with summer tyres on the snow, I'd bet
for the one who drove with wheel/pedals. Same for any driving in low grip
conditions. If it's racing slick on dry oval, then I don't know.

Alex.

And? Do you disagree with my assessment, or are you just throwing
that out there to be contrary?

There is little visual difference between a computer screen and
*reality*?!

This conversation is quickly growing silly. You seem to be arguing
for the sake of it.

I feel the need to quote Michael Sisson here:

"Dude, seriously, expand your horizons. The above statement seems
a *little* sheltered."

There are plenty of people in the sim community for whom
simulation of real cars, tracks and/or historical eras is
important. And there are plenty of people (like myself) who just
want good physics, fun to drive cars and tracks (needn't be real),
and good netcode.

There are people who play FPS to lose themselves in fantasy worlds
(the games that provide this type of experience are a minority).
Many more FPS players are concerned primarily with physics,
controls, balanced weapons, well designed maps, good network code,
etc. Many of the most popular FPS (Counterstrike, Quake Arena,
Unreal Tournament, etc.) don't *have* single-player missions,
they don't have a story to speak of, they are simply made
designed frameworks for competition.

Do you realize that there are professional gamers? FPS tournaments
with $200,000 cash prizes? International competitions attended by
50,000+ gamers? It's not about imagining you're a space marine.
It's about competition. It's about seeing who is best at the
physical/mental skill -- a contest of speed and precision and
tactics. It doesn't need to correspond to anything *real*, and the
scenary is totally incidental.

Why? That's a terrible argument. People with good spatial
reckoning skills also make good physicist -- does that mean
nuclear physicist are naturally gifted athletes?

We weren't talking about e***ment, we were talking about
*immersion*.

You hypothesis is that immersion requires a high correlation
between what is happening in the game and what your body is
doing.  As you point out, that correlation is very low in FPS, and
very high in checkers games. If your hypothesis was true, checkers
games would be more immersive than FPS games.

Your hypothesis is bogus.

Concentration/focus and immersion are not the same thing.

A game of Go can capture 100% of your attention whether the board
is real or virtual. But you don't feel *draw in* to the board, as
if it has become a real place that you inhabit. Many Chess and Go
programs don't even bother to render 3D Chess/Go pieces, they
display 2D symbolic representations.

So you would get in the car with the kid who has learned that you
can take a turn at 180MPH simply by yanking the wheel as hard as
you can? I'd pay to see that. ;)

There is little visual difference between how you see the image on the
computer screen and how you see in the real world.

Right, and many people appreciate both. In the first case you have to use
your imagination in the second you don't need to.

This one I actually doubt. Do you know what is percentage of people playing
FPS online relatively to the number of units sold? NPD Group was used to
provide information on the PC games sales, but it seems they've stopped (or
they don't make it available publicly anymore). Is there some other source?

How is it related to FPS/sim-racing similarity? If anything, it's rather a
dissimilarity to sim-racing. And contest to determine the best presents in
any competitive sport.

Did you actually read what I wrote? like something doesn't mean being very
good at it (or gifted).

You can hardly get immersed into a boring game.

That's not my hypothesis.

That perfectly fits to your own definition (quote from your earlier post):

Well, you keep moving your definition of "immersion". If you mean it as
being drawn-in as into the real place you may find a lot of similarity with
books and movies...

You didn't mention about that kid being a madman ;) You can look at it as
on the person who turns the wheel/press pedals until he starts losing
traction. This person can explore what kind of input you can feed to get
results. Person who can't control his extremities has no this option.

Anyway, this discussion is branching out like crazy. I suggest to get back
to the initial point, where you were trying to demonstrate the correlation
between liking sim-racing and liking FPS.

You've mentioned spatial reckoning and eye/hand coordination, which are the
common requirements. But these requirements are shared by even much larger
group that includes a lot of real sports, arcade games, platformers etc...

Being immersed as being concentrated/focused puts sim-racing much closer to
the logical and strategy games.

Being immersed as being draw-in into real (maybe it should fictious too? -
how about FPS in fantasy/futuristic settings) world. This is not really a
strong point of racing sims, they are usually somewhat limited in this area
(you can't usually look at anything which you don't need for driving, most
of activities, like preparation to the race, pre-start activities are
ommitted). By this characteristics FPS is much more similar to adventure
and RPG (there's no strict border between FPS and RPG anyway, it's just
degree of mental vs physical action)

Alex.