A few months ago, I had a friend over and we played some games. Friend, girlfriend, and I spent about two and a half hours playing Scythe, a board game that is kind of like Settlers of Catan, but more complex and also has giant mechs. It was a lot of fun to play, but after several hours of strategy and planning, we needed a breather. So we got some beers and booted up Rocket League.
My friend had never played Rocket League, but was familiar with the concept. It’s an easy one to understand: it’s soccer, but with rocket-powered race cars. You and some teammates each drive a tricked-out vehicle and hit a ball into a goal. There are little markers on the ground that you drive over to refuel your jets and, when the time is right, you pull the trigger and blast forward, hopefully scoring a point for your team. Expert players can time their jumps and rockets just right in order to fly around the track and perform airborne maneuvers, but by and large, it’s an incredibly easy game to get the hang of. Too easy, perhaps?
When you ask anyone, myself included, what their favorite video games are, very few people will put Rocket League on their list. Yeah, it’s a very fun game, but it’s not really the transcendent experience that a more crafted single-player campaign can be, right? It doesn’t hit the creative high-water marks of a Legend of Zelda game or contain the emotional gut-punches of a personal little indie game. It’s a fun experience, but surely it isn’t art.
I mean, it’s just soccer with rocket cars.
No, when I think of a video game, and I mean a real video game, my mind always defaults to my personal favorite Metroid Prime. For others, they enjoy RPGs that allow them to explore the full scope of narrative possibilities. Other just like well-balanced, well-crafted action. To each their own, naturally, but there has been one word that has become the standard for gamers of all stripes when describing the “goodness” of a video game: immersive.
Yes, that’s how you know you have a good game. It’s immersive. Wow, the camera never cuts from gameplay to cutscene. Isn’t that immersive? Oh my God, my movements with the controller directly tie to my avatar’s movement. Talk about immersive! I have a huge amount of control over the dialogue! That’s what I call immersive!
Immersion, like any other “emotion,” isn’t a hard science. What sucks me into a game isn’t what sucks you into a game and doesn’t suck my friend into a game. We all have different reasons we play, and so what makes a game immersive is kind of an arbitrary metric. It’s so vague it’s almost meaningless, right?
If you had asked me last week what I consider to be immersive, I would have given you an answer that I thought was easy. For me, I like to feel like I’m a world. I want to go wherever I want to go at a pace that works for me. I don’t want to be bombarded with cutscenes, because then I’m no longer playing, and I definitely don’t want to worry about points or high scores or anything that will remind me that I’m playing a game. When I’m aware I’m just playing a game, I’m no longer immersed.
Rocket League isn’t really immersive. It’s just a fun way to spend some time with a friend (even if that friend kinda ruined Dark Souls for you). You hang out, pass the controllers around so everyone gets a turn, and shoot the shit while you play soccer. You aren’t really immersed in the game, right? That’s what I thought.
But then we played Rocket League.
I noticed something happening to us over the course of the night. One of us would drive towards the ball, which was in the air after getting knocked about by another player. We’d head towards the ball, try to guess its trajectory, and at the last minute, we’d realize we were a little off course. Sure, we’d steer with the control stick to correct our aim, but we’d also tilt our legs a little bit in that direction too. The movement would possess our entire bodies.
In another instance, I’d jump for the ball and start using my rocket boost. If I hit it with enough force, it should clear the goal. I’d pull the left trigger for a rocket boost, but I’d also lean forward in my seat. Sometimes I’d even hold my breath. Obviously my respiratory patterns had zero impact on what was happening onscreen, but I couldn’t help it. My whole body was reacting, or sometime just acting, based on the events of the game.
That’s immersion, isn’t it?
I was so immersed in Rocket League that it was physically affecting me. The motions I was attempting to produce in the game were also being produced, to a certain degree, in my own body. This wasn’t just a signal being sent from my brain to my fingertips and into a controller. The walls that I thought existed between mental and physical were blurring, and I didn’t even realize it. The physics of Rocket League were engrossing in their own way.
It’s weird, then, that we don’t talk about that. I’m sure hardcore Rocket League fans and professional players do, sure. But it’s weird that occasional players like myself don’t talk about immersion in a game like Rocket League, but will for a game like God of War. It’s weird that we’ll praise the latter for being immersive its own way, but not the former for being immersive in a different way. Could it be because…we’re embarrassed?
No, we’re not embarrassed to play soccer with rocket-powered cars. We’re not embarrassed to have that game sitting on our shelves. We’re not embarrassed to say “Oh yeah, I picked that up because it’s a good party game.” But are we embarrassed to say “Yeah, I got really into it.” We don’t want people to see us jostling in our seats while our bodies start unconsciously moving in sync with our cars. We don’t want to admit that we’re just as invested in a game of soccer as we are in saving the world.
Maybe you’re not embarrassed. But we are. “We” meaning the market. “We” meaning the industry.
The world is going through a weird transition with its relationship with video games right now. If you’re reading this, you probably love video games. You probably like them for the same reasons that I do; they make you think outside the box in ways you aren’t often forced to in your everyday life. They provide aesthetics that are both unique and interactive. They give you goals to reach, in varying degrees of difficulty, to appeal to different parts of your brain. They give you a sense of wonder and imagination and emotional fulfillment that other art forms aren’t able to do. Video games are a unique and beautiful thing.
On the other hand, there are still those people. You know the type of person I’m talking about. They aren’t content to just say “Eh, it’s not my thing.” No, they associate games with children and judge you for spending time playing games, as if watching television all night was somehow better (or different). They blame games for mass shootings (despite these talking points being continually debunked). They still call all video games a “Nintendo,” which is, admittedly, kind of amusing.
When you one of those people starts talking to you about how video games should be banned because a school shooter played games, you get defensive. No, video games are not the problem. And yeah, there are some mindlessly violent video games out there. But they can be so much more than that! You explain to this person the beauty of an open-world experience, the mental fortitude needed to ace a real-time strategy game, the overall fulfillment that can be found in a heroic quest. These things can be full-fledged artistic experiences!
And, in that moment, you’re embarrassed that you love playing soccer with rocket-powered cars.
But you shouldn’t be! You shouldn’t have to rationalize what fun is. You shouldn’t have to explain away your love of sports games. You shouldn’t have to justify a silly little rocket-powered soccer game just because the world doesn’t know how to judge and interpret video games. You shouldn’t have to, and you don’t have to. You can just love Rocket League.
Video games are a few decades behind television, which itself is a few decades behind movies. Movies started off as weird little clips of babies eating breakfast and men doing circus tricks. People laughed at their friends who got scared, thinking they were actually going to get hit by films of trains pulling into stations. These moving images were novelties, until the artists moved in. There was backlash to the scorn of movies, and we received some groundbreaking movies. Many of these films are still taught in college classrooms today and are considered high art (even if they are also super racist). But after a few decades of artistic movies, the backlash to the backlash hit. The phrase “Oscar bait” was coined as people fled to the blockbuster. Star Wars, Jaws, and E.T. hit theaters and, hey, they were fun! Why did movies need to take themselves so seriously?
Video games are a few generations behind this, but are in largely the same place. If Pong is Train Comes into the Station and Super Mario Bros. is A Trip to the Moon, then we’re currently in the late 1960’s of video games. We’re still getting our prestige pictures in The Last of Us and other “art-bait” games, but the backlash to the backlash is imminent. The industry won’t need to justify its existence. The medium will be out in the zeitgeist, offering a wide variety of experiences without ever worrying about its “worthiness” in your attention.
It’s not Rocket League’s fault. It provides the experience it promises. It doesn’t want to be an ambassador for the backlash’s backlash, nor does it want to be a weird equivalent to New York’s underground film scene in the 70’s. It just wants to be a game, dammit, and that’s just what it’s gonna be. It’ll be fun. It’ll be exciting. It’ll be replayable.
But most importantly, it’ll be immersive.
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