INSIDE – a 2.5D puzzle & adventure platformer game which I felt present in up to a certain point while playing it.
According to Lombard and Ditton, The term “presence” can be split into six different concepts; presence as social richness, presence as realism, presence as transportation, presence as immersion, presence as social actor within a medium and presence as medium as social actor.
Would I say that I felt myself being present to a certain extent while playing INSIDE? The answer is – Most Definitely.
As the title of the blog suggests, presence has also been categorised as Spatial Presence and Self Presence. Spatial presence would be the term defined as the sense of being physically located in a virtual environment (Ijssellsteijn, de Ridder, Freeman and Avons, 2000) which I did feel at times during my gameplay, most notably during those moments where I was being chased after. Self Present on the other hand is when a user experiences their virtual self as if it were their actual self (Lee, 2004) which in the game I did not really feel. I was fully aware during the whole gameplay that the character in the game was just the character, and not me.
The part where I would say that I felt really present in terms of realism and immersion were those times where I was walking through the shrubs and the antagonists heard me, switched on their torch lights and came running after me or when the dogs came after me and even when there were sounds of machinery and other objects such as the sound of the truck engine. The audio of the game was so good, that it actually sounded like the real thing and would be very difficult to distinguish one from the other, which is why I felt really present during those times. It also got my heart beat faster at those times! What made it even more lifelike was when the boys’ breath became more laboured as he was running and even continued when he stopped running to catch his breath which is close to what happens in real life.
From my research I also found that the music track for INSIDE was recorded using a human skull. The reason for this was that Andersen (INSIDE’s composer and sound designer) was interested to experiment with how the track would sound like from inside one’s own head. (Websiter, 2016)
Would I say that while I was playing this game, I actually felt for the character? No, I wouldn’t, not even when the character died in awful ways (I didn’t even twitch), however playing the game through the character managed to give me this feeling of loneliness.
As the game progressed, I started to get a bit bored, mostly because I felt that the game was becoming a bit repetitive, with the only difference that the puzzles got harder. There were also a few times where I simply couldn’t figure out the puzzle and had to go through a game walk-through to solve it, which alternatively ruined my game flow.
Conclusion: I had fun playing this game and actually spent 4.5 hours straight playing it without taking a break, which in itself does show that I was really into it, however it was not a game that made me feel totally immersed either.
References
Lombard, Matthew, Theresa, Ditton (2006). At the Heart of it All: The Concept of Presence. [online] Wiley Online Library. Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x [Accessed 28 Apr. 2018].
Daniel R Mestre (2005). Immersion and Presence [online] CNRS & University of the Mediterranean. Available at: http://www.ism.univmed.fr/mestre/projects/virtual%20reality/Pres_2005.pdf [Accessed 28 Apr. 2018].
Jones, Alyx (2017). INSIDE Game Audio Review [online] TheSoundArchitect. Available at: http://www.thesoundarchitect.co.uk/inside-game-audio-review/ [Accessed 28 Apr. 2018].
Webster, Andrew (2016). The soundtrack for INSIDE was recorded using a human skull. [online] The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/6/13190982/inside-game-soundtrack-human-skull [Accessed 28 Apr. 2018].
Melvin Magro 