The big difference I picked up, design-wise, about L4D over other team-based shooters is the number of redundant audio and visual cues the game throws at you to constantly remind you to think of others. There’s the backlit colored halos around other characters (blue if they’re safe and obstructed, orange if they are pounced, strangled, or biled, and red if they are incapped), the health bars at the bottom with their current inventory stock just above, the fact that the avatars visibly limp if hurt.

Then there’s the audio: the characteristic noises each type of Infected makes to tell the players how to organize, the chatter about ammo and medical supplies that no doubt are completely redundant if the players have their mics on, the comments about open spaces and hearing Infected that the avatars emit, the 3 crescendos (horde, tank, and witch) of the soundtrack, the shouts when friendly fire occurs.

After playing a few times, these redundant cues actually inhibit the immersion one might initially feel playing the game. Which isn’t a bad thing: the players have learned their lessons of mutual reliance and can now uphold the group mentality on their own. I wrote about these cues from the point of view of the game as a still shot, a movie, and then a game… but they were for class and they’re almost a year old now, so I’m not going to link them due to being rather ashamed of the writing quality :P

Where I think we part is that you seem to be associating ‘meaningful’ with “immersion in the virtual world”. This is not the sense with which I’m using the word. I’m using meaningful in the sense that L4D catalyzes real interactions with real people that matter to me, if only for a brief period during the game.

This is really the secret point I was trying to make in the post.

L4D remains one of favorite games from last year, along with Shiren the Wanderer.

It reminds me of how much we lose in single player games. In a lot of ways we give up a lot of genuine emotion, both negative and positive.