A while back, I stated that certain games have a rich quality of immersion, such to the point that while playing MGS or Ico one could almost peel away the narrative itself and find the experiences wholly composed of feelings of survival and self-sacrifice. Frank didn’t entirely buy it, citing the self-conscious way that Kojima’s games make reference to themselves as pieces of media, or the way Ueda’s puzzles always call back to earlier puzzles in Zelda-type games. Because of their post-modern presentation or acceptance of precedent influences, his concensus was that games (or at least those ones) can’t quite strip themselves of their veneer of player/avatar divide, that there will always be some kind of a conceptual divide, and that the kind of immersion I was talking about was something of a “fiction.”
Sir, in the words Yosemite Sam, them’s fightn’ words.