Playin' games

     The immersive game I chose to indulge in was Neverwinter Nights 2, an rpg based on the Dungeons and Dragons series of worlds. I define this game as immersive for several reasons. Aside from the standard "cut things up/shoot things/burn things" style of play expected with any game where combat happens, there's a solid core story that unfolds as the player works through. The story could have easily worked just as well as a novel rather than a gaming experience, with a good, high-fantasy-driven plot, memorable and distinct characters/personalities, dramatic (for a given value of fantasy drama) events and surprises, and similar aspects that make the genre enjoyable.
     Aside from but worked into the story there's a degree of immersion to be found in the character itself. As with many of this genre of game, the main character can be created by the player, offering up choices to suit one's preference such as gender, race, physical shape, job (by which I mean a range of options on what it is your adventurer actually does, from the old favorites of wizard, thief, fighter, and cleric to more specialized classes such as duelist, swashbuckler, divine champion, etc), and even down to the specifics of hair, skin, eye, and minor accent colors. You may devise your own history, and choose what skills a character has (though of course some jobs and races are more attuned to certain skillsets), and help the character grow into a unique and powerful force within the context of the game.
     A fun element of the gameplay is where your character falls on the good/neutral/evil spectrum. There are nine distinct alignments, and choices within the game can affect yours to a degree that there are consequences for frequently flouting the moral system you choose to live by. Some jobs can only be followed by certain alignments, for example, so to start with one of these jobs and then lose it through poor roleplaying of your character is possible (and frustrating, after spending hours building them up to a useful degree).
     The graphics, being of relatively recent vintage (2004 or so), are excellent for the time, as is the soundtrack, with the latter supporting the former strongly. traveling through a forest looks and sounds like it should, caves and dungeons offer distant dripping noises, combat gives powerful musical crescendos. The voice acting of the game is of a good quality, lending it at times the feel of an interactive movie. The game functions on multiple levels to create a distinct world and, while keeping you within the bounds of the story, to help you experience that world in a meaningful way, regardless of how you choose to play it.

Do games count?

     Obviously they count. Games are, to a greater or lesser degree, immersive fiction. The level of immersion as regards the fiction, and as regards to mechanics of the games themselves, varies of course. The fundamental premise of putting you into a situation where events happen in a non-real-world way is the core of fiction, even for games as simple, narratively speaking, as Pong. Leave aside the fact of why you're playing, in a narrative sense, as there's no  "you are a ping pong champion defending your title from those evil communist Russians" or similar elaborate backstory. Just accepting the fact that you are playing on a virtual field makes the concept count within the realm of digital humanities.
     Granted, a richer, more immersive story can lend more to the experience, which is why ARGs like Year Zero fit well into the area of study. Taking reality as we know it and pushing it that little bit, adding that layer of fiction to it, gives a chance to redefine how we react to both the new "reality" and the original. There's a very simple cell-phone application, Zombies, Run, that essentially takes advantage of the mapping/GPS capabilities that smart phones possess. There's nothing fancy to it, it just takes a map and adds in a number of zombies that move towards you at a variable speed. A simple, elegant concept, and one which uses what was there and incorporates what isn't in a real-time environment. Now, instead of going for a morning jog, you're trying to outpace the ravenous dead.
     Zork is an excellent example of how a game can count, both from the player side of the screen and the programmer side. From the end-user perspective, you wander around textually, collecting items, avoiding pitfalls, watching out for that damned grue, etc. Items held can have uses, often very specific uses to help you progress further, similar conceptually to (and predating) the more graphics-oriented Shadowgate. Combat isn't a key feature, and rarely happens. Rather, puzzle-solving is the focus. The programming side is where things get interesting, though, as now a game designer, another human, is required to anticipate the interactions the user will have, and code the likely responses into the game. Elements come into play beyond sheer coding, such as grammar and syntax (users must issue commands in an understandable way such as "look at object" or "see object" for the game to process the commands), human expression (typing "yell" or "scream" causes a frustrated cry, which I've given frequently while playing), simple memory and sense of direction (how far north can I go, anyway?) and so on. The programmer in essence has to write around the possible foibles of the player, and work them into the game, either allowing the player to proceed despite them or forcing them to take action to make their desires more clear. So video games, to a degree, become psychological tools as well. This is more apparent in current times, of course, where games, like movies, employ visuals, soundtracks, and other sequences of data to try and set the mood the designer wants, but Zork is a perfect example of how even in the earliest days of video games the games themselves represent significant objects within the digital humanities field.

Reactions to pieces from Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

Not friendly to epileptics.

That said, all three pieces share a similar structure, i.e. too-fast-to-be-read-comfortably text combined with strobe-y screen flashing and sense-of-urgency-inspiring music. I can get why the poems display at the speed they do, given the music that they try to keep time to and match rhythm with. The problem is that I loathe someone else dictating the speed at which I read. The poems try to convey urgency, force. That's fine. But if I blink, glance away for a split second, pause to light up a cigarette, or whatever, and things have gone three screens away, losing the thread for me...that's just a pain. I don't want to sit through an unpausable video, which is what the poems essentially are, multiple times to feel like I "got" everything that went into it, captured all those little, quickly-vanishing phrases.

"Lotus Blossom" rates special mention for actually playing into the strobe action of the poems, corresponding that annoying quirk of programming with its frequent mentions of flickering lights. The use of subliminal-like phrases scattered throughout what I'd consider the "main" text also adds to the hypnotic quality. All of the pieces almost seem to be aspiring to that hypnosis, especially "Dakota" with its pounding percussion, as if seeking to deliberately induce a trance state. I'd enjoy reading these as traditional text, but I confess doing so would probably lose something that the chosen medium seeks to add. "The Sea," with its stream-of-consciousness wandering, was for me the most enjoyable to read in terms of textual content.

It's possibly a dated view, but I like my text pinned down, like butterflies to a board, so that it can be appreciated. Granted, it may lose the animus when being presented like that, but it does make it more comprehensible. Literature shouldn't be a moving target.