Having recentlytalked with Ken Levine about Bioshockand various peripheral things around it, a lot of interesting stuff came up: there was the fact that, in true Randian fashion, enemy AI in Bioshock doesn’t work as a team; I also found out that fact that Levine didn’t really rate Atlas Shrugged as a book, and that he didn’t get any royalties from System Shock 2. But maybe most surprising was the fact that Ken Levine, by all accounts a father of the ‘Immersive Sim’ genre, didn’t seem familiar with the term so widely used for these games.
When I brought up immersive sims to Ken, the term barely registered, and he responded by tentatively referring to them as ‘environmental sims’ before I - equally tentatively - corrected him. It says a lot when one of the forefathers of a genre (if you may call it that) doesn’t remember its name, before calling the name “clinical.” In a2017 interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, another immersive sim pioneer, Warren Spector (Deus Ex, System Shock), said of the term: “I’ve been trying to find a better way to describe the game style, because ‘immersive sim' sounds kind of highfalutin and pretentious.”
Clearly, something needs to change, but why does something as trivial as a genre label matter? It’s all just made-up stuff really, and games should be enjoyed irrespective of genre, right? Well, part of the problem is that notenoughpeople seem to enjoy this weird, wonderful, poorly defined gamut of games, in the sense that they’ve historically struggled to find commercial success.
From the early Thief games, through Deus Ex, Hitman and the Arkane catalogue of Dishonored, Prey and, to a lesser extent, Deathloop, I’ve been enraptured by the playfulness and freedom of the immersive sim (the only one that I couldn’t handle as I was growing up was System Shock 2, which I switched off and didn’t return to for 10 years as soon as the first mutant started battering my head in with a crowbar while apologising to me - it was too disturbing and confusing for my teenage mind to handle).
But to talk about what an immersive sim should be called, it’s important to first define what it is, and that’s always been a bit of an ethereal thing. Rather than be defined by a point-of-view or core gameplay loop like, say first-person shooters or survival games, immersive sims are instead identified by things like player agency, environmental interactivity, non-linear storytelling, intricate level design that encourages multiple approaches to your goal, and reactive AI that can be interacted with and exploited in weird and wonderful ways. Environments in these games are big, interactive, and can often be traversed or snuck through in a number of imaginative ways by using various tools and skills at your disposal.
And before you say, ‘that’s basically an RPG,’ let me stop you and say… well, yes, kind of, except immersive sims tend not to have numbers-based levelling system, nor do they stem from D&D rulesets and systems like most RPGs do. In a way, the beauty of immersive sims is that they’re very much designed as videogames rather than as a videogame interpretation of existing rules.
These games awaken all kinds of creative neurons in the ol' brainosphere, and rely to some extent on the player figuring out the bounds of what the game world allows them to do. They’re not only robust toyboxes, but also drenched in atmosphere; from the rusting hallways of Bioshock’s Rapture to the steampunk cities of Dishonored and gold-tinged cyberpunk dystopias of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, these games have given players some of the most memorable spaces to explore with a large degree of freedom. They’re ‘immersive’ not just through the interactivity of the world and its denizens but through world-building; even if the story isn’t alwaysthatstrong - like in Dishonored, say - part of the joy is piecing together a picture of the world by exploring its many nooks and crannies.
Now, take all that and throw it under a single label, and somehow you end up with ‘immersive sim.’ It just doesn’t quite sound right, does it? Sure, one of the facets of these games is ‘simulation,’ in the sense that they’re often filled with simulated AI with routines, individual personalities and so on that lead to seemingly endless emergent gameplay scenarios (just look at the ongoing YouTube appeal of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - something of an ‘honorary member’ in the immersive sim genre).
But what about all the other stuff? There is so much more to these games than just the simulation, and in an era where simulation games have really come to the fore, that’s led to a lot of misunderstanding. Just look at Steam, where users can ‘tag’ games with dozens of genre and more broad descriptive labels. Look for games tagged ‘Immersive Sim’ on Steam, and at the top of the list you’ll be presented with tons of simulation games like Farming Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator and House Flipper. The Sims 4 is up there as well, as are sports sims like F1 Manager 2022 and FIFA 22. The only game up there in the top 20 that really leans on the immersive sim design philosophy is Hitman 3, while Prey languishes way down the list (just above Bus Simulator 21) and Dishonored is just below Rival Stars Horse Racing. I even found anImmersive Sim Bundlethat contains a couple of management games that presumably don’t let you hide dead bodies in cupboards or let you poison the apples of town guards.
The confusion among gamers between immersive sims and simulation games is less on the gamers and more on the term itself. If you’re someone who enjoys Euro Truck Simulator then you have every right to call it an ‘immersive sim’ if you find its (very accurate, apparently) representation of driving around in a heavy goods vehicle immersive. In fact, the goal of any simulation game will be to immerse you in the particular activity it’s simulating.
The immersive sim as fans know it is in the midst of an identity crisis, but that’s also an opportunity for it to re-emerge as something new. With Arkane seemingly moving away from their big prestige projects like Dishonored and Prey towards tighter, more contained affairs, and series like Thief and Deus Ex in limbo, the genre’s been out of favours for a few years now. But there is hope: a new BioShock is in development at Cloud Chamber Studios, Ken Levine is working with remnants of the original Bioshock team on a mystery project at Ghost Story Games, and recently the new owners of the Deus Ex IP, Embracer Group, said thatthey want to revive the series(which also gives me grounds to believe thatThief might make a comeback).
Interest in immersive sims seems to come in waves - first in the late 90s to early 2000s, then in the late 2000s to mid-2010s. We’re due for another revival, and with that perhaps it’s time to have a rethink about what we even call these games, given that the current label confuses gamers and makes the likes of Levine and Spector scrunch their noses. Designer-Shooters? Environmental Sims (as Levine accidentally, but kind of appropriately, called them), RPGs-But-Without-All-the-Levelling-and-Numbers-and-Stuff? If we start brainstorming now, then we may well nail down a name in time for the Great Revival.
