Rarely does a video game come along that resets my entire thinking about video games and their possibilities.
The first such game was on an Apple II in my neighbor's garage. There was a starship building and combat game where you could control every aspect of your ship's design. Playing this with my neighbor one afternoon introduced me to the concept of a Phyrric victory. I had boarded his ships that were going so fast I couldn't turn them or slow them down enough to avoid them colliding with local planets or my own ships. This has stayed with me from when I was a young teen. Still don't know the name of this game or what it would even be called.
In high school, I was introduced to the game Starflight, a masterpiece of gaming that I still play occasionally. This game was so "open world" that the contemporary definition wouldn't fit it. You can land on any planet, drive around, look at alien life, collect it, sell it, kill it, go mining, etc. You can staff your ship with your own custom crew and train them, you can do research, you can study alien languages, you can engage in space piracy and combat or be a diplomat - it's really totally your call. I loved playing this game, it was, in my imagination and in my play, akin to what I currently visually experience in No Man's Sky. Starflight did not have anything other than rudimentary graphics, but the experience of play - the real drama of it - happened in my imagination as I talked about it with my friend who introduced me to the game. Starflight 2 came out soon after and it was even better. Not graphically, but narratively.
Caves of Qud is a successor to this kind of gaming, where in my imagination I have a more graphically-intense narrative and scene than what's happening on the screen. Totally adjacent to all this gameplay was my obsession with Dungeons & Dragons, still got it but don't play at all anymore these days, where everything valuable about the game was in the vibrancy that was both an ingredient and the creation of the stories the game produced. We were producing the narrative, with a few random bits of chance thrown in with dice rolls. This is what Caves is like.
In the clip above I'm doing great, walking through a canyon with my horse companion feeling pretty confident I can take anything on. Once I enter the canyon to the north, two flying snake creatures instantly immolate me, and before I can really think about my next move (which should have been to douse myself in water that I was carrying) I decided to retreat. The amount of time it took to walk away meant I burned to death.
Every game in Caves, at least the way it is meant to play, is as a one-shot. The world, your character, everything goes away at the end of the run. The world, the ruins and the various historical twists and turns of the religion and politics of the world will change significantly in the next run.
My current interest is in the randomly generated books in the world. I like collecting them and bringing them to the librarian in the desert. It's a bit of a harsh run with a lot of dangers, but what isn't? In my mind I'm thinking about the narratives I've read about the early Buddhist scholars carrying the books of their faith through the Khyber pass to Tibet. An analogue that no video game should be making anyone think about, really.
These experiences are making me re-think the concept of "immersion" in gaming and what it might mean. As a concept it's pretty thin, ironically, the way it's used today. I think there are some interesting things going on here in my experience that might make for a decent essay. Immersive games have always been around, but they have nothing to do with graphical fidelity. It all has to do with the rhetorical concept of invention. But I don't want to spoil the essay here. I'm just waiting for an update to a game to download and it's taking forever. Another advantage of the graphical place-holder game over the very well designed visual fondant of today's games.