I can’t remember the first time I felt “immersed” in a videogame, but I can remember the first time I got stuck under a swimming pool float as a kid, scratching at a scabby foam ceiling roamed by mocking silver jellyfish of air. I can remember the first few times I drowned in videogames, fighting the waterlogged handling in Sonic’s Labyrinth Zone, or operating the agile sarcophagus that is Lara Croft in Aztec print grottos of antiseptic blue.
I find the continuing use of “immersive” to describe believable videogame worlds weird and a bit alarming. Partial immersion would be one thing – the videogame as nice hot bath at the end of the day, the videogame as splashing around in a stream of thought, the videogame as a kind of apple-bobbing. The “immersion” of the “immersive sim” is a different matter entirely: it’s a box of clockwork you’re invited to tease apart, not some hyperreal enclosure. But the “full” or “total” sensory immersion repeatedly offered by big-budget, photoreal 3D games seems a lot like suffocation.
Even divorced from the idea of dying in the depths, and taken seriously as a psychological state rather than a marketing buzzword, the promise of complete “immersion” sounds like a threat. It entails self loss, time loss, inability to recognise a simulation for itself, susceptibility to whatever that simulation imposes on you. Publishers and developers throw this idea around in press releases, then act all hurt and surprised when enterprising quacks start making wild claims about dissociation and addiction.
I’ve been thinking lately, however, about how immersion could be reconfigured as a critical tool, about whether the idea of play as a plunge beneath the surface doesn’t capture something vital, after all. This journey begins with a plastic paperweight of a famous thinker I found while replaying Frictional’s horror game Soma, which appears to be on the verge of getting a sequel. Beware moderate Soma spoilers from this point on.
Soma takes “immersion” back to its older etymological association with baptism. It is about the wonder and dread of being reborn underwater. It casts you as Simon, a grieving man who drops by the doc’s for a scan one day, and wakes seconds later in a collapsing artificial habitat on the deep ocean floor. Stalked and, at times, aided by cybernetic creatures, Simon becomes embroiled in a search for the Ark – a simulated full-body VR paradise that is designed to shelter the digitised minds of the surviving PATHOS-II crew.
Soma is an existential thought experiment that sometimes wears its bibliography on its sleeve. In one failing outpost, you stumble into a scientist’s quarters that harbours works from Rene Descartes, Carl Jung and Ludwig Wittgenstein. There’s also a statue of Qieci, the 9th century Chinese monk latterly known as the “Laughing Buddha”, and on a desk against the hull, a bobblehead of 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. I’ve been trying to work out how Nietzsche would feel about being reincarnated as an abyssal Funko Pop. Given the comic indignities he inflicts on his own authorial proxy in Thus Spake Zarathustra – a kind of spoof New Testament – I like to think he would have been pleased.
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I’m no real Nietzsche scholar, but I’ve studied a couple of his books in depth, and find him to be an engrossing, complex, anguished monster: a lyrical and endlessly quotable despiser of false morality; a cleric’s son who notoriously declared (again, via Zarathustra) that God Is Dead; a lifelong convalescent who sought to shuck off religious shame and find joy in the body; a tedious sexist and a knowing megalomaniac who prankishly characterised himself as the Anti-Christ.
Nietzsche’s legacy is hard to disentangle from his posthumous co-option by the Nazis, who cherry-picked and misrepresented such ideas as “will to power” and the “ubermensch”. In life, he scorned anti-Semites and demagogic nationalists at large, but his writing is full nonetheless of contemporary racial and ethnic caricatures. You could argue that there is a proto-fascist drift to his account of civilization as a struggle for transcendence carried out by “peoples” with different proportions of virility and effeminacy, aristocracy and slavishness. As such, I find it difficult to draw straightforwardly from his work, but Nietzsche has at least one idea I love sharing and trying to get my head around. I was happy to discover his likeness submerged in a videogame you can redefine as an investigation of what he calls the Dionysian.
Dionysus is the ancient Greek god of wine, fertility and festivity. In Nietzsche’s first major publication, The Birth of Tragedy, this god becomes a cosmic social force of intoxication and dissolution – a violent creative, artistic, communal urge. Nietzsche describes the Dionysian as a rapture in which human beings rupture and mingle with the chaos of nature, in which selves flow like liquor and bodies are revealed for transformable matter – “here the noblest clay, the most expensive marble, man, is kneaded and hewn”.
Dionysus is an invigorating molten darkness, a “glowing life” in the veins of the ancient Greeks, but if he is left unchecked, his mad dance becomes “an abominable mixture of sensuality and cruelty”. As such, he requires a symbiotic counterpoint – Apollo, god of light and of the image. Where the Dionysian engulfs the brain in a drunken, bloody twirl, Apollo deals in lucid dreams, a radiant realm of beautifully distinguished and ordered representations. He is the god of individuation, and thereby of structures comprised of individuals, including the edifice of the state.
Apollo is needed to prevent Dionysus from reducing everything to formless agony and ecstasy, but if he is too strong, his images grow “cadaverous” and oppressive. He becomes an instrument of segregation and alienation. Nietzsche summarises the relationship between these primordial drives in Schopenhauerian terms as that of a heaving ocean surrounding a voyager. To approach the Dionysian is to lean over the side of the boat, plunge your head under.
Nietzsche proposes that all healthy cultures need both the pristine Apollonian world of images and its mad Dionysian dissolution, and that the making and experience of art is best understood as a mechanism for managing this godly alchemy. Art alters the balance of power between Apollo and Dionysus, and thus provides a basis for various kinds of society. In the case of the Ancient Greek theatrical tragedy, for example, Apollo is present as the named characters of the story – shining figures out of legend. But in amongst these towering personae moves a Dionysian multitude, the Chorus, who lack a straightforward equivalent in today’s secular dramaturgy, serving by turns as ritual elements, narrators and onlookers.
In Nietzsche’s analysis, the Chorus form a shifting, sunlit layer between the violence of any classical tragedy – the collapse of the hero’s story into orgiastic ruin – and the spectating crowds. The Chorus are both a “living wall erected against the pounding storm” of the individual’s destruction, and a double of the spectators that allows us to picture ourselves as Dionysian revellers, swept up in the storm. The theatrical tragedy serves as a precarious middle world between the Apollonian dream and the tidal force of Dionysus – a middle world between illusion and intoxication, which extends its workings outward into the conduct of Athenian politics and law. The tragedy is where Dionysus is repeatedly tempered and made concrete as an Apollonian image: it is a crackling reactor chamber, a holy dynamo for a culture oscillating between liquefaction and petrifaction.
Compare that wonderful idea of art with the prevailing marketplace definition of art as a glossy ornament, spawned and transacted by the alienated entrepreneur; a handsome dead object, granted its floor in the economy’s wobbling skyscraper, which has no serious outputs, and can only be justified by devoutly reciting the dollar value and petty topicality of The Creative Industries. Compare Nietzsche’s idea of the tragedy as a process of partial, artful subsumption in a furious ritual of creation with the videogame marketing rhetoric of “immersion” as the leaden increase of “realness” until it feels as though you are “really there”. Still, it’s possible to talk about today’s artforms, even videogames, in Apollonian-Dionysian terms – to think about them as fraught sacred artefacts that are part-drunk and part-dreaming.
Videogames aren’t live public performances, but I think they express something of Nietzsche’s theatrical admixture of blood and sunlight. They are, you could argue, Apollonian in being thrall to images with clear rules for interaction, especially in the case of blockbuster photorealistic games that most often attract the designation of “immersive”. And they are Dionysian in terms of the secret minglings of the code producing those Apollonian images: the ocean of invisible operations that surround and pervade the crisp on-screen representations, relating the visible pieces unpredictably and slyly extending their cadences outward to the player.
The “immersion” of the big budget shooter might conjure Apollo, in its appeal to the exponentially beautiful image, but perhaps this immersiveness is better defined as Dionysian intoxication, because it aims to capsize the difference between player and simulation, swamping the Apollonian beholder in time loss, self loss, while trying to persuade us that we are dreaming, not drowning.
Horror games could be the antidote to such “immersion”, because they echo the Nietzschean tragedy in treating “immersion” with revulsion. The last thing you want, in a horror game, is to feel as though you’re “really there”. Every horror game character is something akin to the Chorus, a “living wall” and a suffering self-image that allows us to witness and enjoy our own, displaced mutilation by monstrous energies.
Part of the thrill, of course, is the fear that the membrane between player and character might somehow collapse, that the “pounding storm” might expand and swallow you too. This is particularly true of Frictional’s horror games, whose protagonists are dogged by a forgotten Dionysian unity with the creatures they hide from, and whose “sanity” effects carry that anxiety to the player, with sensory distortions and even blackouts that interfere with your control – sometimes jumping you forward to the next milestone, in strange echo of everyday bug-spotter complaints about “lost progress”.
Soma, in particular, often plays like a critique or even a parody of videogame “immersion”, though I haven’t read anything by Frictional to indicate that it was actively conceived with this goal. Over the course of the story, the game works through its own peculiar alchemy of Apollo and Dionysus. At the heart of that inquiry is the Ark, a golden and enveloping solarpunk Eden. It’s the only part of Soma’s navigable world that still harbours any sunshine, however ‘fake’ – the last remaining slice of dry land, where human bodies still appear untainted by sunken machines. And yet, the Ark’s wholesome paradise can only be accessed by dissolving ‘the’ body, abjuring the meat, and embracing life as one among many spectres haunting a very sophisticated storage drive.
The Ark is therefore both an Apollonian and a Dionysian artwork, and it is Apollonian and Dionysian in both vital and abominable ways. It is Dionysian because it promises communion with other surviving humans, and Dionysian, too, because this unity requires terrifying liquefaction and transformation: Soma’s plot is a series of thresholds in your understanding of this, facilitated by ‘upgrades’ of a sort. The Ark is Apollonian in the beauty of its gilded snowglobe world – and Apollonian, too, in the sense that this realm is a calculated representation, perhaps a misrepresentation. It’s a dream with decidedly non-innocent origins (I am trying not to spoil too much) that may serve as a mechanism of extraction and manipulation.
Nietzsche writes that the person swept up in the spectacle of Apollonian art always knows that they are dreaming. Unlike the Dionysian reveller, they remain only part-immersed, and can distinguish themselves from the illusion. Soma bluntly enforces this lucidity by having you actively build the Ark, or at least, various prototypes, in the course of your descent. Certain puzzles involve selecting assets to fit a scenario and memory budget, as though configuring the game’s own graphics settings. In one of these puzzles, the aim is to devise a sufficiently convincing virtual environment for a non-player character who knows something you need. Fail to establish the right conditions, and the subject will panic and force a reset.
The panic of that unfortunate subject, contending with the suspicion that what they sense is a fabrication, can be read as an absurd exaggeration of the spiralling disbelief of the videogame player wrestling with the appalling truth that their immersive videogame might ‘only’ be fiction. As Oliver Hargrave wrote in 2010, the cult of “immersion” invites a certain over-sensitivity and narrowness of mind. It aims to render the player intolerant to anything fractious, inconsistent, strange or ‘artificial’, anything that defies particular expectations for fluid habitation of a virtual world. “If videogames ever highlight their artificiality or require concentration or the learning of new rules, then these videogames will be undervalued for not fitting in with the immersion concept,” he notes.
The rhetoric of immersion sabotages the player’s analytical capacity by insisting that there should never be space or pause for thought about the simulation as a simulation – how it operates, how it was made. The thoughtlessness of this immersiveness has wider import. As Adam Stoneman summarises in a much more recent piece on Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions for the metaverse – that latter-day online Ark of commerce where the kingpins of massive tech corporations once hoped to enjoy another lease of profitability – “the immersive precludes the discursive by collapsing the distance needed for critique.” Immersion is how simulations teach us to forget what simulations are for. Again, intoxication feels like the more appropriate term.
Within Soma’s story, however, the immersive never precludes the discursive. When you enter the Ark, you immediately encounter something that ‘sabotages the immersion’ – a terminal jutting from the forest floor with a banal feedback questionnaire, asking how convinced you are by the construct, and thereby ensuring that you aren’t convinced at all. The questionnaire is probably better read as part of the game’s broader existential inquiry – it’s the Cartesian argument about the impossibility of ‘curing’ scepticism – but it has a more specific resonance within games. It recalls any number of in-game audience feedback devices, together with non-diegetic trinkets such as season pass advertisements, which thwart immersion in that they exist for the sake of the product or service.
Later in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that the divine alchemy of earlier Greek theatre has been subverted and diffused by the rise of theatrical naturalism and rational discourse represented by Euripides and Socrates. In Nietzsche’s view, the major artworks of his day had become entirely secular, their “mythical bulwarks” smashed apart and their ritual function dispersed. It’s tempting to carry this idea forward and argue that in videogames, even horror games, what remains of the Apollonian-Dionysian ratio has become part of the sclerotic mirror play of capital, a new god that will perhaps never fully possess and immerse its victims, in that it can’t help enshittifying itself, dragging you back to the surface.