oral presentation

In reading the work by Klevjer (2003) I was in such disagreement with his findings I set out to prove his findings and opinions, if not false, misleading. The issues I took with his writing were inconsistencies and a general lack of scientific data to back up his claims. I found the most inconsistency in his claim that “The First person perspective is not about immersion or about the self forgetting identification with a virtual reality.” and “Many games allow the player to switch between the first and third person view of the game without significantly altering the conditions for identification through the player avatar.” Yet, by the very definition a first person and third person shooter are completely different beings. One world is seen through the eyes of the avatar wail the other is seen through a god like perspective where one controls his creations. If we think of these two views what would be more realistic to us, looking through someone else's eyes where we only have a 90 degree of view and controlling them, or looking down at the same person controlling them from a building? In both it is true we would have a feeling of control, but when seen through a perspective that mimics our own we would have a deeper connection to the avatar because we see what he sees.

To bring up the lack of immersion in first person shooters that Klevjer states, he once again contradicts himself by saying “The quality of the gun, its realism, sound, looks and functions are essential to the success of a first person shooter. If we are to believe that we are not immersed in the game we are playing these qualities would not matter. We could shoot a rifle that made the sound of a train horn and we would not care because we are not immersed in the realism before our eyes. His statements about realism of weapons is correct, but it contradicts his assertion that we are not immersed in the game we play.

Furthermore he Klevjer states that the first person shooter is like the videos of a camera mounted on the front of a car or train. This in and of it self is full immersion in what we are watching. We don't just see the speeding car racing through tight curves and dodging people we are looking at it head on as if we were driving the car. The fact that most people will hold on to their easy chair and with body movements lean and grit their teeth with the direction we think the car should go or when we think there will be a crash shows that we are immersed in what we are watching. Therefore if we are immersed in this type of video and a first person shooter is related to this type of video it must be true that immersion occurs in a first person shooter, proving Klevjers assertion that a first person shooter is not immersive wrong.

To counter Klevjer and his argument about first person shooters the most informative research to counter Klevjer came from The University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom by Dr. Mark Grimshaw. Grimshaw (2008) states that both visual and audio stimulation lead to a immersive experience in the realm of the first person shooter. Grimshaw states that “the goal of the first person shooter is immersion. This is mental immersion, not yet physical, and can be defined as the players perception that they are in the games environment and that he/she is the the avatar who's hands, weapon, or a combination of the two is what he/she sees before them on the screen.

Grimshaw states that before the game even starts we begin to feel an identification that the avatar we are playing is ourself. Back stories address the player in the second person singular. One example of this given to us by Grimshaw is “you are Army Ranger B.J. Blazkowicz, you are about to embark into a journey in to the heart of the Third Reich, and only you can save the free world.” This gives us as the player the sense that we are who we see parts of on the screen before us. We take the role of someone we would love to be, someone who saves the world, and by these feelings we become them as we are playing because we don't want to fail at a life we would love to have, we don't want to die, because if we die on screen we feel the anger and disappointment of losing just as we would in real life if we failed, this is immersion in the purest sense.

As my research shows as presented in my power point, we are immersed in the games we play to the point our body mimics the physiological reactions of the body that occur to people experiencing the real version of the games we play. In showing this I believe I have proved Grimshaw correct in that First Person Shooters are meant to truly immerse us in a world in which we are living the life of who we see on our screen. Only the future will tell if technology will allow us to go to the next step and actually live our true life, fight real wars, and explore strange new worlds through a controller and monitor.