How real is too real?

There’s immersion, and then there’s immersion. From a gamer’s perspective, I get it. The best games are the most addictive and they all have one thing in common: the ability to immerse the player in the experience of the game. Its like a drug that draws players in like tourists to a foreign land and we like that.

On the flip side, there is the more sinister aspect of immersion. This is an article that talks about how the U.S. Ministry of Defence had to update their simulations to bring them in line with the latest instalments of popular FPS games like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Another article discussed how the U.S. Army created a set of realistic-looking game controllers in the shape of rifles.

Now of course we’re still talking early days, but this is just one step closer to blurring that line between reality and games. We know that technology is advancing at a rapid rate and game environments are becoming increasingly more realistic. And then there’s the idea that army simulations used to train recruits are kinda similar to that game you can get on MightyApe pretty easily. Dodgy.

So what happens in the future when gaming landscapes are so realistic its hard to tell that it’s a game? Ooo.