"Structural Incoherence" and Katamari Damacy

In our Wednesday lecture this week, Kevin mentioned Stephen Paul's complaint about the fact that most games have some kind of limit to it which ends up breaching immersion with space.

Well today, I was watchng my boyfriend play Katamari Damace where the point of the game (in story mode) is to make your ball thingy reach a certain size by the time limit by picking up EVERYTHING in the world from a small piece of cheese to a whole island! At first, I thought it was a bit ridiculous considering Paul's comment but I realized that the as the ball grows bigger, it is then capable of picking up larger objects.

So with that in mind, I realized that my boyfriend (and even I who wasn't playing) was fully immersed in the game because he was concentrating on trying to pick up as many objects/people as possible by the time limit.

Have a look at Katamari Damacy's gameplay and the character's goal of making 800 metres:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck27wp617PU