Staring into Abyss: Independent Approaches to Immersion in Video Games: Archimedes

Abstract

Immersion has always been one of the most important reasons why gamers keep on playing video games. Developers constantly try to surround gamers via graphics, sound, narration, and most importantly, interactivity but, to reach a wider audience, developers, at the cost of sacrificing creativity, are not willing to leave their comfort zone. Independent developers, however, can come up with various ideas and executions to create immersion.
 In this paper, my case study will be Archimedes which is an independent game created by Josh Huges. In the context of Archimedes, I will try to examine how the game creates immersion while gradually spreading through the virtual world into our real lives. I will focus on gameplay mechanics, and visual and sound structure to analyze how they are used to create immersion.