Next-Generation Immersion.

Immersion is the next big marketing word to come out of the gaming industry, but when the marketing droids say it, what does it mean, and what does it project?

Immersion can be defined as “when several of a user’s senses are isolated from the real world and fed information (images and sound) coming from a computer.” Now, what this means to me, and what this means to a marketer are two totally different things. “But, Jason,” I hear you ask, “how could that possibly be misinterpreted?”

The definition itself only points out two things that are required for total immersion: video and audio, and this has manifested itself in the next generation of gaming consoles, as both the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 will not only support, but enforce, High-Definition graphics (up to 1080p in both cases), as well as support for 5.1 surround sound, both of which will help pave the way towards immersion; however, they don’t help a player actually feel as though they are lost inside of the gaming world.

The critical point that most marketers miss (or just don’t care about because it’s impossible to market) is how the game actually plays. Almost every game breaks the illusion of immersion by either having horrible controls, a terrible storyline, horrible AI, or unbelievable physics. By lacking in all four departments of game play, a game simply loses the imagination of the player, which destroys the illusion of immersion.

But, Microsoft and Sony don’t really care about these elements of the game. This fact is evident in how their consoles are developed: the processors are developed to run in-order code. What’s the difference between in-order code execution and out-of-order? Modern CPU’s use out-of-order execution in order to speed up poorly written code, while in-order execution is good for one thing: crunching floating point numbers. This is great for realistic physics and high resolution graphics, but sucks for anything else. An initial report from developers is that the two architectures presented by Sony and Microsoft run up to 1/10th the performance at the same clock speed.

That simply sucks for overall game play. I am not predicting a doomsday for the gaming industry; however, we’re not going to see an incredible leap forward in technologies like AI for the home console. Oh, the graphics will be wonderful, and the marketing departments will have a field day selling us shiny multi-bump-mapped polygons, and we’ll buy into the hype as strongly as ever, but the gaming experience, as a whole, will not improve in any significant way with this next generation.

Provided by Geekstreak.