532 – Making Your Story Immersive The Mythcreant podcast

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532 – Making Your Story Immersive

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Is it possible to get so drawn in by a story that you forget you’re reading words on a page? Probably not, but authors usually want to get as close to that feeling as possible. Achieving it is far from simple, though, and sometimes, it might not even be the best choice. This week, we’re talking about immersion: everything from wordcraft to worldbuilding to quest arrows in video games. Also about how quippy humor didn’t suddenly become bad; it’s just oversaturated.

Show Notes

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Latifah K. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[Intro music]

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants. I’m Chris, and with me is-

Oren: Oren.

Chris: -and.

Bunny: Bunny.

Chris: Now I know you think we have three hosts, but actually we have four.

Oren: Ooh.

Chris: Because, dear listener, you’re the fourth host.

Oren: Ooh.

Bunny: Whoa.

Chris: Obviously, you’re sitting around a table with us, your friends, and we’re just chatting about stories. Except sometimes you want to join the conversation, and you can’t. Immersion broken.

Bunny: No.

Oren: Look, it’s fine. Just develop one or two social relationships with us. A pair-a-social relationships if you will.

[chuckles]

Chris: Oh no.

Bunny: And we’re definitely all sitting around a table right now and not on opposite sides of Seattle.

Oren: Yeah, this is real.

Bunny: This is real.

Chris: So unfortunately, when somebody realizes they can’t join in the conversation and argue with us or talk about their favorite story. Immersion is broken, and we got to go to break in immersion jail.

[chuckles]

But I’m not sharing a cell with Ministry of Time.

Bunny: No, Ministry of Time. Look, the fact that they can’t argue with us in real time is a feature, not a bug. That’s what comments are for?

Oren: Got to hold it all in until it’s time for the comments. I’m sure that’s healthy.

Bunny: When you think about it? Comments are a very clever form of immersion.

[chuckles]

Chris: Okay. So, what is immersion? And maybe it means something different in video games. Oren, would you like to tell me– I saw something weird in your notes about immersion in video games, and now you have to explain to me and all of our listeners.

Oren: So, it’s hard for me to hear the term immersion and not kind of laugh a little bit because it’s become almost a little bit of a meme in certain game design and game discussion circles where people talk about “my immersion” in that voice, that tone we specifically use because it has at least some context, and I’m sure the pros have their own terminology, but at least in some context, immersion refers to the feeling that you are in the game.

And so that means typically the removal of things that give away that it’s a game, which can be fun and great, but it can also mean taking out critical UI components like a quest arrow, and not every game needs a quest arrow, but a lot of games need quest arrows, and not having one is bad for the game.

Chris: And immersion. If you’re wondering, “Where the hell is my quest? How do I get there?” I don’t think that’s very immersive.

Oren: Right. But people will sometimes defend that choice under the guise of, “It’s more immersive to not have a quest arrow because you wouldn’t have a quest arrow in real life.”

Bunny: You’d be confused out of your mind.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, that reminds me of something in other design fields where designers are always tempted to make things as minimal as possible, right? Instead of making things busy, making them simple. But that can come at the cost of usability sometimes, so–

Oren: Yeah. And I’ve played some games that are simple, and so they have very minimal interfaces, and you really do have a little bit more immersion that way. So, it’s not like it’s a fake idea; it’s just that it’s not the only thing that matters. And with video games in particular because they are often very complicated and require very complex controls, often trying to shoot for that can mean losing things. Your players really need it.

Bunny: I’d also argue that video games are just by virtue of you piloting a character around. I already have a really, really high level of immersion. So, claiming that the thing that will break it is a quest arrow is intensely funny.

[chuckles]

Oren: Yeah, it’s also just pretty obvious that a lot of this is like a veil for elitism, where it’s like, “Oh, you need a quest arrow. I guess you’re not a real gamer.” That sort of thing. Or, like, “Oh, you need a menu to keep track of what you were told by various people. Why didn’t you just remember it?”

Bunny: I’ll have you know, my spatial awareness is garbage.

[chuckle]

I will walk into a building and immediately get lost, so haters don’t come at me.

[laughs]

Chris: Okay, yeah. That makes sense. And it’s basically the same definition of immersion, where basically it’s the degree to which the story feels real, and the audience forgets they are consuming a story and are just fully in the moment.

Bunny: Basically, books should have quest arrows.

[laughs]

Oren: Yeah. And I mean, at least in novels, in my experience, there is less of a chance that by going for more immersion, you are going to leave out something that the reader needed. That can happen with video games. Not going to say it’s impossible, but–

Chris: Yeah, I will say I think with exposition, for instance, I’ve definitely seen people say, “When you open up a new chapter, don’t tell people the time and place, just show them. Do you want to say that it’s now winter? Describe how it’s snowing.” And so, you don’t have to do all showing and no telling. But sometimes we do need telling for clarity. So that, I think, is where that would come into play.

Oren: And there are also certain types of stories that are stories you might want to tell that are going to inherently have less immersion. Anything that is humorous is less likely to be immersive just because humor requires making fun of things and treating things less seriously. Not that it’s impossible to have humor and immersion, but typically speaking, one will detract from the other.

Chris: I would have actually put it the other way. I would say that humor actually requires less immersion, and so you can create more entertainment in something that is less immersive with humor. So, for instance, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—that’s what I love referring to if I want to show people what entertaining exposition looks like because there is a lot of expositions in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

But nobody minds because it’s all very entertaining and there’s tons of jokes in there. So, I think that novelty and humor work with low immersion in a way that other engagement mechanisms don’t. I do think that it is an interesting thought if you add a joke, “Does that make things less immersive?” I think it might depend on the joke, like some jokes are very meta.

Bunny: If you’re being self-aware.

Oren: Yeah. Like, anything that’s a commentary is going to reduce immersion because that requires calling attention to the workings of your story. And this is like a really hot discourse topic right now because everyone’s sick of Marvel movies, and Marvel movies have a lot of self-referential humor that everyone loved in 2008, like when the MCU started, it was great, right?

We were all so tired of the Batman movies that took themselves so seriously, and it’s like, “No, now we have characters who can laugh at each other. And yeah, their superhero names are really silly, and we can make jokes about it.” But now, nearly 20 years later, everyone’s like, “Oh God, they made another joke about the superhero names.”

So, you’ll see people writing these think pieces about how, like, “Why don’t movies take themselves seriously anymore?” And what they mean is that they’re tired of watching Marvel movies where everything is a funny reference.

Bunny: Well, that just happened.

Oren: Yeah, that is actually an interesting– I don’t know if that one is immersion-related exactly, but the, “Well, that just happened.” joke is a joke that everyone decided was bad because it’s been overused. But it’s actually a perfectly fine joke. It used to be considered very funny because it hadn’t been everywhere, and now it’s in too many movies, so people don’t think it’s funny anymore.

Bunny: Maybe in 20 years it will come back around to being funny.

Oren: Same thing with the, “He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?” That’s a funny joke. That joke has literally been around since like the Ancient Greeks, but it’s just been used so much in so many Marvel movies that people are like, “No, it’s actually a bad joke.”

Now they’ll write pieces about how it’s unsophisticated and bad humor. And it’s like, “No guys, just calm down. Just stop watching Marvel movies. You don’t have to go, it’s fine.”

[chuckles]

Chris: It’s just been a little overused; that’s what happens. Jokes depend on novelty. If they lose their novelty, they lose their surprise, and then they don’t feel good anymore. Pretty simple.

Bunny: With regards to comedy, I was thinking about– as an example of something where you kind of have to be out of it to laugh at the joke. I was thinking of The Play That Goes Wrong, which, if you haven’t seen it, it’s a comedy production where they are putting on a play called The Murder at Haversham Manor, and everything in the play in the actual staging of the play that goes wrong does go wrong.

So, like, paintings are falling off the walls; the actors are really bad; someone gets knocked out in the middle of the play. And then they just keep shouting their lines at her as if she’s going to respond. So, I was like, “The whole point is that I’m comedically observing it from the outside.” But then I was like, “Maybe I’m immersed in the fiction of the play by pretending that it’s not being staged.” Mm-hmm. So, maybe I am immersed.

Oren & Chris: Whoa.

Bunny: Maybe it’s a super turnaround, double fiction immersion.

Chris: Mind-blown.

Oren: I mean, that’s just your average community theater production.

[chuckles]

So, like, honestly, that’s just true to life. Did you see the stage manager running around trying to get people to not take their props home with them? Because if so, it’s perfect.

[chuckles]

Bunny: The stage manager is a part of the play.

Oren: Yes, my day has come.

Bunny: He comes out on stage and he’s like, “I’m pleased to present my directorial debut.”

[chuckle]

Oren: That is how I would present myself, so, accurate.

[chuckles]

Bunny: So immersive.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: But how do we make our stories more immersive, assuming that’s our goal?

Chris: Okay. As I briefly mentioned, showing is more immersive than telling. And if we’re talking about things like narrative distance. So, close distance is more immersive than more distant narration, and generally close distance does involve more showing rather than telling, so it’s the same mechanism.

So, that’s probably the biggest thing, and then the other thing, of course, is not interrupting somebody’s experience. I would say it’s useful to understand what immersion gets you so that you know when you make choices, like, “How much exposition and summary?” Because some types of narration are more immersive than others, and you have to balance that.

So, for instance, description can be very immersive in action too because it’s observable. But you might want to say, “Okay, if I summarize this, what if I use more exposition here?” Or just like more commentary-type language that is less about kind of the sensory experience and more about making a joke about how somebody looks.

So basically, low immersion tends to kill other emotions, or not entirely kill, but like lower them. So, things aren’t very tense if the immersion is too low or very heartfelt. It doesn’t allow audiences to get in the mood. Novelty and humor, as I mentioned, still seem to work just fine. Which is why I wanted to complain about the Ministry of Time.

[laughs]

And apparently after I DNF Ministry of Time, there was a whole lot of sex that I missed.

Oren: Quite a lot.

Chris: But the fun thing about that is– as parts I read, I was like, “This is the least romantic romance I have ever read.” And I think a big part of the reason is because, again, I don’t know actual numbers, but it felt like it was 95% exposition in summary. This book is a lot of talking in general about what characters are doing and very little actual real-time scenes, which they’re doing the most showing. So, they are by far the most immersive.

And it’s just really hard to get any character chemistry without immersion, and it felt like in this book anytime we actually had a scene with the two people who were supposed to be in a romance together and they have some interactions built a little chemistry, the author would suddenly cut away to exposition, and it would just all be gone.

Bunny: It also didn’t help that the character was constantly breaking the fourth wall, which is another intentionally immersion-breaking thing that’s employed by comedy a lot. Where she was turning around and scolding herself on doing the wrong thing, and obviously that pulls you out of the story.

Oren: And it might be worth it, right? Regardless of whether it’s for a joke or not, there are reasons why you would break the fourth wall to comment on what’s happening. The problem is that this book doesn’t have anything to say because it’s all just various flavors of “And I made bad choices.” But you didn’t, though. You actually didn’t make any choices because you had no choices to make in the entire story.

Chris: And I would say as long as that sort of retelling commentary of a character, your future narrator coming in and talking about their past or ever get this or that, as long as that’s not jarring, it’s often okay to have a paragraph, a few sentences of that.

And it’s a little less immersive, and then you continue the story and re-immerse the reader, and it works fine. You go back to the moment that’s unfolding and get close again and you can have your one paragraph that’s more immersive than the other paragraph as long as your narration works smoothly. But if you do 90% of the book-

[chuckles]

-is low immersion, then there’s a lot of emotions that just get muted from that. A lot of hard to build chemistry, hard to build tension, all those other things. A lot of these things take audiences getting in the mood and anticipating things and that kind of thing, and it’s just hard to do.

Oren: Yeah, here is a question. What about evocative telling? We’ve talked about that before. It’s a concept that comes up a lot in Lord of the Rings or Lovecraft. Is that immersive, do you think?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it does add immersion. So, you can do this in fact with summary or exposition as well. Because a lot of times it’s about the specific language, and so, if you want to make your exposition a little more immersive, you can put in more description and specific sensory language in the exposition, and it might make it a little longer.

But sometimes it can be worth it because the exposition will just become more evocative and immersive. So, generally, what you’re looking for is language that focuses on, again, the sensory experience of the moment and doesn’t require the reader to interpret or think about it.

So, the question that I like to ask, again, with description when we’re talking about what words are used to describe things is ask, “Okay. What does that look like?” Usually it’s look, but it could be sound or feel like, and if you have to think about the answer, it’s not immersive. It has to be specific and familiar.

So, if you ask somebody, “What does a Siamese cat look like?” There’s a good chance that person has an idea of what a Siamese cat looks like right away. It’s specific; it’s familiar. They could describe what the color pattern on the cat is. If you ask them, “What does an animal look like?”

[chuckles]

Then it’s like, “Okay. What kind of animal are we talking about?” Or if you ask them some strange species they had never heard of, and they would be like, “I don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know what that is.”

Oren: I think you’ll find that animal is a largely orange with big red hair and a huge mouth and a tongue.

[laughs]

Bunny: You are just talking about Carrot Top.

Oren: He’s a very good Muppet, actually, is what I was thinking.

[laughs]

Chris: So, with adjectives too. What does beautiful look like? That is something that you have to think about. So, you can come up with characteristics that people consider beautiful, but that’s something you would have to think about. So, it’s better to actually describe somebody in a way that makes them sound beautiful and show more than that. That happens with action too, right? If you’re like, “This person attacked that other person.” That is too vague.

[chuckles]

That is not a specific image. If you say somebody lunged, I could easily imagine what that looks like. If you say somebody did a little pirouette, I’m actually not that familiar with what a pirouette would look like in that situation.

Oren: Just you know, the classic pirouette motion.

[chuckles]

Bunny: You spin around in an aggressive way.

Oren: We talked a few weeks ago about intuitive storytelling, and that can also help with immersion. We’ve been talking about intentional breaks to immersion like breaking the fourth wall or making commentary or references. But unintentional breaks to immersion tend to be anytime your reader has to stop and be like, “Whoa. Okay. Hang on. This isn’t what I thought was happening.” And then they may have to recalibrate, or they have to back up and try again.

And making your story more intuitive is all about decreasing the number of times that happens, and that can help with immersion as well, because then you can just go with the flow and you don’t have to constantly be like, “Wait, hang on. This doesn’t make sense with the thing you told me.” And then have to try to figure out what the connections are.

Bunny: For me, nothing breaks immersion faster than weird dialogue tags.

[chuckles]

Like dialogue tags are supposed to be invisible but then suddenly someone’s expunging or opining or–

Oren: “That’s interesting, he explained.”

Bunny: Yeah. Exactly.

Chris: The thing about that is that those types of dialogue tags—I think the problem with them really is that they are telling, which makes sense. Because again, they’re supposed to be an action that is already represented by the line of speech, and so they’re kind of inherently repetitive, and so you are basically doing repetitive telling with a dialogue tag. But at least if you just use the word “said,” people don’t pay that much attention to it.

[chuckles]

Bunny: The problem is that people are worried that that’s what they’re doing when they use “said” a lot, and the truth is that your eyes slide over “said.” It’s unobtrusive.

Chris: I’m not going to say it’s impossible for “said” to get repetitive, but I usually find that as long as you are okay with using action tags, which I think some writers don’t know how to use or are not confident using where they use dialogue tags when they don’t need to, because you can put a line of dialogue and have the same character take an action right after, and that’s a clear enough label. You don’t always have to have “said,” or “asked,” or “explained” right there.

Oren: Well, we know that “said” can get repetitive because the book Redshirts exists.

Chris: If you also know that action tags exist, and again, we can link an article in the show notes if you’re not familiar with this to my article on “Labeling Dialogue.” Then usually it really isn’t necessary to use so many dialogue tags that they become repetitive. Where you place them also can matter, and certainly if you’re using them unnecessarily and they always like appear in exactly the same place since every single line, I won’t say that “said” can never get too much. But–

Bunny: Yeah, it certainly can. If every line is like, “Hello, she said.” “Hello, he said.” “How are you doing? She said.” “I’m doing pretty well, he said.” That’s going to get repetitive, right? But just the word “said” itself, reach for that before you reach for opined.

Chris: Yeah, again, some writers have a different philosophy and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t want that useless said word. I want to do something creative.” But everybody else is like, “Oh. This is so embarrassing.”

[chuckles]

There are different philosophies, but we are definitely in the “you said” because it’s an invisible camp.

Oren: Yeah. Something just occurred to me about our video game discussion. There’s one thing that video games do that makes them feel really immersive that I just don’t think you could replicate in a novel, which is that video games, especially the ones that you aren’t just on rails for the whole time; that lets you explore a bit.

Where you go somewhere that doesn’t seem that important for the main quest, and then you discover that there are details there. You know, you go to a farmhouse that isn’t marked on your quest map, and you go in there, and you find that the farmer is working on trying to splice two kinds of apples and has a whole business plan that he’ll talk– he’ll tell you about if you talk to him because you sought that out.

And it’s like, “Wow, this makes this world feel so expansive and deep.” And I’m immersed, but in a novel, everything that is shown to you is shown to you by the specific plan of the writer. You can’t actually go somewhere else unless you’re doing a “choose your own adventure.”

Bunny: But you have touched on something that makes a world feel immersive, and that’s just feeling like it’s bigger than the slice of it. You can see that it’s not just a green screen back there behind your characters; that it actually goes on and on, and there’s a lot to it.

And that’s more than just exposition. This goes into other world-building tips and stuff like that but having a world that feels realized can go a long way for immersion, at least in my experience.

Chris: Yeah, I criticize a lot of people for putting in too many world-building terms in their first few paragraphs because, again, readers cannot handle that many new terms at the same time. And each one makes it harder to understand, and if they’re confused, then that is going to break their immersion.

At the same time, I can understand the attractiveness of just imagining how the characters would talk in the world and then just having them talk that way, how they would naturally talk without worrying about what the reader can get or not. I don’t think that’s the right choice for the beginning, because I think in the beginning the reader is unlikely to know the difference if you just cut out the name of the capital city and just say the capital instead.

They’ve got enough going on, but I can understand that kind of immersive approach. A naturalistic approach, I should say, to introducing your world, and I think it’s fine to have little references. It’s just, “Are you doing too many new things at once?”

Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s been interesting with the current project because I did a lot more world planning than I normally do. And I did that specifically because I wanted to make sure that I never lost track of where my characters were, and I wanted the environments to feel consistent because they’re spending a lot more time in the same area than they have in previous stories of mine.

But I do end up in the scenario where I’m like, “Oh man, I’ve got so much cool stuff that I wrote. Perhaps the reader would want to know in several pages of exposition. Surely that would be immersive, right?” And I do think that finding out about that naturally as part of the story could be immersive, but I have to take them. I can’t just tell them and expect them to be immersed. That’s just an info dump.

Bunny: We do have an article on introducing unfamiliar setting elements that feels relevant here in forgetting the actual title, but that would be worth linking.

Chris: Yeah, I have one on introducing world terms. That talks a lot about terminology, that’s one I link to a lot. We have a number of different articles this could be. We have so many articles.

[chuckles]

Bunny: We write a lot of articles, as it turns out.

Chris: We have so many articles.

[chuckles]

We have usually several relevant articles for any topic you want to know about. One thing that throws me out, this is the thing that Study in Drowning was a very interesting book. It was not a perfect book, but I found it to be a very interesting read.

The one thing that started to throw me out a lot in the beginning that calls its attention to me in a lot of books is metaphors that do not feel like they belong. I think metaphors in general can break immersion, but not always if they fit into place. But it’s just, “Does the imagery of the metaphor fit the actual mood or atmosphere or subject matter of the sea?”

And in the beginning of A Study in Drowning, there’s so many elaborate metaphors that as I was listening in audio, I could predict when one was coming.

[chuckles]

It was like at the dramatic end to the paragraph. Now there’s going to be a hilarious metaphor here, and I literally started laughing. Now luckily that did get better. I kind of wonder if the author really wanted to impress with fancy metaphors in the beginning.

Oren: I wish I could remember this specific one. There was one that was like steam came off sausages like a ghost escaping its grave. Like, wait what?

[chuckles]

Bunny: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, that is one. So, the main character Effy is just eating in a tavern, and I think it was a pie, and steam comes out of it like a ghost. And it’s just like, “That is– that is really random.”

Oren: What? What does that mean? How does the steam look like a ghost? Like what? The steam is normal. It’s good for steam to come off of food.

Chris: Sitting in the middle of the night is still the one that takes the cake for the most random metaphors and similes because it just had so many. But that is one, and that’s something that people don’t talk about a lot when they’re talking about metaphors is you’re evoking imagery. So, is that imagery what you want for the atmosphere of the scene?

Bunny: You’re only allowed to use that ghost metaphor if it’s poison.

[chuckles]

Oren: Or if it’s gone bad or something, right?

Chris: Or you’re at like a seance. You are going to come with tea and the steam lifts up like a ghost. That would make sense.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: That would fit.

Oren: I drink that tea.

Bunny: I don’t want ghosts in my tasty pie, though.

Oren: Speaking of tasty pie, I have one more question. To what extent is wish fulfillment similar to immersion?

Bunny: Hmm.

Oren: Because I hear people talking about being immersed in the pastry scenes of legends and lattes, and I’m like, “Is that the right term? Is that immersion, or are you just having a good time living vicariously through these Poissant’s?”

Chris: Yeah. I mean, maybe it helps in some wish fulfillment. If people enjoy the details, I can see wish fulfillment being an instant in which people get more joy from the basic description of the scene than they would otherwise. So, rather than like, “Oh, I don’t care what this room looks like.”

And skimming over the description more if you are sort of savoring those sensory details, I can see that maybe increasing immersion. Normally I would just consider wish fulfillment to be a source of engagement and not necessarily a source of immersion, but I could see it in that instance.

Oren: All right. Well, with that delicious croissant image, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: And if you stayed immersed and didn’t try to argue with us this whole episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber; he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then, there’s Kathy Ferguson; he’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[Outro music]

Outro: This has been the Mythcreants podcast opening/closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.

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