# Information Versus Immersion

LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt)

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Which is better: to tell a player they hit a troll really hard, or to tell them they did 25 points of damage? The former is what the character would see; the latter is what many players want to see. If they do see it, though, it works against immersion: In the real world, you don’t see numbers appearing every time you hit something with a hammer, so why should you in the virtual world?

The last of the major decisions that designers have to make about their virtual world is the degree to which immersion should be sacrificed for the benefit of players’ spreadsheets. It’s easy enough to say, “Oh, let the players themselves decide,” but there are limits. Also, designers get to determine the default; what newbies see can have a lasting impact on the culture of a game.

The trade-off between information and immersion uses a sliding scale that can be split into three zones:

- Immersion always wins. Players don’t get to see the code that dictates mobile AI, and that’s final.

- Players choose. Some will see it as “the red bag,” but for others it’s “bag002.”

- Information always wins. You’re told the name of the nearby character, whether or not your own character has ever met them before.

Designers set the boundaries. Although the middle zone allows for multiple settings (“I want to know how much I’ve been hurt, but not the true names of objects”), in practice it works fine as a single, binary setting.

Again, the reason that this seemingly mundane decision assumes unusually high significance is because by the time it becomes an issue it’s normally too late to do anything about it. During testing, everybody wants as much information as they can get; the capability to switch it off can be left almost as an afterthought. It needs to be determined right at the beginning.

Players want to see numbers (or stats bars or labels) because it helps them play. Information given in more circumspect ways is an unnecessary encoding. Everyone is eventually going to get the data they want anyway, so why try to hide it? Once numbers are accepted as part of the virtual world then surely they won’t thereafter disrupt immersion? In the real world, some objects do have numbers on them: If I buy a bag of sugar, its weight is written in bold letters on the side; if I buy a car, it has a license plate that identifies it uniquely. Freedom of information is good.

Isn’t this obsession with “immersion” just pretentious nonsense?

In some respects, a designer’s decision of whether to favor information or immersion is a partial statement of their design philosophy. Players want information for achievement and killer purposes (explorers like it too, but then they also like deducing it when it’s not provided). If you give numbers to newbies, you’re telling them that this is a virtual world that they should take by the scruff of the neck and make their own; if you don’t, you’re saying it’s a mysterious, perhaps dangerous place, where knowledge reveals itself only through experiment or the experience of others [^22].

Decide what you want to tell them and why. Then tell them.


[^22]: In large-scale games, players will eventually need to be able to switch on the numbers even if they start out being unable to; this is for the simple reason that if they can’t, they’ll generate huge numbers of false bug reports because the virtual world is not behaving exactly how it should (according to their empirically derived definition of “should”).