Structural Incoherence, Age and Immersion

These days, video games seem to be focusing more and more on realism, both in terms of the graphics and also in terms of what the player is capable of doing, probably to market the games to an older audience and also to remove structural incoherence. If structural incoherence disrupts immersion, then that is probably one of the reasons why video games are trying to add realism.

However, recently I've recently been playing some older games from the Playstation/Nintendo 64 era and lo and behold, structural incoherence everywhere. Crash Bandicoot can scuba dive yet dies when he falls into a river. James Bond's villains get alerted whenever you fire an unsilenced gun but if you kill one of them with a silenced gun, their comrades just walk right past it as if nothing happened.

Pokemon is by far the worst culprit. How in the hell can creatures who can burn things, create earthquakes and slash things not be able to cut down a fucking tree? But when I played these games when I was younger, I got very immersed. I didn't even question how I could surf on a Horsea.

I don't play many games anymore but I'm sure a lot of more recent games aimed at a younger demographic are choc full of inconsistencies because younger people take less notice of them. At least to me, the game play and, to a lesser extent, the narrative were more important. Going back to Pokemon, the game had a good enough (though incredibly unrealistic) story to go with a fun RPG-style game play. It wasn't until I was older that I started thinking some of those required uses for HMs were stupid.

Back then due to technological constraints, it was probably a lot more difficult to prevent such structural incoherences. But back then, to our younger minds, it probably made a lot less of a difference. It's not until we play them again when older that they become more visible.