At last count, my RSS feeder was keeping tabs on over thirty feeds. That’s not just websites and not just gaming-related (hi, Outside Magazine), it’s more like a giant-ass bucket of interests and keywords I sort through daily. While I’m pretty on top of culling the daily article flood – thanks to my ToDoist + Grit routine – a ton of articles get shunted into my ‘Saved’ feed. (The digital equivalent of tossing your laundry onto a chair to “fold later.”)
I was reading an article…
…that linked to another one about immersive sims. At the time, that term meant absolutely fuck all to me. I don’t even think it was linked as “blah blah blah immersive sims”, it was describing something else entirely and dropped the link.
So I read it top to bottom.
Then I got confused and asked a friend for help.
Take Two
I went back and reread the article, double-checked the ChatGPT breakdown (I should say THAT breakdown, because I also have one explaining Boomer Shooters to me) and then told it that this kinda sounds like survival games.
The convo stuck with me because I had zero clue what an immersive sim was. And I’d never played any of the games listed in the article. (Or the sim titles ChatGPT spit out.) But, after giving the bot a list of games I’ve enjoyed in the past, apparently I’ve always subconsciously gravitated toward games with player choice, system-driven gameplay, interlocking (impactful) mechanics, and messy, emergent problem-solving. (I also seem to gravitate toward turn based combat games, which I didn’t realize, but maybe that explains why I enjoy Wartales so much??) Deep down, I’ve always had a personal litmus test for my games:
Can I roleplay it? Can I believe I’m in it – like I actually belong there?
(Not just pressing buttons and doing video game math, but reacting to a world that reacts back.)
To the RhyDin Inn
If you grew up with AOL, you’ll remember the early internet as a strange and wondrous place. And no place was more strange or wondrous than the RhyDin Inn – an AOL chatroom dedicated to letting budding English majors (*raises hand*) and future Dungeons & Dragons shut-ins flex their vocab and toss their flowing locks.
(Which often hid amber orbs. Sorry! Roleplay joke. You either get it…or you’re blessed.)
I won’t try and explain it, I’ll let ChatGPT give it a whirl.
(Man, I had SO MANY roleplay characters and SO MANY HTML websites built around each character. Also Deadjournals, Livejournals…hmm. )
*Slowly, he drifts back to the point…*
HumanitZ has that va-va-voom.
It’s got the magic. It gives me that feeling that the choices I’m making are mine, that they have real weight, and aren’t just ticking boxes along some internal checklist. Somewhere between starving to death and saving the life of an NPC,the good ones stop being survival games and start becoming stories you built yourself. (Kinda like DayZ and their whole “THIS IS YOUR STORY” shtick, except it’s really hard to have a story when you log in and are immediately murdered, or when you get shot when you’re completely inside a house and laying on the ground not near windows. NOT COMPLAINING but fix the fucking hacker problem, Bohemia.)
Lemme show you two screenshots.
[Also, excuse the shit quality of my RP, once AOL died I largely abandoned roleplay, beyond a few attempts in WoW (which were terrible) and then just some half-assed writing with friends. I never got into the Discord-based roleplay, like my sister, and I couldn’t stomach heading to forums.]
There was barely a moment to wrench the pickaxe from the corpse at my feet before I was lunging forward.
Up, up, up the dented side of the police car, sweaty palms sliding on sun-warmed metal, barely able to keep my grip on the weapon as I threw myself onto the roof and rolled to my back, panting.
Below me, a wolf tore into the teetering corpses with a wet, sucking noise I tried my best to ignore. I stared up at the sky, blue and indifferent, and considered my next move.
The needle on the gauge hovers perilously close to E, and I know my window for safe travel is almost up. Weaving along the broken pavement, dodging corpses and derelict vehicles, I spot the reddish flare of a trader’s torch ahead and steer the truck that way. She doesn’t quite make it, sputtering and clunking to a stop roughly thirty feet short of the ramshackle barn and equally ramshackle house.
Still, a win – it’s safety, of a sort.
I barter for permission to sleep in the old barn. The next night, I fall asleep to the crackle of nearby campfires, and the rhythmic crunch of footsteps on gravel lulling me to sleep.
Not much protection against bandits or the undead.
But better than being alone.
In the end, HumanitZ proves you don’t need a strict genre label to make choices matter, sometimes you just need to stop playing it like a checklist and start thinking like a roleplayer.
