For those of you who still haven’t played developer Quantic Dream’s Indigo Prophecy, Lucas Kane is one the main characters of the game. What I have just described to you is a scene that takes place very early in the game. However, what makes this scene so special is the fact that I made him do all of that. After receiving only the smallest of cues – the quick inner-monologue line that Lucas just wanted to go about his day – I made him go to the bathroom. I made him take a shower. I made him stop and look in the mirror. My question is simply, why? I could have just as easily gone straight to the closet, put on some clothes and been done with it. Why was I so willing to dwell in the mundane tasks of everyday life in a medium that, for the most part, is meant to take us out of all this banality? But at that moment, I was living the life of this man. I made him shower because he was going to work. I made him go the bathroom because when you wake up you have to pee. Lucas was real, the immersion was real and I was swimming in it…the immersion, not the pee. This is the magic of Indigo Prophecy.

Ewwww, yeah…I’m gonna need to wash my hands after this.

In order to uncover some answers as to how Quantic Dream is able to accomplish this feat, let’s look at some other games that have also attempted to achieve greater immersion through “real life” tasks with less than favorable results.

The first game that sprang to mind when I was trying to figure out why I was completely fine with making sure Lucas took the time to wash his hands and blow dry them after using the bathroom was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Here is a game that goes out of its way to include things like working out, eating, and getting a hair cut into the gameplay in order to create some sort of connection between the player and the character, and yet it fails so hard. The problem here is that it tries too hard. GTA:SA makes some of these acts an important part of the overall gameplay mechanics and, in doing so, makes them feel like a chore. If your character eats and doesn’t work out, he gets fat and slow. Don’t eat enough, and he gets skinny. It becomes something you feel like you have to do because it helps build the character’s stamina and expands his move set rather than something you choose to do because of honest immersion.

The other, and more important, reason I feel it doesn’t work is because the system doesn’t behave realistically relative to the time elapsed. You can make your character fat, ripped or skinny in such a small amount of time relative to any sense of real time passage in the game. Again, this just serves to highlight these things as game mechanics rather than something that psychologically or emotionally connects the player to the character. The eating and the exercising are about reaching the end goal of having a character with the player’s desired stats. It’s not about being in the moment of eating or exercising. And that is what Indigo Prophecy is about, sharing the moment with these characters and existing in the same reality of time that they do.

Another way that other games try to add bits of immersion is through available interactions with random objects throughout the game’s world. The game that did this most recently was BioShock 2. As I lumbered around Rapture as Subject Delta, I noticed that I had the ability to turn on water faucets. Why? Why did the developers find it necessary to make the sinks work? There wasn’t much else in the world that I could play with. We’ve seen this in plenty of games. Doors open. Toilets flush. Phones ring. But for what? These do not help immerse the player in the world because they are exactly the way I described them, random. They have no meaning or reason to exist in the narrative of the game. They serve no purpose. Through the use of a meter that displays your character’s mood, Indigo Prophecy gives purpose to having them use the restroom, turn on some music or get a glass of water. Even the actions that don’t have a direct impact on the character’s mood still seem to make sense due to the simple narrative implications of their everyday life. Making a character wash their hands after using the bathroom doesn’t elevate their mood, but it makes sense in the situation because it’s what I would do in the real world.

Indigo Prophecy’s greatest trick is to blanket the player with a feeling of connectedness to all of the main characters. The presentation of the narrative plays the biggest role in this feeling and helps foster the player’s participation in these mundane tasks. Here’s what I mean. Lucas wakes up in a trance and finds himself in a bathroom stall. He murders a man, has some visions and blacks out. He had no control over his actions. As a player, I was the mercy of the director’s whims had no control since this was all presented in the form of a cut-scene. Emotionally, the player is instantly on a level playing field with Lucas due to the shared helplessness of that experience. While playing as Carla or Tyler, the two cops charged with finding Lucas, you also share the emotional gravity of the situation because just as they were thrust into the case, you are thrust into the situation of solving the murder you just saw yourself commit. You don’t have the choice to not play these parts; it’s what the director wants.

You’ve probably caught on by now that one of the biggest factors at work here is the manipulation of control for both the characters and player. Control is constantly being taken away from the characters and then given back bits at a time. Events are going to play out one way or another. As a player, you feel this lack of control just as the characters do, and it will effectively alter your mood and make you want to participate in as many actions as you have control over as possible. Enter the mundane.

It seems to me that it’s no coincidence that the game’s mood meter uses words like stressed, anxious and depressed to describe the character’s mental state throughout the game. Anyone who has chronically suffered from anxiety or depression can tell you that sometimes when the weight of their depression is at a paralyzing apex, it’s the most menial of tasks that can feel like the largest victories. Getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, doing some laundry; all these are minor things that a person has control over and can participate in when everything else seems out of control. Indigo Prophecy’s narrative reflects that by putting these characters in an extraordinary situation that they have little control over and telling them to continue to live their lives. You as the player have to live it with them, and when you get those fleeting moments of control, that few seconds to go to the bathroom or to dry your hands, you will take them. And what’s more incredible, you will enjoy taking them. Indigo Prophecy proves that you don’t need to force the player into some gimmicky gameplay mechanics or create the illusion of a real world with running faucets and flushing toilets. You just have to set the mood.