Navagon: [removed some here, to limit length of quote]
To me a roleplaying game is very much about playing a role. Being that character and shaping them as they affect the people and the world around them. Fallout segmented that experience; broke it down into chunks. The roleplaying experience becomes less involving as a result.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with turn based games. I love a great many of them. But they're mostly strategy and tactical games. Games that are immersive in an entirely different sense than the Fallout style RPG.
Yes, that's the general view of what "immersion" is in the game industry, lately, too. I disagree with that view, just as much as I disagree with the idea that one game mechanic is inherently better than another. But let's focus on "immersion". And then in a bit, further down, the idea of games as "interactive" or "interactive media."
Games are quite certainly not the only "immersive" media. Think film, movies, photography, art, etc. Games are definitely not, for me personally, the "most immersive" form of media. I love literature above all other forms of media, and I quite certainly get immersed in books to a much deeper level than I ever have been immersed in games. And yet books have very few of all these immersive features that in your perspective add to the immersion factor. In fact books are almost exclusively focusing on using your visual sense only [1] and there's not much happening visually either.
What makes books so immersive - good books that is - is good storytelling and an author that knows her/his craft. Immersion doesn't happen outside your mind. I don't think you'd ever feel that all books written in the first person are, by definition, more immersive than those written in third person. Or that those written from a limited character perspective are more immersive than those with an omniscient narrator. There's a huge amount of examples out there - it doesn't matter what techniques an author uses. What matters is that he/she employs them well.
The same is true for a good game. A good game, to me, is immersive through it's game mechanics (it's so fun to play I really am in the moment and with it) and/or through it's storyline (and to a lesser degree it's setting). The first - game mechanics - is what is unique to games, the second is the same immersion factor that all forms of media share. A good game - to be good - requires a team of people that are good at their craft and able to use the techniques available to shape a coherent and fitting whole. Not people that decide that one way is best, regardless of what type of game they aim to make.
I am passionate about this - that immersion is not just simply achieved or only added by one particular set of technical decisions - because there's a trend in the industry to see it that way you describe. Which, taken to the extreme, means we'll end up with one set of game mechanics being applied to nearly everything, a lack of variety of game play and eventually a general sameness. I like variety. I dislike this trend in the industry. Variety is good. Variety breeds new ideas and new approaches, new techniques.
This doesn't mean that, say, turn based game systems can't be further improved upon, or that first-person real time isn't useful. It's just that - I disagree that an isometric game has any less potential for immersion then a modern first person game has. Or that the only way a role-playing game can be immersive is to look like a shooter and by hiding its underlying mechanics. I've been more immersed in some good classic games then I have been in some of the current crop of ultra-realistic first person approaches. What makes a game good is how well it is put together, not what it's individual parts are.
As mentioned immersion isn't what happens on your screen. It's what happens in your mind. And that is why I find that other buzzword - "interactive" - to be even more cringe worthy.
Games, by and large, are not "interactive". Interaction means some form of mutual engagement. It means an exchange is happening. Something dynamic - where both that which is viewed, or discussed, or considered and the one (or the ones) doing that viewing, discussing, considering ... well ... interact. Good art (of any form, that includes most of the forms of media mentioned above) is interactive, because it requires you to consider the subject matter it is presenting, because it asks you to make sense, asks you to interpret and to re-interpret. Art or (political) discussion is interactive because it challenges your perception and asks questions of you. That is what also happens in an engaging interaction (i.e. discussion) between two (or more) people.
What describes games better is the word "reactive". You react to the game, the game reacts to your reaction, you react to the games reaction to your reaction, etc. What is missing is that deeper level of "inter action". There is not a lot of meaning created - in most cases. There's a few exceptions - where games veered of towards something like art - but the large majority of games are not at an interactive level. I disagree with the term "interactive TV programme " on very much the same grounds. A good documentary is a lot more interactive than those.
[1] There are other senses involved - touch, smell, sound - and I feel they add to the experience and are important, but, yes, the big thing with books is the visual input.
