What parts of a video game break the illusion of reality to you?

- The lagmonster is reasonably successful in destroying the illusion.
– Certainly scripted things aren’t good.. random is king
– Bouncing off a texture that looks like a door you could walk through.. mm hmm
– the rapidity with which the army sends tanks after you for driving over some people in the street.. definitely a reality buzz kill

I could go on and on.

@NaturalMineralWater Please do if you wish to. I’m trying to make a very detailed list. I’m an undergraduate going into the video game industry. I am currently composing a, I think satire, of a game concept based on flaws in video game reality. I want to make sure I cover (almost) every one there is.

-An arrow pointing to a character you should talk to
-Lack of traffic/people on a city street
-Firing a gun at a “bad guy”, and him taking at 6 different shots without going down
-The general assumption that every single person you run into is automatically a “bad guy”
-Coins, gems, weapon stashes, ammo lying on the street, armor lying on the street
-“Human” characters walking away from horrifying car wrecks
-Power-ups and health
-Bad voice-overs and repeated dialogue: “I don’t like the look of this”...“I don’t like the look of this”, “No one can hide from me”, “I don’t like the look of this”, “No one can hide from me”
-Bad costuming (why do all “heroes” either wear fatigues or a wife beaters and cargo pants? – or a cheesy uniform?)
-Never eating, drinking, sleeping

I personally don’t like games that are ultra realistic. I like games that present mechanics that make playing fun. The best games in my opinion are the ones that don’t give a shit about realism and only focus on gameplay. It is for this reason that I don’t care for first person shooters based on historical events. If a game is trying to imitate reality, it is hard for me to suspend disbelief while collecting powerups. I’m looking at you Medal of Honor series.

@Vinifera7 – I agree. I think first person shooters are brain-draining bores. And usually (ironically) they have the worst looking graphics of any games, even though they’re trying soooo hard.

But the question here really just wants to know for the purposes of study/satire what makes the “realistic” games not at all “realistic”.

@bananafish
I see your point. I interpreted a negative connotation in the phrasing “break the illusion of reality”, yet I like playing games that are unrealistic, so it’s not a knock against most games unless they are purposely trying to be realistic and simply fail at it (like the Medal of Honor series does). I do enjoy other FPS games like the Halo and Resident Evil series.

Cut scenes are a big one for me – I didn’t pay to watch a movie – I want to play! Also pretty much everything you listed.

And there was me thinking all video games were based on reality :(
lolzy

I hate when in a game you can get killed so fast yet the enemy cant , that said i don’t tend to play M-O-H games anymore F.E.A.R is realistic but unrealistic at the same time so much so its a great game for it .
How about in GTA games you can flip bikes and totally wipe out cars but yet the still drive , how the army comes after you i doubt it would happen that way in real life you would be dead by the police . Even tho a cut scene leads you to the story i always skip them they spoil the games .

Poor voice acting will kill a game for me.

In GTA 3 you start out on an developed island that is part of a city, with a huge bridge, port, and an underground freeway tunnel linking it to the rest of the city, but none of them can be used to get off of the island, until and unless your character fulfills a certain mission for the crime boss, which is only offered after completing certain other missions. This can go one for days, weeks, or months of game time, with no apparent effect on the city. Once you have done that, you get to ride a small boat to the rest of the city, which can never be taken in other circumstances, but once you take it, both the bridge and the freeway tunnel are repaired in the same instant. Yep.

In games where you can eat, games often make it so your character must eat with silly frequency, or else collapse and die.

FPS games where the hero can carry eight types of large gun and vast supplies of ammo, grenades, and rockets, and also run constantly without getting tired, hop six feet in the air repeatedly (which is somehow a better thing to do than lying down and taking cover the way actual soldiers do), swim underwater, get shot multiple times without slowing down, etc.

Magic healing abilities and other power-ups that are sometimes lying around like all the spare weapons, ammo, which only the good guy can use.

Game worlds where enemies are just hanging around in one place waiting for the hero, so they can attack him on sight and fight to the death, or until he runs back out of their “aggro range”, and who never raise the alarm, gang up or search for the raiding heroes. No, they’re just there to make the game take time to complete, without posing any real risk, neatly arranged in order of escalating strength to pose slightly increasing resistance to the player character as he increases in strength.

Animals which, as they die, release a spring-loaded random item of hero-usable equipment, such as a sword, magic potion, suit of armor, or a stack of gold coins.

Getting tea-bagged on call of duty

One of my favorite games never really took me out of the “illusion”: Shadow of the Colossus.

Part of it was because the way the characters moved was realistic. Your character wasn’t a superhero; he stumbles when he jumps, he trips, he has to struggle to climb. He rides a horse that is realistically difficult to control and willful. The enemies are giant statue creatures that have an incredible weight to them. So, a combination of animation and gameplay controls.

Another factor was that the game world was devoid of superficial, pointless encounters. You don’t have to fight through 20 goblins on your way to a boss fight (all of which can be mindlessly dispatched). You don’t have to waste your time talking to robotic villagers. You just hold up your sword and beams of light point you where the next colossus is, and you ride there across a beautiful landscape. It’s an empty world, but the emptiness has an emotional resonance to it; all you have is yourself, your horse, and your dead girlfriend who you’re trying to bring back.

The game wasn’t “realistic.” It took place in a magical world. But this magical world seemed much more internally coherent, more “real,” than any other game I can think of.

@Qingu Glorious game. When you beat a boss on that game, you felt like you really accomplished something.

You also felt kind of guilty…

Yeah that game ended on a downer.

Having someone spawn in your face.

The HUD. If I’m on a battle field, I’m not going to be able to see how much ammo I have, exactly where my gun is pointing, how much “health” I have, etc. Thankfully some games let you take that off.

Being able to hold an infinite amount of guns/ammo. I don’t like it when my character can just magically pull out a rocket launcher from his back pocket.

Glitches in enemy AI. I can handle bad AI, I just pretend that they’re all stupid. But if I see a guy just running full steam directly into a wall for 30 minutes, it pretty much kills it.

Oh yeah a few more…

-the concept of having “end bosses” to beat
-Spawning/having someone spawn near you (as Jayne said above)
-load times
-jerky action movements that look like someone is using a GI Joe to do stop-motion animation
-power meters
-the ability to “slap” an enemy when you can’t find a weapon lying happenstance on the ground
-When the areas you’re fighting in feel likes Hollywood sets designed just for a hunting eachother down (see Halo series, Bond series, et al.)

Great answers. Hoping to see more. To contribute to my own question,

-Invincible. Scrawny. Trees.

Water being deadly in GTA3

choppy terrain rendering with movement
loading screens
player exploits (getting shot from under the world is fucked)
limited, predetermined character pathing (of players or npcs)
poorly preportioned character models
disregard for basic physics
any delay between user input and game actions

Lack of meaningful choice.

i actually don’t pay much attention to reality when i’m playing a game, i just have fun