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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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One of the starkest examples of distinction between these two types of fictional world I can think of is the difference between Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II. DA:O built an interesting and complex fantasy world. In DA2 it seemed to be reduced to a stage on which the player character plays with moral puzzles. But I guess the existance of those Inserters is why DA2 was still well received by the gaming press and on gaming forums, reddit, etc... They just didn't feel or cared about how much poorer the worldbuilding felt.

From the writers' perspective, I would expect professionals who write genre fiction (even if it's "just" writing for videogames) to be mostly in the Immersers camp. Almost all great enduring literary classics in fantasy and sci-fi are more works of worldbuilding than character studies. I don't know if the current state of affairs in videogames is deliberately pandering to Inserters over Immersers or the result of a misunderstanding of what made a hit game. Maybe it's game director/designer interference? Make a world interesting and give the player some ability to influence it and some tough decisions along the way. Then player feedback is that people particularly remembered the hard moral decisions, and so the next installements are nothing but hard moral decisions. It's like a director that has one or two popular "twist" movies and then veers into doing just that.

Now that I think about it, it seems like it's a thing Bioware pretty much always ends up doing with their franchises if given enough time.