It is interesting to me how the Diary of a Computer feels so natural. In the Diary of a Computer, I jump up and down and rush across the battlefield with the camera, and see from the perspective of the player. My sight is very limited (it is a 2560 * 1600 screen and a Youtube page, after all) and yet I never doubted that there is an ongoing battle on the other side. I did not find soldiers running on and off the screen strange at all, and I did not freak out when I see RPGs fired from someplace I could not see on screen. It is funny how I subconsciously made my assumptions on the time and space in the virtual world and applied the real-world rules to the game world without realizing it.
(pic of RPG coming from nowhere)
The same happens in Her Story, where the game did the cunning move to place the time stamp on the screen. The timestamps are so realistic with the exact date and month. Hannah’s changing hair, attitude, mental status and familiarity with the interrogator are just screaming “it is real” to me. I, again, was tricked into thinking the game world shared the same rules with ours. I was convinced Hannah had a life, and went through an interrogation process that lasted through months. To be honest, I tend to think “her story” really happened in real life when I was playing the game.
In both works, I am convinced that there is a bigger world beyond what is shown on screen. As an audience, I did not think of a pile of code running or a filming studio and a written script. As a student seeing Diary of a Computer and Her Story in a row, I see a trend of make-believe of the completeness of the virtual world.
In early games like Space Invader and Pac Man, we have games run on simple rules and a simple constructed space. The whole game space is the screen size. While in Diary of Computer, we see the shooting game implying on a larger space —— the whole battlefield is full of randomness and momentum. Moreover, in Her Story, we see a “real person”, implying a whole background of “real life”. It is a trend of making the virtual world more and more realistic, and the ARGs just took a step further into borrowing the full setting from the real world. It is exciting to find the realistic perspectives in these games and to expect them to build more on the preset setting in the real world —— it is borrowed from life, but made it a little better.
I think the point you brought up that there is more to the worlds than just what we see when we play is really interesting. It's a little like the fallen tree in a forest argument too. It may seem like it's there, but do we really know? Is there a way we can know? It's funny that you bring this up now, too, when we're in the midst of our final projects. There's so much we the creators are thinking about and that feeling may come up to future players, but if we can't find a way to put the information in the game, can the player ever really know it?