Link to the Video:
Immersion: The Video

IN THE BEGINNING:

“The Nintendo Entertainment System was released in North America during 1985. The NES has sold 61.91 million consoles, and has a game library that contains more than 900 games. The system was many peoples first immersion into a digital game space.”

This is the text that my piece “Immersion” begins with.

In 1985 the Nintendo Company released the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America. This was a brave move considering the crash of the video game market in North America in 1983. The Nintendo Entertainment System changed the gaming world as we know it. It restored the game market, and made gamers out of millions of people, myself included.

I received my first NES in 1989, and it changed who I was as a person. No longer was I just a kid, I had been transformed into a gamer.  This one piece of hardware shaped my life, as it did countless other people.

This piece is a return to my first game space, a return to the cave that shaped and transformed me into the gamer that I am today. This piece is about immersion into that game space, or a re-immersion. I wanted to explore every game that my first game space had to offer, and create a video documenting this exploration.

IMMERSION:

Using emulation technology, I began my quest and started screen capping the start screens of all the games that the NES had to offer. My task was at hand, to play every NES game, if even for only 5 seconds. My descent into the cave of the NES game space was no easy task. The system has a game catalog of over 900 games, and many more unofficial games (which I at least played but did not include in the piece). While re-exploring this forgotten cave, I remembered why I fell in love with games in the first place, and that was immersion, becoming absorbed into a game space that totally and completely captivated me. This is what I was seeking, and it was what I found. Any other idea for the project became meaningless. I wanted this immersion. I needed it.

I was not alone. 61 million NES consoles have been sold. I was not the only person to be immersed in this system. Millions of other people had also been immersed. So what started as a selfish journey, a journey that I alone wanted to take, (I did this project because I wanted to play every NES game) become a shared experience. An immersion that was not undertaken alone. While no one may have been in the cave while I was there, remnants of others still existed. If this cave had been forgotten about, why does this emulation software exist? Why do old games sell so well on the stores of new game consoles?

CULTURE TO THE MASSES:

With this piece I hope to depict the immersion that I felt as a gamer on this system, and perhaps help non-gamers explore the history of millions of gamer’s immersion. By using images of the start screen of every NES game, I depict the vast amount of game spaces that this system had to offer. Not only does this piece contain games that I personally played, but it contains games that millions of people around the world experienced. By using these images I create a global understanding between the games and the gamers, and I have created a history that non-gamers can easily relate and understand. If you had never played an NES console before you can easily see the vast amount of games that this system had to offer. The start screen of the games has been chosen in that both gamer and non-gamer alike can easily see the game spaces for the NES. While gamers might me more apt to try and guess the game from an image of gameplay, this excludes the non-gamer, who might lose interest and get bored with seeing random images of gameplay. With the start screen, the information about each game is easily decipherable.

The text that appears before the title screen to the piece is a very brief history of the NES console. While one could get into more depth about the history, a brief explanation of the history to explain why the NES was chosen, and to display this information is important to the piece. I wanted to include this information to show that 61 million consoles were sold, making the information about the game seem more relevant, and showing the scale of households that the system reached. I needed to show that I was not alone. This system has touched the lives of more people than me. Maybe you the reader have been influenced by this system as well.

IMMERSION: THE GAME (aka the title screen)

Descending into the cave and retrieving information (the screen caps) about each game is the bulk of the concept for the piece. But the actual information is meaningless, if it is not presented in a way that it is both understood conceptually and understood as the data that it actually is. To push my concept that this piece is both documentation of the game spaces of the NES, a global history of millions of gamers, and a documentation of a journey through these games, I decided to create an NES game cartridge detailing the concept of the piece as well as serve as a title screen for the piece itself. Using McKenzie Wark’s idea of game spaces being like Plato’s cave, I used the image of a cave on the cartridge to further the concept that I myself would be descending into the cave, or game space, of the NES. On the cartridge the name of the ‘game’ is Immersion. This serves as a conceptually nudge, as well as the title for the piece itself. Using animation I insert the game into a NES console, and then the data that I collected from each game proceeds until completion.

SONIC: (not the hedgehog that was on Sega)

Sonically this piece uses the theme from the adventure of link. I wanted to use sounds from the actual game, and ended up using this theme. It is not as iconic as the Super Mario theme, or the original Legend of Zelda theme, but still had meaning to me as a gamer. During the animation segments, I used sounds to help further the narrative that I was establishing.