One of the things video games are particularly good at as an entire medium is allowing you to immerse yourself inโฆ things.
Exactly what youโre able to immerse yourself in depends entirely on the game โ inย Microsoft Flight Simulator you can immerse yourself in a realistic depiction of what it is like to fly a real aircraft, for example, while inย Xenoblade Chroniclesย you can immerse yourself in a well-realized fantasy world.
One interesting possibility that this immersiveness allows for is the ability to โliveโ in another culture. For Westerners, itโs particularly intriguing to be able to immerse oneself into Japanese culture, for example, which is in many ways rather alien to the societal norms we see in America and Europe. Of course, said societal norms vary even between America and Europe, but not quite so drastically as the divergence in culture between โEastโ and โWest.โ
This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2012 as part of the siteโs regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.
Continue reading From the Archives: Culture Shock →