11 Immersion Shattering Moments in Gaming

Immersion Shattering Moments

Sometimes video games have features that just don’t make any sense because of how easily they can be abused. Immersion is such a precarious feeling that it can be shattered with a simple text-to-speech feature. Sometimes, hilarity ensues at the cost of our own enjoyment. This is the nature of the internet + video games on the internet I suppose.

Video games can also remind us that they contain programming language that can pervert a process that almost always runs correctly – we often call these perversions glitches. Now, glitches can be hilarious, tragic, or downright maddening but the results are almost always worth telling people about.

However, so many of these moments are lost because it can be such a pain in the ass to record all moments of video gaming. In an effort to collect all these immersion shattering moments, I began a tumblr. Was it a good idea? Let’s find out.

Here is a collection of 10 of my favorite glitched, hacked, or trolling videos people sent me over the past couple years. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did! Send me more!

11. Morrowind

We could probably spend a few years talking about all the glitches in the Morrowind series. This particular glitch is sort of soul shattering and I have tried to give my computer apples when I restart my browser and forget I had this video up.

10. MLB 2K9

Baseball games, really any sports game, involves a lot of action-response to projectiles and this can sometimes go wrong…very wrong. With this level of immersion gone awry, I really wondered if this guy would ever play a baseball game again.

9. Saints Row

THQ is in trouble financially but we still have the memory of Saints Row from winter’s past. I think that most people have tried to forget about how insane Saint’s Row really was…except for this guy who was driven to making a song in honor of breaking the world.

8. Assassin's Creed III

A book floats when it shouldn’t, as its being held by an invisible Ben Franklin who apparently invented an invisibility potion.

7. Red Dead Redemption

Rockstar is something of a legend when it comes to glitches. That swingset in GTA IV where you could launch yourself across the game world was something amazing to behold. However, this glitch from Red Dead Redemption may take some sort of trophy to truly appreciate.

6. Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain allowed us to see an alternative for video games that didn’t involve SHAUUUUN war. In fact, there are a few SHAUUUN guns in this game but they don’t take center SHAUUUUUUN stage. When you get SHAUUUUN down to it, the fact that these sorts of SHAUUUUUN games even exist is somewhat amazing. SHAUUUUUN. Perhaps we should emulaSHAUUUUUNte these games more often.

5. Dragon Age

Alistair in Dragon Age was a pretty amazing character when you got down to the nitty gritty. His inability to just up and marry some woman for the good of the world is legendary. However, there is a little known legend about the nature of his neck. Have you heard the one about the inverse spin?

4. Battlefield 1942

Now let’s say that you really love Battlefield 1942. One day you decide to play on your favorite server. You’re really looking forward to it because you have the whole day off and the joy of piloting battleships, airplanes, jeeps, and shooting the other guys is something that really keeps you going. So, you sit down with a beverage, order a pizza, and log in only to find…this:

3. Oblivion

Can I do that one again? I think I said it too fast. Perhaps you could remember to cut that part out? Oblivion makes its way into our top 3 glitches…though this is more of a memory lapse. What did I call that file again?

2. Moonbase Alpha

Moonbase Alpha is a NASA funded program that tries to simulate what a mission on the moon would be like. It is incredibly detailed all the way down to an advanced text-to-speech filter that allows spacemen to discuss the finer points of the moon with each other. I think it probably took the internet less than a minute to realize how incredible this feature was.

1. Skate 3

So what do you get if you take a physics engine and mix it with skateboarding in a massive environment. Nothing can go wrong, right? Nothing at all. Skateboarding is the most immersive activity available in video gaming.