A few days ago I was thinking about games like first/third person shooters, race etc and I found out that what makes those kinds of games good and attractive (at least for me) is the 'energy' they show, the way they transmit impacts to the player.
Immersing the player in the game is actually transmitting 'energy' (or impact) to them. And to transmit this feeling of energy you have to show the energy. Like, you can't make the player to actually feel an explosion's impact. So you have to show the impact to them.
You have to transmit lots of energy to the player in games like FPS and races. It's not about showing the energy being created (e.g. showing a big impressive explosion). It's all about showing where the energy went to so the player can see that there is energy. Like, the energy of an explosion goes to the objects around it (throwing them away, breaking them etc). Turning energy into movement is a very good way to show energy. The energy of a car's collision goes to the car itself. In this case, part of the energy is turned into movement (pieces of the car fly in all directions) and the rest is turned into destruction (the car gets all crooked). That shows the player how much energy the explosion/collision created. That's what transmits the impact.
Well, all of this may seem kinda obvious but I wrote that because it was one of those things that I always knew but didn't know exactly how to define it. It's one of those things you know because you saw it so many times but you don't really understand them, you don't really know why they are like that. It's one of those things that you can do because you learned how to do it, but once you understand the base, the core or the structure you can do it in new ways.
The concept I'm trying to explain here is basically this: if you want someone to feel the impact of something they cannot feel, you show them the effects of the impact so they will know how strong the impact was.
By using this concept I think it's easy to make an immersive game. All you gotta do is show the player what to feel by using objets, characters or whatever.
