Our Inside XR Design series looks at specific examples of great XR design. Today we are watching the game Synapse and exploring the concept of embodiment and what makes it relevant to VR gaming.
Editor’s note: Now that we’ve restarted our Inside XR Design series, we’re republishing them for those who missed our older entries.
You can find the full video below or continue reading for a text-adapted version.
Defining embodiment
Welcome back to another episode of Inside XR Design. Today I will talk about Synapse (2023), a PSVR 2 exclusive game from developer nDreams. But specifically we’re going to look at the game through the lens of a concept called embodiment.
So what the hell is the incarnation and why am I bothering you talking about it instead of just talking about the shooting, explosions and clever game design? Well, it will help us understand why certain design decisions in Synapse they are so effective. So stay with me here for just a minute.
Embodying is a term I use to describe the feeling of being physically present within a VR experience. Like you Actually standing there in the world that is around you.
And now YOUR The reasonable response is, “but don’t we already use the word immersion for that?”
Well in conversation, people certainly do, but I want to make an important distinction between ‘immersion’ and ’embodiment’.
‘Immersion’, for the purposes of our discussion, is when something is complete attention. We all agree that a movie can be immersive, right? When the story or the action is so compelling, it’s almost as if nothing outside the theater exists at that moment. But even the most immersive movie you’ve ever seen has made you think you are PHYSICAL inside the movie? Of course not.
And that’s where ’embodiment’ comes in. For the sake of specificity, I’m defining dive as a circle attention. On the other hand, embodiment is about your sense of physical presence and how it relates to the world around you.
So I think it’s important to acknowledge that all VR games take immersion for free. By literally taking your vision and hearing, for the most part they automatically have your undivided attention. You’re immersed in the second you put on a headset.
But some VR games manage to push us a step further. They not only have our attention, but make us feel like our whole body has been transported into the virtual world. Just like you would feel things in the game if you reached out and touched them.
OK then immersion is attention AND embodiment is the feeling of actually being there.
And to be clear, embodiment is not a binary thing. It’s a spectrum. Some VR games are a little immersive, while others are very immersive. But what makes the difference?
This is exactly what we will talk about Synapse.
Cover You Can Feel
At first glance, Synapse it might look like a fairly ordinary VR shooter, but there are some really deliberate design decisions that bring a strong sense of embodiment. The first thing I want to talk about is the cover system.
Any VR shooter there is cover. You can walk behind a wall and it will block shots for you. But beyond that, the wall is not physically connected to your actual body, because you never actively engage with it. It’s just a stationary object.
But Synapse makes walls and other covers interactive by letting you grab it with your hand and drag the body in and out of cover. This feels really natural and works great for the game.
And because you’re physically moving in relation to the wall—rather than just tapping back and forth with a finger—the wall starts to feel more real. Specifically, it feels more real because when you grab the wall and use it as an anchor from which to move, it’s unconsciously becoming part of your proprioceptive model.
Understanding proprioception
Let’s take a second here to explain proprioception because it’s a term that comes up a lot when we talk about tricking our bodies into thinking we’re somewhere else.
The clearest example I’ve ever seen of proprioception in action is this clip. And listen, I never thought I’d show you a cat clip in this series, but here we are. Watch closely as the cat approaches the table… without really thinking about it, it effortlessly moves its ear out of the way just in time.
This is proprioception at work. It is your body’s model of where it is in relation to the things around you. In order for the cat to know exactly when and where to move its ear to avoid the table without ever seeing it, it must have an innate understanding of the space its ear occupies and how that relates to the space occupied by the table .
In the case of the coverage system in Synapseyou intuitively understand that ‘when I grab this wall and move my hand to the right, my body will move to the left’.
So instead of just being a “thing you see”, the walls become something more than that. They become relevant to you in a more meaningful way because you can directly engage with them to influence your body position. By doing so, your mind begins to pay more attention to where the walls are in relation to your body. They start to feel more real. And as a result, your body starts to feel more present in the simulation… you feel more ’embodied’.
Mags Out
And the walls in Synapse can actually be used for more than just cover. You can also use them to load magazines into your gun.
Stepping away from the embodiment for just a second – this is such a beautiful design detail. In Inside XR Design #4 I spent a long time talking about the realistic weapon model Half-Life: Alyx (2020). But Synapse is a run-and-gun game, so the developers took a completely different approach and landed on a reload system that’s fast-paced, but still engaging.
Instead of making players mess with the inventory and the room, the magazines in this game just pop out and float out there. To reload, simply slide them back into the gun. It may seem silly, but it works in the sci-fi context of the game and reduces the complexity of reloading while maintaining much of the fun and flow of the game that comes with it.
And now we can see how this pairs up like that beautifully with the cover game cover system.
The game’s cover system takes one of your hands to operate. So how can you recharge? Pushing your magazine against the wall to reload your gun is the perfect solution to allow players to use both systems at the same time.
But guess what? This is not only a really clever design, it’s another way you can engage with the wall – as if it’s actually there in front of you. you must know if your arm is close enough to the wall if you’re going to use it to reload. So again, your brain begins to incorporate the walls and their proximity into your proprioceptive model. You start to really feel the space between the body and the wall.
So both of those things – being able to use walls to pull yourself in and out of cover and being able to use walls to get a magazine into the gun – make walls feel more real because you interact with them closely and meaningfully.
And here’s the thing. When the world around you starts to feel more real, you start to feel more confident that you are Actually standing inside it. This is embodiment. And let’s remember: virtual worlds are always ‘immersive’ because they necessarily have our full attention. But embodiment goes beyond what we see—it’s about what we are smelt.
And when it comes to reaching out and touching the world… Synapse takes things to a whole new level with its incredible telekinesis system.
Continue to page 2: Expand your reach »
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