Immersion.

There is no real comparison between the streets of Night City and Midtown Detroit’s 2^nd street at night. There is no real comparison because the latter was built up over time by renters and students and the former was designed by a team in Poland (the urban environment which makes up the entirety of the game world in Cyberpunk 2077). There is no real comparison, in my mind, between the aesthetic experience of walking through either of the places either. I find myself often recognized when I’m out and about for my patch-covered jacket, and a pair of faux-leather heeled boots with buckled straps that make a distinctive jingle and click sound every step. I take my commute between Wayne State’s campus and my apartment with my earbuds in as leisurely a pace as I can. Often that is not a very leisurely pace.

            In Night City, on the other hand, I have as much time as I need to get anywhere that I want, the tasks the characters within the world ask of me do not have any practical urgency no matter how urgently the request is voiced. And yet—and yet! —with how much free time I have in that environment I find myself rarely walking anywhere. This is not the game’s fault for not allowing walking (it does), I could even take a slow and scenic ride on the metro public transit system high over the bustling liquid crystal streets if I wanted and really soak in the experience of moving around a futuristic dystopian metropolis. Instead, I find that I am compelled to get to each location and complete each objective as fast as possible, which usually means eschewing the in-game vehicles in favor of a combination of dashing and jumping and double-dashing, which outpaces road-bound transport. It’s fast enough (and glitchy enough) parkouring in such a way around the city that there is no time to luxuriate in the lighting effects and aestheticized urban decay facilitated by my maxed-out graphics settings. I love listening to the in-game radio though.

            The in-game radio stations go a long way towards creating the immersive experience and the world building of Cyberpunk. There are 14 in total, many of these having news breaks covering events in the city, and even station tags that play every so often between songs. Each station has its own curated list of music to fit whatever tone the player wants to accompany their experience as a mercenary exploring Night City, the playlists are short, no more than an hour or so each in total length. You tune in to 88.3 Pacific Dreams for the lyric-less, ambient electronic background track, or 92.9 Night FM, for Jazz, mostly Miles Davis  whose lonesome trumpet gives everything a noir film tinge. Multiple stations cover subgenres of punk, which makes sense since that is the genre promised by the game’s title. According to IGN the most popular station is 98.7 Body Heat, which offers a sort of punk-tinged semi-hyperpop blend. In Detroit, 98.7 is an alt rock station that never appealed to me. Alternative rock never really felt like an alternative to anything, playing the same popular rock stylings as other stations, only through newer bands instead of the classics from the 70’s and 80’s.

My family’s lived in Detroit as long as I can remember, and at the earliest at the Detroit Yacht Club. The soundtrack to life at the DYC was—and this should not be very surprising—Jimmy Buffett. My parents were big fans of his, and I wonder how much that influences where we lived in the first place. My mother, a former news station production assistant, wanted to homeschool my brother and I, often describing herself as a hippie born too late. My dad worked as a videographer and editor, often travelling to cover the baseball world series and participated in local film festivals around Detroit. I remember Jimmy Buffett playing around the boat frequently, but when I try to remember how we listened to it I’m not entirely sure. My parents were often early adopters of the new media technology coming out in the early 200os, and I recall having my own iTunes account around then, and buying the Ben 10 TV show theme song and listening to it non-stop with my brother, Isaac, which I’m sure delighted our parents from the first time we played it all the way to the eventual end of that obsession a month or two later. Isaac and I, for most of our time at the yacht club, shared many of the same interests and social circles, though where he was short and straight-haired I was tall and curly-haired, leading us to often be seen as opposites. Being homeschooled allowed us flights of fancy spent on a singlular interest for weeks. Some of the other kids who hung out at the yacht club one summer triggered one of these when they introduced us to Magic: The Gathering, a card game that we played together well into our high school age.

            When I was around seven or so I got a laptop from my parents so that we could begin schoolwork like the Rosetta Stone program to learn Spanish and Khan Academy to learn other subjects. At the same time, though, entering into my social circle were websites far more interesting than Sal Khan lecturing dryly about mathematical concepts while doodling in hard-to-see Microsoft Paint colors, sites like Club Penguin and World of Warcraft. Otherwise, 2007 was a pretty normal summer, averaging around 75°f, which was especially warm on the boat we lived on that had no AC. As I remember, it was a 40-foot long (or so) power boat my parents had bought off some friends for a couple of thousand dollars. The engine was busted, my mother had to rebuild some of the fiberglass, and the piloting mechanisms were delicate enough to only get used thrice a year: once for the annual fleet display where everyone circled Belle Isle for the day, and once to move from the summer slip to the winter slip and back again. Rather than go out into the warm air, I wanted to sit on my upper bunk with the sun coming in windows that were squeezed between the deck of the boat and the ceiling of my room and make the most use of the 10 days of free trial I had on World of Warcraft before I had to make up a new email and start back over from scratch. I wanted to see as much as I could, even though I could barely get half-way to the level 20 maximum that free trials had (while the actual maximum for paying players being 60 at the time).

            I loved the ambience of the starting area for the Night Elves, the sort of dreamy floaty harp-based score with unintelligible vocalizations that really felt like Fantasy to me as a kid. The palates were deep emerald greens and royal purples and burnt autumnal reds. Moats of blue light would float in and out of existence as I practiced fighting imps with nature magic. When I got free of the tutorial zone, though, I would enter into the rest of the world: a massive dark forest in the hollow of an even more massive tree stump called Teldrassil, the kind of scale that made my inexperience in the game feel insurmountable. I often died fighting the animals and Firbolgs (bipedal bear-like creatures) that were the targets of the earliest quests.

            When a player-character dies in World of Warcraft they turn into a ghost and must return to the scene of their death to revive without a penalty, a penalty I remember being an untenable waste of my precious 10-day free trial time, though the details of it escape me n0w. According to my WoW manual I’ve kept around since then, the penalty was a reduction in stats, making it more likely that the character would just end up dead sooner somewhere else. Importantly, however, the journey back to one’s body was always done manually. As a Night Elf, the ghost form is represented as a floating orb that moves faster than the ghost of other characters, and it was one of the easiest ways to explore the world without being hindered by enemies and combat. Sure, it was also shrouded by a blue-grey filter as a way of invoking a kind of “spirit world,” similar to the depiction of the invisible world in the Lord of the Rings films, but at the very least it was less dangerous. It gave me a chance to actually explore the hills of the hollow stump, since my lack of skill meant death was frequent when encountering enemies in the world.

            Back in 2020, with little else to do and the release of World of Warcraft Classic the year before, I found myself drawn to that world again to play the game without any of the updates which changed the game from how I had been playing it when I was a kid. I played Classic for about two weeks before cancelling my subscription, it didn’t have the same magic as it once did. Maybe it was just that hyperfocus unique to kids, whose imagination likes to fill in the gaps between pixels on the screen. Maybe it was that I looked back on those early days of WoW with rose-tinted glasses. Really, I think it was that even after repainting my bedroom when I moved back from college dorms, putting a couch in the bedroom, and lowering my loft bed, the game was no longer the same escape that it had been in my boat’s bunk bed.

            What makes an aesthetic experience special? Often—at least to me— it comes down to the space that I experienced it in. When I think of my fondest memories in those game worlds and on those servers, I think about warm summers as a kid and being cramped up in a bunk bed that was smaller than a twin where I would be able to play on my laptop. We left the boat when the repairs and docking fees grew too expensive a couple of years later, moving from downtown Detroit up to the suburbs of Saint Clair Shores, since my parents wanted to stay near the water. I think of, later on, playing in my parents’ house after we moved, and feeling embarrassed about the characters I would make (they were often girls, and I would argue that the developers had made the men all hunched and ugly, only partially truthfully) when my parents would come into my room to talk with me. It was an interesting way to reach out into a wider world at a time when I only knew about 10 other kids around my age that my mother would take my brother and me to visit. Maybe I’m just anti-nostalgic but returning to World of Warcraft after a decade or so of not playing it was more a realization of how much my context as a homeschooled kid with too much free time and too few social engagements shaped my enjoyment. To give a more recent  example, the energy-oozing Eurobeat French music playlist I made in my first summer of college to help me in my introductory French class has since been listened to only occasionally, since I am no longer in the right aesthetic context: hot weather, the insides of unfamiliar apartments, fresh samosas on cement benches covered by dead trees, parking as far away from my class building as I could; French pop music.

            I think it’s this aesthetic immersion (as slippery as that term “immersion” can be) that draws me to video games and makes them difficult to replay or return to with the same investment as I once had in them. “Immersion” is a wet metaphor, to add to its slipperiness, and refers to being completely surrounded by the aesthetic object. This magical state of being swallowed up by an experience like reading a book or watching a movie, surrounded on all sides with no way out but to break the spell entirely, seems to get thrown around casually pretty often. Mark J. P. Wolf speaks of three stages of immersion and his second stage, “saturation,” is what I like to think of when I think of immersion in aesthetic experiences. To be saturated, one must devote full attention, concentration, and imagination to the experience, and by being saturated by the aesthetic we are unable to hold all relevant details in our minds simultaneously. It’s this inability to hold the entire deluge of aesthesis that, to me, makes the magic work. There is joy in exploring the parts of the experience not being held in one’s head, a joy dependent on the aligning of the context with the moment of experience.

R.G. Collingwood has been a favorite philosopher of mine since I read him in my philosophy of art class. He wrote at the tail end of the 1930s and I found him immediately interesting as he suggested art and magic are inseparable concepts, since all magical practices contain some form of art in their execution. He seemed at once ahead of his time in including so much under the umbrella of art yet still steeped in late modern mysticism. Despite the very blank and formal portrait on his official Wikipedia entry, he saw art as predominantly expressions of emotion. In this way, “magic,” or superstition, or folk traditions, or whatever you want to call them, are art in so far as their purpose is the expression of emotion. I always think of tarot cards and telling the future—the emotion expressed in the act is that of calm.

I think back to moments of immersion that couldn’t be held in my head all at once, and several come to mind. Listening to Lana Del Ray’s album Ultraviolence while lying in bed, limbs entangled, with a boy who shivered when I drew fingernail circles on his back. Also, Portal 2 which—when I was not playing it with friends or to impress a girl who I saw as more cultured than I was—lost a lot of its immersing power. Sure, the repetition of puzzles whose solutions I have memorized almost in their entirety after several hundred hours (steam says 716, but this is not entirely accurate) of play time can be a relaxing return to form but does not have the same appeal as it once did. I went through a phase of this during my last year as an undergraduate, when I found myself in a history of ethics class as well as a medieval culture class while working at the university bookstore. I could not bring myself to read or play anything but sci-fi. I picked up growly and aggressive industrial music and Neuromancer by William Gibson to enjoy while on break between shifts at Barnes and Noble. Dark Souls 3 was the only game that I wanted to play in April of 2022. In  May of 2022 it was Cyberpunk 2077. I was completely burnt out on history. I ended up finishing final papers while listening to a song called “Antagonistic” by Pacific Avenue off the Cyberpunk soundtrack – wet pavement, rusting black metal, and passing expressway lights over the glossy roof of an impossibly sleek car.  

            It’s raining today, as I write this. The kind of cloudy, slightly windy wet weather that encourages hiding under the blankets with a movie on, something whimsigoth like The Corpse Bride, Coraline, or The Craft. The blankets should be quilted, the tea tray should have baroque ornamentation, piled with crosscut sandwiches, accompanied by chrysanthemum-goji tea. I imagine this person, this version of me, is dressed in a handmade shawl that’s 200 years old and has a friendly stoop in their posture, yet is able to stand up straight and tall like one of Tim Burton’s towering waifs.

            Or maybe the right experience is a heated blanket draped over the shoulders while sitting at the desk. Fairy lights overhead and lighting dim. Headphones on to stay warm as well as listen to the ambience and music of Cyberpunk 2077. Driving a motorcycle down the streets of Central Night City while lights reflect off wet pavement from billboards, ads, and streetlights. A person whose attention is fully engrossed, and who does not skip any of the dialogue when it starts to bore them.

            Or maybe the mood is best suited by wearing a beanie and a flannel, putting on a vinyl copy of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel and playing Life is Strange on the PlayStation. A craft beer on the coffee table and the smell of old cigarettes coming in through the open window with the wet concrete breeze. The kind of thing that someone who attends live concerts of bands no one has heard of might do.

            Or maybe, it’s none of those things. I’m reminded of Amanda Palmer’s In My Mind, since it was featured on the Life is Strange soundtrack but is completely optional to listen to.  The third verse always stands out, after two others that cover aspirational futures for the narrator: “it's funny how I imagined / That I could be that person now / But that's not what I want / If that's what I wanted / Then I'd be giving up somehow / How strange to see / That I don't wanna be the person that I want to be.” As much as these aesthetics sound lovely in the damp and overcast climate, as much as I would love to go walking and have the same impact listening to Antagonistic from the Cyberpunk soundtrack as I did when I heard it for the first time riding through rainy digital streets, that magical context where my attention could be fully devoted to the experience cannot be returned to, only approximated.