Counting barrels in Quake 4: affordances and homodiegetic structures in FPS worlds

Since the release of Half Life (1998), first-person perspective games can be seen to drive towards an unbroken immersive experience, with fewer breaks from real-time delivery. Simultaneously, a move towards ever greater complexity and depth of game content can be seen, although the basic ludic structure of the genre has remained relatively unchanged. A discontinuity is thus established which places pressure upon the homodiegetic devices used to deliver an immersive experience. In this paper, the concept of affordances is used to illustrate the essential ludic structure of first person gaming, and ludodiegesis, a concept used to understand homodiegetic devices as means of managing immersion, is introduced to offer examples of how this discontinuity can be effectively managed.