Looking Glass Studios was a video game studio that was founded in 1992 and closed in the 2000s but left an immense influence on the medium. In his years of life, video games and sagas of great relevance would be born, and great personalities from the video game world would make their careers. A large part of the study was made up of students from MIT, where the book Hackers (Steven Levy, 1984) and its ethics permeated the study. They did not crave money so much, but the desire to do incredible things[3,1].
One of the great contributions to the medium, apart from its excellent developers, was the birth of the Immersive Sims genre, sagas like Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief were the first to contribute and lay the foundations of the genre so that, later, others studies, which were born from former members of the study, would contribute and enrich the genre with games such as Deux Ex, Bioshock, and all Arkane video games.
According to Warren Spector, one of the great developers of the genre, he was looking for the freedom and immersion that role-playing games gave, being absorbed in a fictional world and that you could do everything you want, depending on the role of your character[2,1]. That philosophy will be transferred in the games he has worked on, giving them that freedom so that the player can solve problems the way they want, being in an interactive world that responds to stimuli.
From that we could also add that the way to see these games is in the first person, which is the most personal way there is to live that immersive experience, as there is no way to see a game that is categorized as "Walking Simulator" that not be in the first person, because it needs that implication, but then there are games like modern Fallout, which can be categorized as an Immersive Sim because they meet certain characteristics, but they have the function of switching between first and third person. It is clear that all the big and important titles have been in the first person, but there can always be debate about whether it is strictly necessary, although in my opinion, it is essential.
In a post-mortem interview on Deus Ex, Spector elaborates a little more on what this term means, explaining that an Immersive Sim has to make you feel like you're not in a video game, that there's nothing that can take you out of that experience and that you don't you realize that you are playing a game, and if there are elements of the medium that could take you out of the experience, be diegetic with its world. It's all about how you interact with a relatively complex environment in ways that you find interesting (rather than in ways the developers think are interesting), and in ways that move you closer to accomplishing your goals (not the developers' goals). If the player is given all the tools to interact, he will have to deal with the consequences of his actions, the game has to be an expression of the player[6].
It is also said that these types of games have emergent gameplay, by having so many systems in operation, they can interact with each other without having to be thought of at the time of their creation, in this way the player can make decisions that make that their experience playing that video game is different from that of another player, and that they are rewarded for using a connection that was not intended from the beginning [7].
With all this, we will try to repair the history of the study and for the games that would mark the first era of the Immersive Sims, and with the most important ones, we will try to go deeper into the reason for its weight in another section.