You’re right: I certainly didn’t mean to say that 3D graphics are worthless but, rather, that they aren’t the all around win that is sometimes assumed. To my mind, the way to the future isn’t so much about going higher and higher fidelity visually but rather developing a deep understanding of what representations work best in specific situations. Sometimes restraint is rewarded.

surya: Indeed! I just simplified for those who aren’t South Park fans. The fact that it’s Stan’s dad does add something, though, doesn’t it? :-)

What makes NetHack immersive for me, though, is not the graphical style so much as the control mechanism. You touch on that in your handing-over-the-sword example; suspension of disbelief isn’t broken over bad visuals, it’s broken when the player doesn’t know how to do something that they know they should be able to do, and has to sit back and think in terms of their keyboard/controller/wiimote/whatever rather than within the game universe.

For me, if all the various things you can accomplish within the game are easily at hand, without having to think about it too much, then immersion just happens. For example, the huge command list of NetHack is unwieldy, but once I had some experience under my belt, I started thinking “break the wand” rather than “extended #apply”.

Another example that you mentioned is Infocom games. In those, and other IF, the highly reduced subset of English you use for commands is totally unconvincing as narration goes (“examine bed; examine desk; examine drawer; examine pencil; etc etc etc”) but make sense once the player gets a feel for how text adventures are organized.

So, I totally agree with what (it seems like to me) you’re saying: once the actual interaction with the game world feels natural, then immersion happens, whether you’ve got pretty 3d graphics or ASCII art. Not that pretty 3d graphics are unappreciated, but photorealism just isn’t measured on the same scale as world realism.