It turned out the statement was to be taken as an exclamation of ridiculousness of the situation at hand. Apparently the only clue to that was that “her” was italicized. And yet I could still interpret the statement many ways depending on how it was said. Unfortunately, the main character has no voice acting.

Nuances of diction get lost on the text-driven dialogue system. I’ve heard a suggestion before of a dialogue system that does away with having the player choose specific lines, but direct the flow of the conversation by choosing how he wants his character to react: sad, angry, etc. or how he wants the character to direct the topic of conversation in broad choices: cautious, affirmative, interrogative, etc.

So my conclusion is that the actual immersion is strongly connected to the designers’ competition for players’ attention. The greater amount of interesting, easily accessible stuff the player is exposed to, the more difficult will it be for him to get immersed in any single one of them.

I once played an RPG where an NPC literally said: “How r u, player?”