The Tricky Thing that is Immersion
Immersion has numerous definitions depending on the context in which it is placed. Commonly known as physically immersing someone or something in a liquid (“thou hath been immers’d in oil!”). The video games industry and other entertainment industries have used this term as an analogy for being lost in an activity, like reading or writing, or in our case playing video games. So, that’s it? We’ve figured out what it means, everybody pack up and go home? Well not exactly.
A Theory of Spacial Presence, by Wirth et al. is explained in Jamie Madigan’s explanation around immersion in games through a psychological lense on Gamasutra. ‘Presence’ is just another name for ‘immersion’ albeit from a psychological point of view, and psychologists have identified multiple kinds. It is largely accepted that spatial presence is the typical version of presence that applies to video games.
Wirth’s theory explained that spatial presence happened in three steps:
- * Players form a representation in their mind of the space or world with which the game is presenting them.
- * Players begin to favor the media-based space (I.e., the game world) as their point of reference for where they “are”.
- * Player becomes immersed in the game, sacrificing spatial awareness for their investiment into the game’s world.
The magic circle of the game becomes pervasive through various cues (sound, visual, movements, etc) and player assumptions about the game they’ve begun to play through. I’ve defined this as the (core player fantasy). When you play an adventuring game, you expect adventure. When you play a first person shooter, you expect using guns. So on and so forth.
Gordon Calleja identifies two types of immersion in his book “In-Game”: immersion through absorption and immersion through transportation. The former (absorption) is identified a the commonmost form of immersion in the video games industry, and the one Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman pointed out as ‘the immersive fallacy’ in 2003.
At the time, more performant software/hardware allowed developers to pursue photorealistic audio and graphics, which spearheaded an obsession for pushing towards such realism in games. As a counter argument to this sudden movement, Salen and Zimmerman point out that anybody can be immersed in anything without necessarily it having to be as close to realism as possible. For instance, anybody can be immersed in Tetris, which is in no way as close to realism as possible. Instead they advocated for more engaging gameplay mechanics instead.
Calleja proposes another type of immersion, which is amade available through the evolution of “virtual environements within both the humanities and presence theory.” Essentially, video games may “absorb” our attention through a specific task, but many nowadays “transport” us to a fictional game world instead.
“A player who assimilates this game world into their gameplay as a metaphorically habitable environment can be thought of as being transported to that world. This experience is made possible by the anchoring of the player to a specific location in the game world via their avatar, which the game world and its inhabitants, including other players, react to.”
G. Calleja, In-Game pg 27, 2011
Basically, game worlds that do a good job at transporting their player into their fictional reality will see said players immersed into the game. But how is this done? Lazaros Michailidis, Emili Balaguer-Ballester, and Xun He in their examination of immersion, Flow and Immersion in Video games, associate immersion with the Flow state theory, claiming certain criteriae ought to be met to reach it:
- merging of action and awareness;
- clear goals;
- immediate and unambiguous feedback;
- concentration on the task;
- perceived control over the activity;
- loss of self-reflection;
- distorted perception of time;
- intrinsic motivation toward an activity
This however, is closer to immersion through absorbption than transportation. What Jamie Madigan puts forward is far more in line with what we’re attempting to define. Madigan explains there ought to be a certain richness in the feedback and information:
- Multiple channels of sensory information (sight, hearing, detail, movement, etc);
- Completeness of sensory information (the less the player has to fill up the better), i.e: Assassin’s Creed where city streets are full of people going about their daily lives;
- Cognitively demanding environments (requires focus from the players which will emphasise their mental faculties and allocate brain power to navigating the world);
- A strong and interesting narrative, plot, or story (books are capable of immersing their readers with text alone, a strong story or plot will immerse the player regardless of medium);
There are immersion breaking moments that would ruin the facsimile of player immersion: uncalled for tonal shifts in the narrative, difference in setting such as ur sci-fi elements in a heroic fantasy world, repeated reminders that the player is in a game, such as achievement pop ups, tutorial pop ups, etc.
Sources:
Flow and Immersion in Video Games: Frontiers | Flow and Immersion in Video Games: The Aftermath of a Conceptual Challenge | Psychology (frontiersin.org)
Analysis: The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games: Gamasutra – Analysis: The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games
Gordon Calleja, “In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation”. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.