[-empyre-] Immersion

[Gordon Calleja]

Hi all and thanks to Patrick for inviting me to join the discussion here.
I have been researching and writing about games within Game Studies for
over a decade now, so the perspectives I offer here will be marinated in
ludic sauce.  The bulk of my game research has tackled the experiential
side of games.  I have been particularly interested in analyzing the nature
of player experience and have aimed to contribute both a more nuanced
understanding and talking about player experience as well as offering an
alternative way of thinking about the fuzzy concept of immersion.



Immersion is problematic because it tends to roll all forms of involvement
with interactive media, especially forms of virtual environments, into one
type of experience, at times plotted on a continuum of intensity but seldom
acknowledging the variety of experiential forms that come into play when
dealing with complex media artefacts such as games.  So immersion is used
to signify general absorption with a game or virtual environment, as well
as the sense of being in the simulated environment, at times referred to as
“presence”.



The second problem arises when we consider the latter experiential form:
the sense of inhabiting the virtual environment.  The real and the virtual
are plotted, erroneously, on two sides of a divide with the metaphors of
immersion and presence implying a move from one realm to another.



My research, contained in *In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation *(apologies
for the shameless plug), argues that the first problem requires a better
understanding of the various dimensions of involvement in virtual
environments and games, along with an appreciation of the difference
between attention, involvement/engagement and presence/immersion as
different layers of cognition and experience.



The second problem argues for conceptualising immersion and presence not as
a dive into the *virtual other*, but an absorption into consciousness of
the virtual environment, what I have called *incorporation*, as a space
that affords an expression of agency within a cybernetic circuit.




-- 

Gordon Calleja
Associate Professor and Director
Institute of Digital Games
University of Malta
Malta

Associate Professor
Center for Games Research
IT-University of Copenhagen
Denmark.
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