[-empyre-] Immersion

[Patrick Keilty]

Gordon, I would love to hear more about incorporation, as a space that
affords an expression of agency within a cybernetic circuit. Meanwhile, I
am dashing to the library to grab your book to read more about it!

Patrick Keilty
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Information
Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
University of Toronto
http://www.patrickkeilty.com/

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 6:43 PM, Gordon Calleja <gordon.calleja at um.edu.mt>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> 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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> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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