Defining immersion.

To begin I have started to read upon the principles of immersion in games. Video game shave become a medium for entertainment, which can be far more immersive than that of a book or movie, but how? The answer is not one thing, or a few, but a large number of contributing elements, in order to understand immersion i must first difine what different kinds there are.

I was introduced to "Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analysing Immersion, by Laura Ermi and Frans Mayra", the paper was written to lay down some aspects of immersion and test a model (in the form of questionnaire) as a tool to research the gameplay experience. The paper includes many seperate difinitions that have been stated before hand, and combines them. This was usefull to me in my investigation since it labelled many of the contributing factors that are involved with immersion. I also found a good statement which highlights something i have through previously when reading about or discussing immersion: "Furthermore, the concept of immersion is widely used in discussing digital games and gameplay experiences. Players, designers and researchers use it well, but often in an unspecified or vague way without clearly stating to what kind of experiences of phenomena it actually refers to." I can relate to what it means not only in the things i have read, but also in the times i myself have written or talked about immersion. For such an encompasing word, its hard define exactly what you are relating to, and at the same time, you could leave out other aspects of the gameplay experience.

Since I want to focus on how the factors of interactivity have effected the development of technology, I need to lay down the ideas that i think are appropriate to what i want to investigate. The paper narrowed down many of the elelments that different researchers have identified into three components that make up the "Gameplay Experience Model" first sensory immersion, which is audiovisual information the gamer is given, the space of the game, a world that surrounds the gamer which distracts from the real world and stimulates them with powerfull sensory information. Secondly you have Challenge-based Immersion which is important in the pure interaction the gamer has with the game, it balances challenges with the players skill, relating to motor or mental skills, it can give the gamer a sense of acheivement, and is a form of immersion wholely unique to games. Thirdly there is imaginative immersion the elements of story and narrative that have become central to contemporary games, where the player can relate to the characters and content of the virtual world, not just in role playing games, engaging the players imagination.



This is the figure of the "SCI-model" included in the paper, it shows how the concepts or immersion relate to what the game provides and what it means for the gamer.


For the rest of this blog there will be a strong emphasis on "sensory immersion" since this is the area that the technology that provide the medium for video games enfluences. I will hopefully look at advances in technology which offer even greater audiovisual information to the gamer, and discuss whether they can increase the feeling of immersion in games and if they could possibly be used to influence the other areas of immersion also.