The definition cited on the other thread is a good place to start:
Quote:
All forms of entertainment strive to create suspension of disbelief, a state in which the player's mind forgets that it is being subjected to entertainment and instead accepts what it perceives as reality.
I don't have the context in which Salen and Zimmerman made the statement, so I can't say for sure whether or to what extent they actually think an immersed gamer accepts what he/she perceives on the monitor (and through the speakers) as reality. I expect that most psychologically healthy people don't really accept what they see and hear as being reality while playing a video game, no matter how immersive that game may be. But, as I said, I haven't read more than this one sentence from them, so I can't say for sure what their theory is, fully expressed.
I think it might be more helpful to define immersion in terms of the extent to which the player of a given game shuts out reality in favor of the game world. In other words, the level of immersion is related directly to how much of the gamer's cognition becomes invested in the game. I doubt that there would be a fully objective way to measure that sort of thing, but asking several gamers for their subjective responses to the following questions, which ask them to provide a rating within a pre-defined range, might be helpful for game designers to compare "immersiveness" between different games.
So, assume a rating system like this:
A. often
B. sometimes
C. rarely
D. never
and ask questions like this about the game:
1. Did you concentrate on the game so much that you didn't think about anything else?
2. Did you care about the other major characters in the game?
3. Were you affected in any way if any of the major or minor characters died?
4. Did you care about the outcome of a portion of the storyline, apart from "winning," or accomplishing the objective?
5. Were you ever tired from playing, but continued to play because you wanted to see what was going to happen next?
6. Did you ever have an emotional reaction to something that happened in the game, apart from being frustrated at not being able to accomplish a goal?
7. Did the motivations of another character in the game matter to you in any way?
I'm sure there are many other (and probably better) questions a game designer could come up with to gauge a player's reactions to a game. My point here is that the above questions focus on what I think is the central characteristic of immersion: good storytelling. It's the same with movies and books, and other forms of entertainment. To be immersive, a game has to make you care about what happens, above and beyond winning or losing.
As one illustrative example, I played Tetris on the original Nintendo until I started dreaming about the pieces falling and locking them together. I was hooked on the game, but I never perceived any reality to it (as Salen and Zimmerman define immersion). Nor was I "immersed" in Tetris as I've defined the term.
The FPS genre is one way to achieve immersion; the RTS and simulation genres are other ways. All can make use of storytelling in different forms as a means of drawing players into the game. For my money, first-person games (not necessarily, and not only shooters – think of Myst) have more potential to give the player a role to fulfill in a narrative, apart from more basic "command and control" functions.
In short, the ability to
be someone other than yourself, and the extent to which that character is developed through narrative, is what immersion is all about.
edited on Mar. 18, 2007 05:09 pm by ITOE_MC