More on immersion confusion

[ewilen]

Two articles have recently come to my attention:

The Play of Simulation (excerpt from Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals). This article is the ultimate source for "the immersive fallacy", a term that's started to pop up in some RPG discussions.

Immersion and Presence (presentation from a computer game theory class at IT

Comments

[ext_949461]

I totally agree, this new "critique" of immersion is poorly founded. It conflates being "engrossed" with what has historically been meant by immersion (aka character immersion). It's fair enough to argue that immersion doesn't have to be the ONLY goal of a game, but they use this to then cast aspersions on it as any goal.

[tcpip]

It doesn't make too much sense to me to discuss immersion with only a very minimal reference to the participant themselves. Immersion, imo, requires at the very least motivation on the part of the active performer, a desire to "immerse" oneself (hence, why one can become immersed in tetris or freeciv)

[ewilen]

Incidentally, I mean to respond in more detail to the two pieces

[tcpip]

Elliot, you've got it in one :)