Immersion, a pleasurable state of intense focus, is not strictly produced by a fantasy narrative. Immersion has at least three different forms that can work in harmony. Furthermore, personal preference for the different forms greatly influences the degree of immersion achieved.
This might be the frequency illusion (aka Baader-Meinhof phenomenon) at work because I’ve had immersion on my mind for several weeks and subsequently been noticing it pop up in various RPG conversations. The pattern I’ve noticed is about the importance of immersion, often stated like “you can’t do that, it will ruin immersion”. This usually comes along with the idea of being lost in an fantasy world where some incongruous element suddenly snaps the participant out of their daydream.
This struct me as, at best, incomplete, perhaps entirely wrong. Being a programmer, I often experience a sense of immersion in the process of coding and there’s absolutely no fantasy world wrapped around that experience. Then I thought about chess, which certainly inspires a feeling of immersion with only the thinnest of story about it.
Being naturally disagreeable, I imagined that stance to be incorrect. I needed to remind myself what immersion meant, and then I went searching for why immersion was important. Eventually, I stumbled on a model for thinking about immersion that better informs game design.
What’s immersion and why is it attractive?
The concept of immersion in the context of role-playing games is metaphorical. We’re not thinking about dunking in a river. We’re thinking about about concentrating mental attention. Similarly, we might say we’re absorbed in an activity, or achieving a flow state. We might say we have intense mental focus. We can also speak of being tightly engaged, as are gears in a machine. English doesn’t have a purely non-figurative word for this concept. We could adopt the Sanskrit term samadhi, but this wouldn’t be particularly useful in typical discussion.
From here, consider immersion to mean mental focus or concentration, or the concept of flow state as defined by Csikszentmihalyi.
I don’t want to take for granted that immersion is desirable. It’s easy to imagine that a state of complete immersion would appear as catatonia to anyone else. Whereas a complete lack of immersion must be a profound lack of focus or a series of rapidly changing frames of focus. Both sound like psychiatric conditions, although I can see sleep being a temporary retreat into a dream world from which we emerged refreshed every morning.
To be immersed in a subject is to be relieved of the distraction of other aspects of our experience. Let’s take it for granted that most people find this pleasurable. It’s probably covered in depth by Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. I haven’t read it. For the sake of what I want to explore here, I’m going to set aside any debate about whether getting into a flow is a worthwhile pursuit. Intuitively, it does seem like immersion produces happiness, and I actively try to get into myself.
I found there have been multiple studies that show games that facilitate immersion correlate to reports of higher player enjoyment. If we want flow, we can rely on playing games as a way to find it. Yet, games take many forms. D&D is a role-playing game. Chess is a boardgame. Baseball is a sport. Even improv theater relies on following rules. If I define game as a pastime meant for entertainment that follows rules, all of these are games. Yet, we must examine how the idea of immersion applies to each because it’s not obvious whether each of them are immersive.
Immersion as three forms
Here’s the key idea I stumbled on. Immersion is not strictly about a immersion in a fantasy world. When left unqualified, statements about immersion default to this idea of being lost in a story, an imaginary world with its own logic. But how do we explain getting into a flow state while playing chess or baseball? The answer is that there are different kinds of immersion.
Consider the 2005 study by Ermi & Mäyrä titled Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analysing Immersion. It includes what they call the SCI Model after three types of immersion.
- Sensory immersion: Overwhelming audio, visual or haptic stimuli that dominate the senses
- Challenge-based immersion: Absorption in the game’s mechanics, rules, goals, feedback, and cognitive/motor challenges
- Imaginative immersion: Engagement with story, characters, and the fantasy world
This study looked at computer games, but I can apply the model to the four games mentioned above.
RPGs are probably first and most popularly thought of as producing imaginative immersion. There can’t be any meaningful play without significant imagination. The game exists within a constructed world with a high degree of verisimilitude. The internal consistency encourages a feeling that the the imagined world is real, and thus, immersion is encouraged.
Sensory immersion can also help immersion in the RPG experience. The referee might play music to match the location or mood of the game events. Maps, illustrations and miniature figures can aid in the conception of the game situations. Players may even feel more involved by the tactile feel of the dices or their motion as they are rolled.
Depending on the rules used by an RPG, the players may become immersed in the challenges of play itself. Highly complex rules will certainly draw the attention of the players as they seek to achieve various goals by choosing from between a long list of possible actions.
These three aspects will all simultaneously compete or cooperate to produce a unified flow state for the player. Imagine the DM presenting the picture of an NPC for D&D that looks like Bugs Bunny. If you’re primarily immersed in the faux medieval fantasy realm of elves, it’s likely to be jarring. Likewise, if you’re focused on the game mechanics but the narrative cannot explain the outcome of a dice roll, you may find yourself falling out of flow state.
Chess cannot be said to have much in the way of imaginative immersion. The theme of knights, castles and kings is superficial and unimportant to the game. Likewise, the game offers little in the way of sensory immersion. Perhaps the environment of a park or a cafe would recall prior chess games. Silence or certain instrumental music could enhance focus on the game itself and planning moves. The primary immersive element of chess is the challenge.
Baseball, also, encourages deep immersion in the challenge and little in the way of imagination. The game can hardly be understood as simulating some other contest in the way the chess could be thought of as a battle between two armies. The sensory aspects of baseball, though, are strong. The players engage in the game with their bodies directly. The roar of the crowd variously must focus or distract a player.
Neither chess or baseball produces much narrative immersion. The events of the match to that point or the play styles of the opponents must figure into how a player predicts an interprets choices made by other players. Inconsistency or unexpected plays might serve to deepen focus in this case, as the player likely uses his imagination to adjust expectations. Consider the case of a slow-footed slugger making like he’s about to bunt. The pitcher in this case wouldn’t experience a loss of immersion in this situation. He’d think really hard about why his opponent choosing to play in an unusual way. Thus, the story of the game offers little engagement.
Improvisational theater, like baseball, typically involves an audience that might encourage or discourage the players. The setting of the performance, with players on a well-lit stage in an otherwise dark auditorium helps to focus attention on the game at hand. And the game has rules by which the players must abide. The rules may be simple but challenging.
Consider the game of New Choice, where a short form improv player might be called on to retract a line and invent a new line, sometimes multiple times rapidly. In long form improv, the players must consider the internal logic of the entire situation, taking care not to contradict the events up to that point or the choices made by the other players in the moment.
As with role-playing, improv encourages significant focus on imagination and verisimilitude, even if the the situations are are often absurd. Immersion can easily be broken if a player introduces elements that violate the internal logic of the story being developed.
Here are my ballpark guesses at rating the three aspects of the SCI model for the four games I discussed, specifically for their potential in producing deep immersion.
| Game | Sensory | Challenge | Imagination |
|---|---|---|---|
| D&D | medium | high | high |
| Chess | low | high | low |
| Baseball | high | high | low |
| Improv | low | medium | high |
Immersion in D&D
D&D offers high potential for immersion for both challenge-based immersion and imaginative immersion. The sensory aspect is not going to get you there on its own. I can imagine a D&D game that entirely neglects the sensory, such as in play-by-post form. Otherwise, there’s a lot of room for sensory immersion, from elaborate game materials, environmental sounds, maybe props or actual mugs of ale.
With any editions of D&D, there are ample opportunities to be lost in the game mechanics and the challenge of the game itself. At the extreme, the players are laser focused on character builds, using combat options and even metagaming to achieve some victory condition. A D&D game neglecting challenge-based immersion entirely is the type of game where the players do not actively engage in the rules, abdicating all uncertain outcomes to the referee, who is the only one paying attention to the rules, if at all.
Games with high attention to the rules will do little in the way of drawing immersion to the narrative. The rules may be producing an endless series of events and conditions that are only tied into a narrative in retrospect, that is, via abduction. The players rationalize the product of rolls on random tables in order to make sense of the story, such as it is.
At the other extreme, the history of the world and the players can be the primary source of immersion. The players care most about a sensible story arc, with the rules only providing a supporting role, never actually producing immersion themselves. In this style of game, the rules may be considered as working in opposition to imaginative immersion because they can seem unrealistic. This is a game where abduction isn’t valued because the DM is expected to have prepared a sensible narrative before a session begins.
Adding it up
Think of these three aspects of the SCI model as sliders that must all add up to 100%. As you raise one, the other fall. It’s unlikely you’ll find an immersive game with any of the knobs turned to 0% or 100%. Somewhere in there, there’s a mix that satisfies the group of players.
It’s important not to disregard that each player will have his own preferences for immersion. Some players will be entirely happy with a compelling world history and a story about the characters. Taken too far, this becomes the DM telling a story to the players who all sit quietly and just listen. Another game could be all about moving from battle to battle with almost no regard for the why the characters do anything they do.
There’s a lot more to explore on this topic. Is there a way to analyze the preferences of all players and come up with a balance that optimizes everyone’s immersion? Should the referee instead set the balance to his own preference and let the players adapt? Are there configurations that simply do not work? Are there configurations that almost always work?
