What is immersion?

In my last post, I proposed a new term, the Turing Event. I suggested that a Turing Event would mark the point at which simulated reality was indistinguishable from real reality.

To help make the point that such a term was useful, I suggested that something as ambiguous as “immersion” would be well served by a term such as the Turing Event. You could, conceivably define immersion as some fraction of the Turing Event. The closer to the TE, the more immersed you are. Full immersion was equivalent to the being inside a Turing Event.

This, I thought, would help sort through some of the silliness that surrounds games and all the talk of their relative immersiveness viz other games and media. That is, I hoped to make a point that we could discard general overreaching statements like, “Man, San Andreas is a completely immersive game.” or "Videogames are much more immersive than television."

Of course, in my pursuit of simplicity, I rolled over a bunch of nuance and some toes.

I’ve talked about immersion with researcher Barry Atkins on several occasions. And while he’s sympathetic to my basic argument, he still holds out that the term “immersion” has some utility. He wrestles with this exact point in his book "More Than Game".

After all, isn't there something, well, immersive about a good, book or movie or videogame?

Seem so.

At this point, I think we could go two ways:

One, accept that immersion is a property of things and just deal with the ambiguity that kludges the imaginative involvement you have with things like a book with the inability to tell reality from simulation. Or—

Two, accept that we overreach when we use the term “immersion”. What we really mean when we talk about good books and movies and games is that they are “engaging”, “engrossing” or “involving”. But we never loose track of reality. We never for a moment forget which way is “out” of the simulated experience.

Both points of view have a point.

Focusing on books for a moment, a great book “sweeps you away”. In your minds eye, you are in the story. You can see what the words describe, smell the scents wafting in the imaged world, feel what the characters feel.

If someone steps up to you and says, “The building is on fire!” you snap back to reality. In a sense, you never left. You are not, even for a fraction of a moment, wavering on the line between the literary fiction and the reality of a fire. You don’t think, ”Well, we must go on or Frodo’s quest is over!” That’s ridiculous. We drop the book and run out of the building.

So, we were not immersed, right?

Not necessarily. Because if immersion is defined, broadly, as the inability to tell real from simulation, then it seems perfectly reasonable to me to assume that a part of our being was fooled by the words on the page. After all, why care about a made up creature called a Hobbit? Why feel something for someone who obviously does not exist?

The answer is that we are partially immersed. Just not totally immersed.

From that point of view, I think my original argument of a Turing Event is helpful. We are immersed, as the vernacular dictates. But we are not wholly immersed. To say , “The Lord of the Rings is immersive masterwork” is really to say, “This book immerses you more than most, but not really all that much, relatively speaking.”

Of course, what this really means is that "immersion" in most cases actually means “partial immersion”. And this line of thought turns into a form of the original argument, that immersion isn’t such a good word.

Just so you don’t think I’m laboring some semantic issue for no good cause, let me give one more example of why clarifying what immersion means can help in analysis of things like games.

Consider this: Immersion is a function of how deeply you are fooled. Not how much you care about the experience. When people refer to immersion, they usually are describing a, intense moment of experience. But while they use the term, they are not really really assessing immersion.

Put it this way—if you really like a story or game that does not, therefore, mean that it is immersive. Rather, it means that it probably was immersive to a degree. But the immersion was a result of your empathy. You liked the game so you found yourself in it. The game itself was not immersive in any objective sense save for the fact that you had real emotional and physical responses to the simulated world.

This thread ties together the separate ideas that immersion is, in one sense, a masking of reality and, another sense, that it is the feel or reality.

As a way-point to bigger conclusions about immersion, I’d argue that the term “immersion” should mean the distance from or fraction of the Turing Event—the masking of reality—and the other senses of partial immersion should stick to the terms such as engrossing, engaging and involving.