Immersion.. Yeah Right?

While attending the lecture on Immersion I have to admit that it was a difficult concept for me to grasp, not the theory but the reality of it, my first instinct was how can someone be so into a game that outside occurances often take a while to penetrate this gaming bubble. This prompted myself as a casual gamer to look back and consider my experiences with games that I had played and enjoyed. I was in fact relatively shocked to discover that often when playing games from Grand Theft Auto to Alice: Return to Madness that I often drift into the world of the characters that I am controlling, what seems like half an hour is in fact hours later that I return to reality. I would liken immersion to being in a trance, where nothing permeates in, you do come to understand and be emotionally attached with the characters, their missions become your missions, when they fail at something, you fail as well. This lead me to consider other times that immersion occurs with myself and I think the only other time that I really become so absorbed in something and feel for the characters is when reading a book, like games I become so engrossed that I lock myself away and just read until I am finished. While Immersion in games are completley different, with gaming being an active kind of immersion in which what happens to the character is down to me, and books more passive in which I have no control, I think that they are the same in that both have the ability to make you care and while in games the actions are a result of the decisions that you make, games are still somewhat decided for you how we get there might differ person to person but when you finish the end result is often the same.

Just a side note, this blog is in refernce to games played on consoles as I have not had a lot of experience with MMOG's I do know that the experiences and immersion are completley different.

Jarrod Te Moananui