Game Immersion

How do you know you are immersed in a game? There are lots of obvious signifiers: time passes unnoticed; you become unaware of events or people around you; your heart rate quickens in scary or exciting sections; you empathise with the characters. But while we can reel off the symptoms, what are the causes? And why do many games get it wrong? Stimulated by all the Demon's Souls obessives on Chatterbox at the moment, Gamesblog decided to jumble together some tangential thoughts on the subject. This might not make a whole lot of sense. But then neither does video game immersion. Back in May 2010, the video game designer responsible for creating Lara Croft, wrote an interesting feature for Gamasutra in which he listed some ways in which developers often accidentally break the immersive spell. One example is poor research, the placing of unanalogous props in a game environment. That might mean an American road sign in a European city, or an eighties car model in a seventies-based game. The interesting thing is that we pick up on most of these clues almost unconsciously – we don't need to process a whole game environment to understand what it is that's making us feel unimmersed. Indeed, in the midst of a first-person shooter, where we often get mere seconds to assess our surroundings before being shot at, we can't process the whole environment.

Neuroscientists and psychologists are divided on this, but while many accept that we're only able to hold three or four objects from our visual field in our working memory at any one time, others believe we actually have a rich perception and that we're conscious of our whole field of vision even if we're not able to readily access that information. So we know we're in a crap, unconvincing game world, even if we don't know we're in a crap, unconvincing game world. But there's more to immersion than simply responding to what a game designer has created. Researchers at York University are currently studying immersion, and how it relates to human traits of attentiveness, imagination and absorption. Generally, though, what researchers are finding is that players do a lot of the work toward immersion themselves. People more prone to fantasising and daydreaming – i.e. more absorptive personalities – are able to become more immersed in game worlds. So while we're often being told that gamers are drooling, passive consumers of digital entertainment, we're actually highly imaginative and emotional – we have to be to get the most out of digital environments that can only hint at the intensity of real-life experiences. The best games help us to build immersive emotional reactions through subtle human clues. Believable relationships with other characters are good examples.

More information:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2010/aug/10/games-science-of-immersion