« Three Ladies: Background History | Home | Do You Enjoy Fear? »
Immersion vs. Engagement
By Corvus | May 12, 2009
immerse: im·merse (ĭ-mûrs’) tr.v., -mersed, -mers·ing, -mers·es.
- To engage wholly or deeply; absorb
Yesterday, while Twittering about the Tyranny of Fun, the question came up whether immersion of engagement was a better term to describe what we’re looking for in video games. Here’s my answer–feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments.
For many people,. the notion of Immersion in video games is somewhat equated with graphic fidelity. Far Cry 2 was heralded for it’s immersion techniques because you saw your character hands a lot. Sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto and Fallout 3 are considered immersive because of their enormous worlds. Some people cite the use of a first person camera as critical to immersion while others, like me, find that the constraints of a first person camera to be off putting and reduce immersion.
engage: en·gage (ĕn-gāj’) v.tr.
- To attract and hold the attention of; engross: a hobby that engaged her for hours at a time.
- To win over or attract
- To draw into; involve
- To enter or bring into conflict with
- To interlock or cause to interlock; mesh
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone refer to Wind Waker or Beyond Good & Evil as immersive however–or, for that matter, Peggle, Today I Die, or the free Solitaire that ships with Windows. Arguably, however, these games are just as compelling (if not more so) than their AAA counterparts.
So perhaps immersion (however you choose to define it within the context of video games) is merely one route to creating an engaging video game. And perhaps the ability to create a variety of video games, each of which utilizes different tools to engage the audience, is the true power of the medium–not immersion.
Not to mention that the idea of immersion would seem to focus more on the author’s intended experience. If you are immersed in the creator’s vision, what room is there for your own?
Engagement, on the other hand, speaks of a cooperative approach. It implies that your audience has their own thoughts, their own abilities, their own experiences to bring to the table. It also suggests a variety of emotional responses, which I think is critical to the success of any medium. The technology, perhaps, can be focused on immersion, but the game itself should seek to do more.
But enough of what I think. What do you think?
May 12th, 2009 at 9:31 am
I think shooting for something that works in the sense of meanings 3, 4, and 5 would make very interesting video games. Perhaps especially #4 where you might say “Bring the player into conflict with the designer”.
It’d be an interesting social contract, certainly with the designer tasked with both teaching and opposing the player…This could be seen as being the way traditional games are, but I’m thinking of something more overt and freeform…
May 12th, 2009 at 9:52 am
I think there’s certainly room for both. I do however think too much Pseudo-Power is craved from most gamers though.
“Engagement, on the other hand, speaks of a cooperative approach. It implies that your audience has their own thoughts, their own abilities, their own experiences to bring to the table.”
It’s probably just me but I think gamers clamor for that sort of thing way too much (I include myself in that category as well). The intention of the author from the game is worthless past a certain extent though, so it’s kind of a necessity at the same time.
I’ve personally always held the nothing that immersion equals the amount of oneself they can insert into the game’s world, plain and simple. If I simply asserted my own perspective in lieu of the game itself, I’d probably give up being a gamer altogether. I agree about the cooperative experience for the gamer and the game though; that’s what a lot of people have problems with now, they don’t know if they SHOULD be communicating with certain games in certain ways and it’s opening new windows (at the same time showing how archaic some design actually is).
Did you do the pleasure vs fun thing yet? I’ve been too lazy to tackle it myself, but it remains on the little outline I keep for myself.
~sLs~
May 12th, 2009 at 10:11 am
I’m not sure I agree with the those few paragraphs, but it is definitely the case that “immersion” is a term with a lot of baggage.
“Engaging” is a less burdened term for the not-necessarily-fun gaming experience you’re trying to describe. As in, “Good games aren’t necessarily fun, but they are engaging.”
May 12th, 2009 at 10:39 am
I think you hit the nail right on the head for me when you said that some things are “immersive” for some people, but aren’t for others. To be honest, I think the same is true for the words “engaging” and “fun”. They really do mean different things to different people. I say this as a person whose tastes in gaming are a bit off the beaten path; I think I’m one of the very few people I know who actually finds dialogue trees engaging.* Hence, the big problem for me is when people try to say with some semblance of objective authority that “game X is fun/immersive/engaging”, or that “games ought to be fun/immersive/engaging”, without defining what the term means to them.
* I take exception to dialogue trees where the text is poorly written, but that’s a problem of the content rather than the form.
May 12th, 2009 at 10:50 am
It’s true that there are different forms of engagement. I’m even inclined to say that, for video games at least, there are more forms of engagement than immersion. Which is why, I think looking at design in terms of engagement is a stronger stance.
May 12th, 2009 at 11:26 am
A personal definition:
Engagement means that something has grabbed my brain and won’t let go. Because of my internal wiring, this is usually more relating to systems, design, or puzzles. Engagement means that I’m thinking about something, even when I’m not doing it actively.
Immersion is letting go of the external distractions and becoming so absorbed that I feel inside it. External time gets replaced by internal time (allowing for days to pass in the matter of hours, and hours of real time to be lost in no time at all). For me this happens rarely, and usually for short bursts.
If a game has both aspects, they are usually mutually exclusive: when I am immersed I am experiencing only, when I am engaged in the system I cannot become immersed (usually because I’m analyzing the structure).
As an example: I am currently engaged with the pen and paper RPG Shadowrun. I’m reading the sourcebook, working out the inter-connected-ness of the rules, and examining the systems that make the game run. When I start a campaign I hope to allow my players (and myself to a degree) to become immersed in the game world while role playing.
Some games and situations require engagement, some hope for immersion. Neither is necessary for fun, but both create specific types of fun for certain individuals.
May 12th, 2009 at 11:29 am
This is a position that a fair number of academics already hold, but it’s good to have an ally in the Corvus.
You’ve already listed more forms of engagement than sensory immersion (graphical fidelity). You’ve got the form of engagement created by camera position and angle, and the form of engagement created by a player’s interaction with a sandbox environment. Your premises already implicitly contain your conclusion
There’s also the form of engagement known as coin-drop (addiction).
What we don’t have are good enough words for the other forms of engagement besides immersion, which is perhaps why people continue to use it despite it never really making sense as the all-encompassing term for how a mind becomes locked into the experience of a game.
May 12th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Simon kinda said it but here is my two cents: Looking at the description of immersive in this article, we read that it says “to engage wholly or deeply”. Based on what this definitions suggests, we could come to the conclusion that immersion is a type of engagement. So this does not seem like a “versus” issue, but an issue about where the treshold of the qualitative jump from “ordinary” engagement to immersion lies.
May 12th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
And then that begs the question whether to try and “engage wholly” is healthy and/or appropriate.
May 12th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Well… that, and whether it’s necessary.
May 12th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
+1 to Corvus and Deirdra:
What you’re getting at might be this: once you understand how to fully engage players in a variety of ways, you can then begin to experiment with purposeful dis-engagement. Examples of this in film would be contrapuntal sound design, some forms of intellectual montage, and a troubling of the protagonist such as Ethan’s racism in The Searchers (and anti-heroes in general).
May 12th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
I don’t believe immersion is necessary to be fun or engaging. It’s a nice component of gaming, but what I consider immersion to be – to be completely absorbed in that world as if I am actually the character itself – is not something I’m looking for if I’m playing say, Peggle to use one of your examples.
To delve further into the points you made, I’ll say for one that First person games only immerse me if they’re very well designed. There’s many times that I felt a complete rush in the Half-Life series that I become totally lost in the experience but never feel like the camera constricts me, whereas Mirror’s Edge, a game that tries to live and breathe on it’s immersive qualities, has many points where you’re expected to get the jumps and timing just right on the first try that when you don’t, you’re sucked right out of the experience and are left with a very frustrating platformer.
This is all ready getting really long so I’ll cut it off there, but over all I agree immersion is not the only avenue available to making a great game.
May 12th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I wouldn’t want to use these as categories to label games because they do not necessarily refer what is “in” the game, but what emerges out of the interaction between” the player(s) and/or the game. My father used to play backgammon in coffeehouses and he wouldn’t even recognize me even after half an hour of my arrival. (“Hey! Since when are YOU here?” was his typical question) But for me backgammon was never really a fun game.
Brecht too would probably say that immersion isn’t healthy or appropriate. But that begs the question if you can break immersion without getting someone immersed first. Could there be something like negative immersion for example, where you get immersed by the very fact that the game doesn’t try to immerse you and is therefore pulling your intelectual strings?
May 12th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
I kinda agree with Adrian that we basically repeat the continuity-debate in film: Do we want to have films that identify us with the gaze that generates the highest pleasure (and the desire to come back for more), or should films continuously defamiliarize and alienate their audience for a poetic and decentralizing impact (which also could mean you must give up any hopes to earn money from making games).
In games I think that would mean that you have to ‘dislocate’ the player by making him question his belief that he is identical with the mediated self on the screen. Disrupting processes of virtual sensation by manipulating time-space contiuities and exposing the “seams” of the construct is a general name for a whole class of techniques that could be applied to achieve that.
I think that both game art and industry are still in the middle of discovery of such stuff(but they would of course use what they find for their own purposes). I don’t think it’s really the particular form that you find that makes the difference, but the way you put these bits together. Something that alienates in one game, could be an absolute immerser in another.
I like to refer to the term tectonic in architeture. I think it pretty much is the science that tries to understand what makes us look beyond the core physical construction when we are in a building. A building always performs, even if you think it just poses for you. It’s like a dancer who has to carry his own weight and many more to look good in front of you. It’s the same with games. A video game performs. Buy you don’t see it as a bunch of hardware that processes like crazy to look good to you. That’s why I think that understanding the tectonic of video games lies at the hard of understanding the path that leads to immersion.
Sorry if I sound unorganized while I write all this. I’m a bit tired from today
May 13th, 2009 at 2:58 am
I never considered the Immersion vs. Engagement as a player before. As I think back to my favourtie classic D&D campaigns they were true engagement- but they were only as good as the DM and the other players level of enthusiams.
As I think about the games I enjoy to day, like Forces Unleased, I am somewhat already engaged by the pre-exisiting storyline and history and emotion of it all. In parts, however, I feel the immersion into the world.
Wii games feel more like immersion to me, becasue of the physical elements- truly taking the kinesthetic-tactile into the game world.
In Tokyo we encountered a number of game centres that had wonderfull games “pods” and “cubes” that fully immersed your body into the game. I tried one out- and if had not been for my need to translate constantly- I beleive I would have been fully immersed in another world.
May 13th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Careful Corvus you bias is showing
Joe, wouldn’t griefing or similar means of exploiting the mechanics of a game valid fall within definition #4 of Engage?
I agree with Altug that the very fact that engage appears in the definition of immersion implies that immersion is in fact a form of engagement.
What I felt playing Beyond Good & Evil was very similar to what I felt playing something like Thief: The Dark Project. However I’m wary of using the term immersion for either as it has become a buzz word whose meaning has been so diluted as to be all but meaningless.
I wonder if immersion (In the sense it’s used here) is a form of right brain centric engagement where the aesthetic aspects of the game are more engaging that the systemic ones. Obviously engagement of primarily the left brain is entirely possible, such as that found while playing Chess, Backgammon etc. However there’s no explicit term for this form of left brain centric engagement so we don’t think of it in the same way.
As with all aspects of games, any form of engagement requires a willingness to step inside the magic circle and abide by the rules of the game. It is an active act of suspension of disbelief and the willingness and ability of each person to become engaged in a particular game is highly subjective. What is engaging\immersion for one can be frustrating and confusing for another.
May 18th, 2009 at 8:38 am
If I understand you correctly, which I’m not sure at all that I do, logical non-artistic games such as backgammon, chess, etc are engaging yet not immersing games?