“Immersion” comes up often in discussions about RPG’s, and with good reason. Some say that it’s come to mean so many things to so many people that the term has become meaningless. We don’t think that’s necessarily true.
Links
- The Turku Manifesto
- Stop Saying “Immersion” by Matthijs Holter
- Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Heroes of Hesiod
- The Wildlings thread on Story Games
- The Wildlings thread on RPG.net
- I was wrong—Fortune, Karma and Drama come from Jonathan Tweet, in Everway, not John Kim. See also Jonathan Walton’s 2009 critique.
I love the end of your immersion discussion
Besides the importance of matching skill to difficulty, it seems to me that a lot of people relate immersion to making progress in any given ability by means of simple repetition: you go deeper and deeper as you gain momentum with each similar action that you take. Specifically, you become more and more immersed in your character because you always try to talk in-character, you always try to think within the boundaries of your character’s knowledge and personality, you always try to act only in your character’s best interests and you never ever break this “flow” of repetitive activity by reaching for the rules, bidding for narrative control, re-arranging your character’s decisions to fit with the kind of story you want to play or anything like that.
This is what I’ve gathered from my own involvement with these flaming topics
I can understand this point of view, but I also think it is a very narrow vision of RPGs. With all the stances we can take and have so much fun, do we really want to tie ourselves down to only the actor’s stance? Definitely, I like your general definition of immersion better.