Manbearcat
Legend
I think different people will have different definitions.
I define it as "I share the same emotional experience as my character." When my character would be confused/scared/surprised/relieved/fooled/amazed", so am I. Not in the exact same way or to the same degree, of course, but the moreso the better. Or it might even be an aesthetic feeling of the setting or genre, and not a specific emotion.
(This is why I don't feel that everybody pretending they don't know about trolls regenerating is immersive. Nobody is actually experiencing the fear/confusion/surprise that their characters supposedly are.).
So I agree that people will have different definitions (often vastly so).
Personally, although I've run games rather than played them, I've always agreed with Elfcrusher's take here.
My first D&D rules were the famous Red Box, which I got when I was nine years old. Even then, I hated the rules; their idiosyncrasies, their inconsistencies, and mostly, the way they did not conform to any genre of fantasy story-telling that I had ever encountered or wanted to think about. Just to call out one famous example, what happens when someone who's not a thief tries to sneak or hide? Had it never occurred to anyone that this might be a fairly common strategy in a world of soul-sucking monsters? And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Why do elves spot secret doors by rolling a 1d6? Like, all elves are equally good at spotting all secret doors? What about other secret things, can elves spot them, too? What about a secret cabinet door, or the lid of a secret treasure chest? Why is read magic a spell I need to cast and not just a thing I can do because I'm a super smart wizard? For that matter, why does my wizard forget his @#$% spells after he casts them?!?!?
If a 9-year-old with no experience in game design whatsoever could pick apart these rules, then they were not good. And they certainly weren't helping my immersion.
I'm quoting this as a bridge for my next point.
I think D&D 4e finds its D&D heritage very much in Moldvay Basic, not in tropes, but in its tight systemization around a focused play premise.
I suspect there is a lot of overlap between the sorts of thoughts that a certain group of people had about Moldvay Basic and 4e; the rules are so...rules-ey. Or, "this reads more like a textbook or engineering manual than it does an RPG."
I have a couple thoughts on this:
1) I think, broadly but not universally, that longtime D&D players who have played almost solely D&D (or games that harken to it in terms of cultural expectations, table authority, or rules paradigm) have a hard-earned, and heavily-invested mental framework (and cognitive blindspot) when it comes to "what an RPG is/looks like" and "what makes for immersion in RPGing (all in reading texts/prep, in the conversation of play, in table authority, and in systemization...or lacktherof)."
D&D operant conditioning coupled with nostalgia for the romances of youth.
2) Unrelated to (1) (people smuggling in cognitive biases that they aren't aware of), people learn, perceive, and are provoked/inspired very differently. I think due to this fact alone, if we could re-run the 80's RPG experiment as follows:
a) Remove the cultural zeitgeist of the 80s (sub out D&D as the nearly exclusive entry point into the hobby).
+
b) Let all the unbelievable diversity of brilliant games that are available today battle out for market share/piece of the cultural zeitgeist pie...
...if we could do that, my hypothesis is that we would see people talking about RPGs differently than they do today and the diversity of inclinations that people hold toward very different things (immersion being a big one) would shine through (rather than the sort of "D&D through-line" that dominates cultural thought and emotional investment).
And my follow-on to that is that we would be a more healthy and happy community as a result. D&D would still be awesome and our conversations would be less entrenched and acrimonious while our thoughts (collectively and individually) would be more well-tempered, well-considered, and well-developed.
Some folks would love Gygaxian prose + rulesystems as discrete and modular, non-integrated, toolkits for immersive, challenging, creative play.
Some people would love tight maths and engineering-manual-like rules text that frees their mental overhead from thinking about rules adjudication/interaction so they could better imbue their play with immersion, challenge, and creativity.
Some people would like deeply granular rules underwritten intensively by causal chains from one phenomenon to the next because it lets them explore things in the granular way that immerses them in an imaginary space and doesn't jar their sense of "how stuff should work."
Some people would like a tight play premise and simple action resolution mechanics that uses pathos/connection as a primary input when attempting to change the gamestate and introduce content into the imaginary space because that stokes their creativity and helps them inhabit the character's cares/hopes and sense of excitement/loss.
And all of it would be no more or less RPGing, no more or less immersive, than any other. It would just be people of different dispositions discussing gameplay outputs, being understanding of their differences in mental framework and priorities, and figuring out how to get there together.