D&D General The History of 'Immersion' in RPGs

D&D historian Jon Peterson has taken a look at the concept of 'immersion' as it related to tabletop roleplaying games, with references to the concept going back to The Wild Hunt (1977), D&D modules like In Search of the Unknown, games like Boot Hill, and Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood speaking in Dragon Magazine.

Immersion and Role Playing in the 1970s

The idea that role playing involved a property called "immersion" occurred to the early adopters of the 1970s fairly early. The earliest e...

playingattheworld.blogspot.com

 

[Lanefan]

You might have misunderstood my example.


I can imagination a stronger, tougher, more repulsive version of myself. But are you saying that for you to do something similar, you have to imagine a person that is different from yourself in all respects?

Preferably, yes; and even more so if the character is anything other than Human.

I play the role of myself enough in real life.

 

[Thomas Shey]

To make it clear, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with "What if I was in a fantasy world and had This Guy's stats?" as a play style. I think its a little narrow, but I'm not going to judge others for what they get out of gaming. I just think its virtually the opposite of what most people are talking about when they talk about immersion.

 

[clearstream]

To make it clear, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with "What if I was in a fantasy world and had This Guy's stats?" as a play style. I think its a little narrow, but I'm not going to judge others for what they get out of gaming. I just think its virtually the opposite of what most people are talking about when they talk about immersion.

I think of immersion as the feeling of being in the game world: a property of the player. I appreciate that another mode of immersion is acting as if you are in the world. I have not a thespian bone in my body, sadly.

 

[Hussar]

Why do you suppose that one cannot play oneself, but as one would be if strong of arm, tough as nails, but somewhat clumsy to look at/be around? I'm not saying that other modes of immersion are bad, and I'm also not clear where the resistance to just playing yourself - mutatis mutandis - arises from? Immersion in a different world, rather than immersion in being a different person.

Well, after about the third character, wouldn't this get really, really tired?

Sure, it's a character concept just like any other, but, when you have that player who plays Himself the Fighter, Himself the Wizard, Himself the Cleric, it gets REALLY REALLY stale, very quickly.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think the difference is that there's a difference between your character becoming you (token play) and you becoming your character (immersion). My objection to some posters is that they don't seem to think internalizing the defined traits of the character (including the parts on the character sheet) as particularly necessesary, and I can't get on board that.

I don't really see this distinction as important to immersion. To me, it is just the feeling of being as if you are the character. i.e. you can still be you, you don't need to adopt a fictional persona: the important element is feeling you are there. Some people get there by internalizing the PCs personality traits, some people don't do that. But both can still have the feeling of being on the ground in the game world

 

[Thomas Shey]

See, that doesn't seem to be immersion as I ever saw it used before this thread.

 

[Mannahnin]

I think one can be immersed either in a character (or role) or in a world or both.

When I think of immersion in an RPG or other game context I usually think of immersion in the world first, though I have experienced character immersion too.

 

[Bedrockgames]

See, that doesn't seem to be immersion as I ever saw it used before this thread.

That is how I have always seen it, and how I have heard people describe it. I think there is a lot of variation regionally in uses of these terms perhaps

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, when I've seen it used it was always in the context of "immersion in character and world" but both parts were important.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yeah, when I've seen it used it was always in the context of "immersion in character and world" but both parts were important.

To me the most important part was always feeling you are there, interacting with the world through your character. Whether that character is you with the serial numbers filed off, or some person totally different from yourself, was never hugely important to us (though people often would do the latter)