Is Immersion Important to You as a Player?

[pointofyou]

I've cried - as in, shed tears - in the playing of my character. The approach I used to inhabit my character was - in my imagination - to connect elements of the character's experience to a few real-world individuals whom I knew well. My relationship with them, and ability to empathise with their experiences, underpinned my generation of the appropriate emotional state and response for my character.

I do not for a nanosecond doubt that people have that experience and/or reaction. In particular you. I hope I didn't convey doubt about that. I might not prefer it for myself but that means exactly and only that.

 

[payn]

Oh, I think it’s an interesting discussion topic. I’m not trying to shut it down or say it’s fruitless to talk about it. I’m just saying that I think people need to be really clear what they mean by it, or it will be like an American saying “I love watching football” and a European saying, “I do, too!”

In these situations, I read all the words in the post to get context. If I can not figure it out, I ask further questions.

 

[Bill Zebub]

That real-world physiological impact was a sign of solid immersion into the emotional state of the character.

That’s pretty much my definition of immersion.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think for me it is a lot less about the internal emotional world of the character and more about this sense of being there. Sometimes a degree of emotional detachment from myself and the character can actually enhance that type of immersion for me. I think I find it less about dealing with say the grim realities of living in the world the PC inhabits and more about enjoying the escape to another world that is engaging and fascinating because it is different from this one. I like the feeling of being in the characters shoes on the ground and seeing through their eyes, but I am probably less interested in investing in their emotional journey (it is more like my own journey and adventure throughs the character).

 

[Xamnam]

I will say, I'd, theoretically, love to experience the deeper character-emotion-mindstate based immersion that some folks talk about, but I've yet to be at a table where I'd both feel comfortable and supported by the players around me in doing so.

 

[Pedantic]

Immersion, as I've experienced and desired it, doesn't have much to do with the emotional state of my character and a lot to do with the rules.

What I want is to decrease the distance between my decision making as a player, and the decision making of my character, so that my choices at the level of the gameplay are as close a mirror as possible to the character's decisions in the fictional world. Thus, a system that serves immersion is one that:

1. Adjudicates results at the level of individual actions
2. Provides abilities/declared actions that exist in fixed, specific time intervals
3. Does not provide abilities/actions that result from factors outside of a given character's personal powers

I've yet to find a system that actually commits to this model of immersion as a design goal, so I'm always a little behind the ball to begin with. These conditions are often satisfied in some systems, or I'm sufficiently used to the abstractions of time and effort necessary to contort my brain around gaps.

In the situations when this is the case, the next point of conflict that's possible is a divergence in player vs. character motivation. Generally this isn't a problem if the goal is success at a given task, because I as a player trying to play a game well, and my character, as a person trying to achieve their goals in the face of obstacles, will make the same decisions and thus immersions is maintained. Picking the most effective gameplay move will satisfy both the character and player, thus maintaining immersion.

This becomes a much bigger problem when the system prioritizes specific narrative outcomes, or story/emotional beats, because the actions I may take as a player to optimize success do not benefit my character's motivations. Immersion, as I experience it, is impossible in such situations. I may choose, for example, to undertake an activity that will likely fail, or which my character is ineffective at, because there's a meta-narrative reward that will improve my gameplay outcomes later, or in a strictly narrative sense, because my goal as a player is to hit a particular narrative beat or emotional state for the character. The character obviously does not want to experience failure/defeat, and would like to accomplish their goals, so we are at odds and immersion cannot occur.

Fundamentally, I view the goal of an immersive system to be narrowing the cognitive dissonance of players engaged in a game, and characters striving against obstacles in a world. Brennan Lee Mulligan had a good description of this toward the end of this roundtable discussion with Aabria Iyengar and Matt Mercer:

I don't want the experience of being a storyteller when I'm a PC...When I'm a player, I want to be living in a story, immersed in a character that is not to their knowledge living in a story. I don't want to play a character that's thinking about their...narrative arc, I want to play a character that's trying to save the world as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Ideally, the non-system aspects of the game, the encounter design and worldbuilding and obstacles created by the GM or intrinsic to the module or scenario, should effectively challenge and stymie the character's attempts to achieve their goals, thus that as I player (and, ideally, as the character) I have to come up with novel applications of the limited actions/abilities I have to succeed, so that the resulting game is interesting.

This has, however, routinely led me into conflict with other players who seem to define immersion completely differently, and view the act of playing a game effectively as a separate and sometimes alien experience to the narrative unfolding of a TTRPG. Immersion is generally a pretty easy to acknowledge binary state for me. I can generally point to any individual declared action and tell you whether it was immersive or not, and my preference is strongly that it be the former.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It might be useful to break down what different people mean by "immersion" and how different people experience what they call "immersion" but I do not see how anything good or positive can come from trying to say one type of immersion is better than another or denying that something some people call "immersion" is something else.

While I have some sympathy for this position, terminological sprawl makes communication harder. If there are three different definitions of "immersion" in use, without at least some kind of qualifier word on the front of that to make it clear which one you're talking about, miscommunication stress is going to be almost inevitable.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So, how about I get into the first time I realized I'd experienced what I'd now call deep immersion in character...

It was in a live action game, rather than tabletop. It was on Sunday morning of a larp convention, and the con ran a sort of project each year, with a game written during the convention.

The scenario was set in an art museum, during an attempted robbery gone wrong, turned into a hostage situation. I was playing an unarmed, off-duty cop who just happened to be at the museum that night.

My character, like the rest of the hostages, got hands tied behind his back (simulated by my holding my hands behind my back). And I'm sitting there wondering what to do. One of the GMs made rounds among the hostages, and when he came around to me, after a couple of questions I determined that the only item I can reach this way was my police badge, which is in my back pocket. I asked if I could use the metal edge of the badge to wear away at my bonds. The GM thought this was reasonable, but I had to keep wiggling my wrists behind my back, as if I were trying to do this, for 10 minutes. If the thieves noticed, well, they noticed.

That was a long ten minutes. While I was doing this, the pregnant character across from me started going into labor. And the Mayor's wife (also a hostage) who had always wanted but couldn't have kids, went into an emotional crisis over that, so the thieves had to come right next to me while I was still trying to free myself.

And my real-world heart rate became elevated. And I had to pay attention to my real-world breathing pattern, to keep it normal so I would not be noticed....

That real-world physiological impact was a sign of solid immersion into the emotional state of the character.

That sounds about right. I'd probably have been incapable of properly immersing under those circumstances because too many of the visible and auditory cues would have pulled me out, but I was noting to my wife (who, in fact, I met while MUSHing) that on occasions in the MUSH involved when back-and-forth narrating a combat situation, I'd feel what I can only describe as a feral grin come on my face that I suspect was effectively identical to the expression the character I was playing had at that moment...

 

[pointofyou]

While I have some sympathy for this position, terminological sprawl makes communication harder. If there are three different definitions of "immersion" in use, without at least some kind of qualifier word on the front of that to make it clear which one you're talking about, miscommunication stress is going to be almost inevitable.

I can live with different descriptors. It's really claiming that one is universally a higher goal or better play than another that's sand in my gears.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I can live with different descriptors. It's really claiming that one is universally a higher goal or better play than another that's sand in my gears.

And that's fair. Its going to be tricky applying extra descriptors to "immersion" that don't feel that way to at least some people I expect, though.