clearstream
(He, Him)
That makes a lot of sense. So these aren't necessarily dichotomous, right? I come at it from a very different angle from you, in that I see the consistent living world as working in service to character expression. For example, when I ran OOTA I tried to envision the consequences of Demogorgon's destruction and occupation of Sloobludop. That led to imagining a diaspora, which then created foils for character expression.I'm a software engineer now, but I pretty much grew up in the theater. For me roleplaying is an extension of that practice, unless we're playing an emphatic war game like Moldvay B/X. I want to embody a character and experience the world as they experience it. Through their intuitions, fears, feelings, sense of physical space, etc. generally with a strong emphasis on relationships. That's what bleed is all about for me. I like stuff like range bands because they encourage describing the setting as my character sees it (Close, Short, Medium, Far). It's relative to them. I feel similarly bout stuff like Strife in Legend of the 5 Rings. It helps me to be mindful of what's important to my character and how they see the world.
So classically in RPGs the GM is supposed to describe the setting/world/shared imagined space neutrally and concretely. Players move their characters within it precisely in a considered/strategic fashion. When players are addressed it's usually done collectively with no real sense of urgency. I think this encourages a sort of detached view of the situation the characters find themselves in. There's always plenty of time to think and anyone can respond to the GM's prompt.
Basically under a classical model players think about the shared imagined space concretely and their characters abstractly. I mostly prefer play where players think about their character as concretely as possible and the shared imagined space abstractly in the same way we navigate through meat space on a daily basis, relying on our intuition, focusing on what we think is important with a real sense of urgency in our decision making process.
I'm a lifelong amateur athlete as well so that sense of physicality, immediacy, and being in my character's body is critical to me.
On surface, I don't grasp how we can have character expression in the purely abstract. A character must occupy a world. Or to put it another way, the only persons we know of, and can possibly imagine, are those that occupy a world. The less we know about our game world, the more each character's expression must be down to external inspiration. That is of course absolutely okay. The character immersion I enjoy is that which is articulated in the context of - greatly inspired by - an alternative living world. Ergo over ego.
We did see a lot of fruitless attempts at over-precise objective worlds. A question to ask though is if any RPG can occur in the absence of a game world? DW has its fronts. L5R has Rokugan. I feel sure you are not saying your character is played in deliberate ignorance and absolute denial of inspiration from the game world it finds itself in? As a kind of blind, deaf, and numb wanderer in such worlds. You let in chinks of light from the game world, right? It's really hard to picture the character that is so self-obsessed that the game world is anathema to it (I shall wear hats, even where there are none!)
Might it be that your objections land less on a disagreement with world-immersion, and more with disagreement as to the forms world-immersion has sometimes assayed?