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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 7829777" data-attributes="member: 6802765">To me, immersion describes a mental state in which I am not consciously aware of my sense of self. Importantly, I don't see it as a binary condition: there is a sliding scale of immersiveness depending on the degree to which I am consciously aware of my sense of self.Immersion also comes in what I consider different flavors. In passive mediums like film or books, when I'm heavily immersed I have little-to-no conscious awareness of any self. By contrast, in a roleplaying game, when heavily immersed I have a conscious sense of a different self either existing side-by-side with my normal self-awareness or supplanting it. I've also experienced immersion in the context of work, where my conscious awareness of my sense of self drops away, and I start considering the current problem directly rather than through the lens of how I relate to the problem.In all three contexts I find immersion wonderous. In the recreational contexts, it's pleasurable and (at the highest levels) profound. In the work context, my problem-solving ability (and speed) increase, and I'm less likely to over-analyze (or meta-analyze), so immersion can lead to my best work (it can also lead to really good work that isn't on-point, so there is a drawback too).I agree with you and [USER=97077]@iserith[/USER] to the extent that with skill and practice, I have some control over my emotional reaction to becoming consciously aware that my immersion has been lost (or lessened). But even if I successfully choose to not let the loss bother me emotionally, that success doesn't restore my highly-immersed mental state. (Indeed, in my experience conscious control over one's emotional responses requires a conscious awareness of one's sense of self, so for me the process of consciously choosing an emotional state prevents re-immersion.)As for what breaks immersion for me, it's anything I can't understand without resorting to conscious analysis. For example, when reading, if I encounter a word I don't know, but its meaning is obvious in context, I won't be consciously aware of it (and as a bonus I just learned a new word--hopefully the author used it correctly!). If the meaning isn't obvious in context, the immersion drops, and I scamper off to the dictionary (usually with an effortless positive emotional response because I really like learning new words). But the act of looking up the word to learn it does not retroactively restore my highly-immersed mental state.In D&D, I can be happily immersed when some incongruity in the rules knocks me out of it. For example, having built a character that took the thief subclass partially to be able to apply poison to a weapon as a bonus action, only to encounter enemies whose blades do poison damage on every hit without requiring reapplication (or any application at all), but those blades somehow don't deal poison damage when wielded by the PCs. Maybe, after losing my immersion, I can indeed come up with a satisfactory explanation for how those blades works. If so, great! But that doesn't retroactively restore my highly-immersed mental state. And unless the explanation I came up with is intuitively satisfactory, it's going to be an ongoing obstacle to immersion whenever it comes up.My views on the nature of immersion may be highly idiosyncratic, so I can't be sure I speak for anyone else here. But I do get the sense that others posting in disagreement with you may similarly view immersion is a mental state, and thus see your suggestion for dealing with its loss through conscious re-interpretation as closing the barn door after the animals have already fled.Put simply: consciously reinterpretation (and/or voluntary emotional control) may be useful tools to addressing the consequences of losing a heavily-immersed mental state. But they don't do anything to help prevent losing that mental state in the first place. For those who value that mental state, your suggestions may thus appear to be addressing a different problem than the one they are trying to discuss.</blockquote>

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