 Think about the strange versatility of the term immersion. It can refer to that sense of enchantment that accompanies a good book, being transfixed by the web of strategies encoded in a game of chess, where the act of immersing your senses into new digital interfaces, whether it be through sound, touch, or sight. Being both encompassing and frustratingly nebulous in its application, it is incumbent upon us to define immersion more clearly. In the realm of video games, the term has become entrenched in our lexicon without having a precise definition. We have games called Immersive Sims, Deus Ex, System Shock, and Bioshock amongst them that are predominantly about enabling player choice through systemic design. They create both strategic intentionality in the gameplay, as well as transporting you to believable, fully realized realms, suggesting immersion is about realizing an alternate world through systems and environmental storytelling. This was explicitly the design goal of people like Warren Spector and Ken Levine, who are seen as the progenitors of the genre. Games like Far Cry 2 and Metro 33 are also considered immersive, and what characterizes those games is a strict abidance by the logic of their own worlds, so much so that they embed their interfaces diegetically and employ mechanical conceits like malaria and nuclear poisoning that deliberately inconvenience the player for the sake of fully realizing a place. Finally, we have expansive open worlds that are also included in this immersive category, from the dense narrative theater of The Witcher to the picturesque vistas of Red Dead Redemption 2. Fiction is not unique to games, and thinkers through the ages have wrestled with the question. T.S. Eliot has spoken about the importance of suspending a reader's disbelief if you want to tell them a story. Tolkien speaks of the importance of enchantment if you wish to enrapture your audience, and dystopian fiction has either warned us about the liabilities of alternate sensory worlds like the Matrix, or promoted as the fullest expression of the evolution of art like the holodeck in Star Trek. Art is inherently escapist and fictitious, and so it makes sense that the word immersive is used as a testament to the power of that art. If we draw from the literature both inside and outside game design, it becomes clear immersion can exist in multiple dimensions simultaneously. We have sensory immersion, which is about how any of our senses can be engulfed with alternate stimuli. A game like Rez, with its abstract iconography and synesthesia inducing dynamic music is the perfect example of this. On top of that, we have narrative immersion, which is that experience we have all had in just being swept up in a powerful story. No media invokes this in a linear format, but video games are branching out into non-linear forms as well. Systemic immersion is about interacting with a set of interconnected systems, either arbitrarily or embedded in a new world, and this enables intentionality in both a narrative and gameplay sense. This then builds towards world immersion, which is about being lost in a world with an actual history and geometry. However, truly immersive worlds seem to not only leverage these forms of immersion, but actually meet the psychological needs for play that we have acquired over thousands of years of evolution. If Esper Yule calls games half real in his book of the same name, then our confusion with immersion might stem from the fact that we are existing in multiple worlds simultaneously. In his now seminal book, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud argues that deeply abstract and iconic imagery can convey more universal themes than precise representation, and is why we can project ourselves into avatars like Pac-Man more readily than others. The nondescript is more immersive than the specific, allowing us to thrust ourselves into another's role. One could argue that as our first gateway into alternate worlds, avatars are extremely important, which explains why most immersive games take place in the first person and generally feature silent protagonists. However, even if characters are more fully realized, we often have the ability to define how they act within the context of the world, making the character a surrogate for our desires as opposed to a fully independent agent. In games like Half-Life, we are always embedded in the role of Gordon Freeman, with events and cutscenes transpiring in the world itself, enhancing its immersive grasp and bridging the divide between us and a virtual character. If we have a more fully realized character like Nathan Drake, we can match the emotional state of the player to the emotional state of the avatar, something seen in the opening of the game where both you and Nathan are disoriented and confused. This is our first step into sensory immersion, but there are many more dimensions we need to contend with. We have a set of evolved psychological functions that respond to sensory cues, whether sight, touch, or sound, that map onto a whole suite of emotions, themes, and ideas, giving us the ability to activate a cascading array of experiences in the mind of the player. At a base level, we have a psychological framework called Flow Theory, which argues that engagement in a game comes from having a challenge that matches a player's rising abilities. What characterizes the sense of flow is a loss of time and spatial awareness, immersing players fully in an activity. Emotions are also deeply intertwined with immersion. In the book Designing Games, Tine and Sylvester advocates viewing games through a two-factor theory of emotion, where we can use the fiction of a world to label any kind of tension to create the emotion we want. The tension in Doom can be labeled with fear by using monster imagery, and the tension in Res can be labeled with beauty and transcendence by using synesthesia-inducing abstract effects. He then argues for a step-by-step process to generate a sense of immersion, which coincides with Paul Cairns and Emily Brown's research on the subject. First, we create flow to remove a player from reality, then we arouse them using the events of the game itself, and only then do we work towards preserving this sensation by not suspending their sense of disbelief. Building on these ideas, Werner Werth and a team of other researchers came up with one unified theory of immersion that consolidates a lot of this information. Immersion ultimately comes from creating an alternative representation in a player's mind and getting them to prefer that world to our own. First, you need complete and multiple sensory channels, so a world like Assassin's Creed with its dense population and robust soundscape qualifies well. Next, you can use cognitively demanding environments, which is why abstract games like chess enrapture us so fully. Finally, a dense narrative also compels us to change our frame of reference. However, to preserve the suspension of disbelief, we need to ensure a world is not incongruous, is consistent, and is heavily interactive. A game like E.C.O. has a powerful sense of immersion because all the sound is diegetic and the world feels like a real authentic place. Warren Specter's game Deus Ex was devised with a series of consistent rules that made you feel like you existed in an alternate world and gave you options to tackle objectives in an action, stealth, or narrative way. Researchers often distinguish immersion from presence, which is the difference between feeling like you are physically being present, much like you are in a virtual reality game, versus being immersed in more conventional ways. This dichotomy speaks to a conceptual divide in the study of immersion, often called the immersive fallacy. The immersive fallacy is the misimpression that presence is the ultimate goal of immersion, but simulating alternate worlds is more important than a willing suspension of disbelief. In the book Rules of Play, the authors argue play is a form of medicommunication, where we are both aware that we are playing and engrossed simultaneously, creating a duality between reality and fiction. They argue a recognition of this is what will allow us to expand the kinds of play and storytelling we can craft in games. This speaks to a deeper conflict between systems and the fiction of a game. Systemic immersion is the cognitive process of optimizing and engaging with pure mechanics. The compulsion we have to play at dense strategic games, or perplexing puzzle games, engaging our cognitive faculties is the fullest of our abilities. It can also be about discovering the intricacies of a connected system. However, systems having a fictional level does not necessarily conflict with this. It can be instrumental in communicating mechanics like in Breath of the Wild, or it can actually be leveraged to craft unique forms of play. In Will Wright's Game Sim City, a version of urban dynamics is being modeled, but it also enables player-directed storytelling, reconciling the divide between systems and fiction. This double consciousness of games imbues all forms of immersive design. Dead Space's inventory, health systems, and navigational methods are all embedded in the world itself, but you are also aware you are playing a game at the same time. And the same can be said for a VR game like Beat Saber, the simulation is understood to be just that, a fiction. Red Dead Redemption 2 used slow plotting and methodical animations for its movement and interactions, an inconvenience in service of crafting immersion, but some complained that this was too laborious. This is a similar reaction that players had to Far Cry 2, where players suggested it had too much driving, malaria, and endless dread to be fun. Again, though, as the lead designer Clint Hawking explains in his GDC talk, the meaning of a game is both the systems, but also the fictional context that underlies it. There is a strange tension between immersive fidelity and flow, but this can be understood if we recognize that games are straddling the line between two realms, being both about the fiction of a world, and crafting emergent systems of play. In their talk, Crafting Existential Dread, the developers of Soma argue that to create an immersive world, you need to build a sense of presence by giving players agency and continuity of action. Embedding narrative level design and puzzle design in a virtual world is how he argues we should do this. For example, Little Nightmares has platforming sections where you actually climb geometry that makes sense in the world, and Insight has puzzles embedded in the themes of what is happening. This is mirrored in the talk by Gregg Kasseven, creating atmospheric games, where he argues there needs to be a tonal and thematic cohesion to suspend the player's disbelief. This sense of spatial presence is what can be referred to as world immersion, and can be also seen in games like Bioshock and Dark Souls. Bioshock has meticulous detail in its environments that implicitly convey the tale of how the underwater city of Rapture came to ruin. Dark Souls hides all of its lore and weapons, item descriptions, and locations, letting you piece together its subversive and macabre plot at your own discretion. Everything has a place, and is there for a specific narrative reason. Dark Souls also has NPC characters that seem to have their own agenda, reinforcing how the world of Lordran exists independent of us. A game that executed this earlier was Shenmue, which embedded a suite of interesting characters in its world that felt real and governed by their own desires. It also had a full day-night cycle, which altered the conditions of the world and forced you to change your actions and plans accordingly. World immersion is about maintaining the illusion that an alternate universe exists both in space and time. At the highest level, we have conventional forms of narrative immersion seen in games like Uncharted, which uses the tension-pacing and tone of other art forms and then layers in interactivity. On top of that, though, we have embedded forms of storytelling seen in mechanical or environmental form. All these devices enhance the narrative immersion of a game, but we also have to consider the avatar we inhabit. In his talk, The Identity Bubble, Matthias Warch says we can either have a puppet character, which is effectively us in a game, or an actual character to enable a player to interface with the world. In his talk, though, Jeremy Bernstein emphasizes the importance of creating a parity between us and a virtual character by creating unity across different dimensions. With this tool set, we can see why specific sequences in certain games work. Uncharted 2 has this section where you have to help the cameraman you have in tow evade your pursuers, and it uses a bevy of the methods we just talked about. It creates unity of purpose and action. We would escape, help an innocent man, and wander desperately through the streets. It uses mechanical reinforcement by restricting your movement and gun use, and it creates the right kind of tension by corralling you in a desperate series of actions. Additionally, it reinforces the theme of the narrative, as the plot is about Drake being torn between two worlds, and we literally carry Drake's burden and dissonance as we play this section. Ultimately, creating immersion through narrative means leveraging all these tools in innovative ways. Does the mechanic you use act in a context that creates an emotion that mirrors the character's state, the tension of the story or the themes of the game? Metro Exodus tells a story about surviving in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, and to do this effectively, it embeds all your actions diegetically, and allows you to act with intentionality both in the systems and narrative of the game. Immersive sims are possibly the easiest way to demonstrate the continuity that exists between narrative systemic and world immersion. Bioshock is a game that has a powerful sense of world immersion, it creates a sense of flow through an escalating sense of difficulty, and maps your emotions to horror and intrigue by leveraging its world's design. You can act with systemic intentionality by choosing powers and leveling up, as well as planning for your encounters with big daddies. On the narrative front, you are forced to make choices between harvesting and saving little sisters, and this directly ties to the themes of the narrative. Of course, many argue they executed this poorly, once more creating dissonance, but you get the point. Games like Bioshock leverage overlapping forms of immersion to deliver unique experiences to the player. Deus Ex was conceived of as a collaborative story generator between player and designer, and it too created a robust sense of place, enabled multiple options for players to experiment with, and embedded this in the context of a sci-fi cyberpunk ethos that gets us to question the utility of technology and the future of us as a species. The systemic elements in the game mapped onto the choices that existed in the narrative in powerful ways, to create what many view as the game that put Immersive Sims on the map. Warren Specter himself describes Immersive Sims as games that just do whatever they can to convince players they exist in an alternate world, and the entire lineage of Immersive Sims share this philosophy. However, we have yet to address the question of what the point of immersion is to begin with. We have some fairly robust frameworks that can help us conceptualize why we play games. The aesthetics of play model and the five-factor personality model show us how catering to your audience can amplify the immersive trance of a game. However, we need a more sound psychological basis underneath all this to understand the universal appeal of immersive games. Self-determination theory asserts that underneath all our idiosyncratic variation, we are driven by the need to fulfill a core triad of desires. These three needs are competence, relatedness, and autonomy, and can be seen in varying degrees in different games. Competence is the feeling that you are improving at a skill, relatedness is a feeling you have when you have a place in a social network of some kind, and autonomy is not about having the ability to do anything but wanting to do the things you are doing. Viewing immersion through the lens of fulfilling needs clarifies a lot of the confusion we were experiencing earlier. The reason we may want to be immersed by the games we play is because that feeling of enrapturement is a proxy for our core needs being met, and if the virtual worlds we devise are doing a better job at this, who can blame us for wanting to enter the matrix? In our book, Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal argues that games present a version of reality that is optimized for this needs fulfillment. Her thesis is that we should learn from the games we make, optimizing a broken reality as it were. However, what if our fictions no longer serve reality, but it is reality that starts serving our fictions? I suppose this is ultimately why thinkers through the ages have been very wary of immersive technology, as it's possible we might be sucked in by our own creations. Games are an immersive art form because interactivity intrinsically enables a broader range of needs fulfillment, and if you couple this with the fact that our attentional capacity is finite, it raises concerns about how we ought to manage this technology, as reality slowly starts to fade away. Jesper yields half reality of games as true in a technical sense, as for the time being, we are straddling the line between two universes. However, we can view immersion as a threat to reality, or we can view it as an opportunity. Ironically, given his aversion to manipulative art, Plato's parable of the cave might be our best analogy. We can create worlds that are more ideal than the ones we actually inhabit, but it is then our responsibility to bring this wisdom back to people trapped viewing shadows on the wall. Then again, unless we leverage this technology responsibly, we may be consumed by our own creations, before we see the fulfillment of that dream. I suppose that future is for us to decide.