Immersion as Invitation

Words: 1996 Approximate Reading Time: 15-20 minutes

As someone who spends a lot of time both playing games and watching others play games, there is a particular word that comes up a lot: “immersion.” It’s not a concept that is brought up every time a person is playing. But it comes up quite often, perhaps most frequently as a point of criticism. If a game fails to be immersive, it has failed as a game.

Again, “immersion” is not the only thing we think about when it comes to talking about games. But it is a sticking point in many cases, and that makes it worth examining.

But in trying to examine it, we run into a problem where we find a variety of different outcomes. That is, we experience different players being immersed or not immersed in the same basic experience. A useful example of this might be horror. Look up any given horror game, and you will find people arguing about whether or not the game is actually scary. There will be at least a handful of people saying that they didn’t find the game that good because it wasn’t really scary. We could spend hours trying to dissect what “scariness” or “horror” really mean, but it’s much easier to chalk this up to a problem of immersion.

Yet if we try to simply say the player isn’t immersed, we must ask the following question: why were they not immersed?

Our gut reaction in these situations is to place the blame on the game itself. The game has done something wrong to eject the player from the experience. But this approach would ignore the ways in which we as the audience play a role in how we experience things. I’ve written before about the ways in which we interact with games – getting help, trying to guess upcoming narrative twists, playing for (or pretending that there is) an audience – can impact our feelings about a game we’ve just played.

So in examining immersion, I want to look at that exchange between player and game. The ways in which both parties can create missteps, and break immersion. Sometimes these are errors. Sometimes these are accidents. Sometimes these are matters of disconnect between player and game. Sometimes these same functions can create a new sense of immersion that was not intended.

But to truly get to the heart of immersion, we need to think of it as a space where both player and game meet. If the player makes the trek and finds the game has not put in the proper effort, then the game has failed. If the game has offered an invitation that the player has rejected, then the player has (for lack of a better term) failed.

Horror, Gameplay, and Tension

I want to focus on horror here just because it is a genre that particularly demands immersion. A game can frighten audiences easily via jump scares. But after a certain point those jump scares can stop being fun. Indeed, they can become tiring very quickly.

The key to horror lies in the building of tension. There are a variety of ways that games can do this, but much of that tension lies in the player’s immersion. The player feels tense when they feel a sense of uncertainty, a sense of danger, and so on. This is why, for instance, a game which gives you complete control can struggle to be properly horrifying.

Yet whether a player feels uncertain or ill at ease is subjective. Two players can go through the same dark corridor and have different reactions. One may feel scared by the darkness and the possibility of something jumping out, and the other may regard anything spooky as a mere prop and thus nothing to be taken seriously. The idea that a given setting or event is universally terrifying mistakes what we find scary with what is scary.

Those same quirks about individuals can hurt their ability to become immersed in an experience that others may well find engaging. As an example, one streamer I watch enjoys playing horror games, but hates how so many of them incorporate puzzle solving. I’ve wanted to explore this particular combination and why it occurs, but suffice to say the issue this streamer runs into is that he’s not good at puzzles. But that fact means that when the game is supposed to be calming you down to prepare to wind you back up for the next spooky sequence, he is spending his time being frustrated. It is a combination that takes him out of the experience and thus prevents him from being immersed.

And yet, those same sequences still serve a function. They are not inherently unimmersive, but certain players will brush against them, and will be unable to immerse themselves. We can also pose whether a given sequence is done well or poorly, but at the end of the day a significant chunk of this question is still going to boil down to what we as players want from our games.

This is an example of player and game failing to meet, and yet neither is necessarily at fault. But a player might also reject the underlying premise of the horror. If you’ve ever found yourself asking those questions that attempt to rationalize horror media – “why would you go into this clearly creepy building?”; “why is this mansion/lab/circus so enormous?”; “why is the monster always behind me waiting for me to turn around?” – those questions are the kind of thing that disengages you.

We generally call this the suspension of disbelief. Media needs to take shortcuts or have us accept things that would normally not be believable in order to tell a story and communicate an idea or feeling. And so we as audience are meant to take in all of this information without prodding deeply into it or peering beneath the curtain. When we demand information for why something is happening, or ask how we’re supposed to believe that such-and-such character can perform some feat, we lose that suspension of disbelief.

Which is not to say that therefore the audience must be uncritical and accept everything that a piece of media hands to them. Media can make mistakes. A character can go from one place to another far too quickly. A character can overcome obstacles they shouldn’t be able to. And so on and so on. True problems can exist. Part of proper criticism is knowing the difference between what you should accept and what you shouldn’t.

And that distinction is where the media’s objective comes into focus. If immersion is an invitation, media must effectively offer that invitation. A game can still take shortcuts to help build tension or make the player feel ill at ease, but it must also help the player get into the proper mindset. And likewise, it must do what it can to keep the player in that mindset.

I mentioned the example of the streamer I watched. The structure of the game necessarily drew him out. But this was a case of a mismatch between player and game. What about a fault of the game itself?

While a rather absurd example, let’s start with something easy. Horror games are often built around a thing which is scary – some kind of monster. Perhaps not a literal monster, but the word “monster” helps get across a lot about what we expect.

But imagine that the monster appears thoroughly non-threatening. A number of recent games have tried to play on this idea of children’s toys turned into creatures, but even in those examples the actual creatures being encountered are designed to be off-putting in some way. But imagine that the appearance was truly and genuinely not scary. A literal teddy bear, or a puppy. At that point, even if the rest of the game was built well, you wouldn’t be able to take the monster seriously. The game just wouldn’t be scary.

This is what I’m getting at with the game doing things wrong to eject you from the experience. Again, that example is somewhat silly because monster design is probably the place you would start. But we can extend this concept to other parts of a game’s design. The construction of the world, the mechanics of the gameplay, the placement of monsters and how often they appear, all of these things and more contribute to the atmosphere that is supposed to help players feel immersed.

When things go right – when the game is well-constructed – the invitation is extended to the player. The player can choose to accept that invitation or not, but the game has done its part. Not everyone will be immersed, but this becomes a reflection of how each individual chooses to engage with the game.

If things go wrong – when the game is poorly constructed – the invitation does not exist. Even the player who wants to accept that invitation will have a hard time doing so. Players will find it difficult to become immersed in the game because the game will continually kick them out of the experience. If players become immersed, it will be in spite of the game’s efforts.

I selected horror as a genre for this investigation because it relies so heavily on immersion. Because horror relies on a person being in their own head – jumping at shadows, startled by the smallest sounds, fearing what might happen next even if there’s nothing there. A good horror experience relies on the audience feeling invested, but by the same token the audience must be invested. A piece of media can only do so much to create the space. The audience still needs to settle into it. But horror is not the only genre where immersion is important, nor is it unique in requiring effort both from the medium and the audience.

And conceptualizing immersion as a function both of game design and player mindset allows us to better understand the discrepancies between player experiences. To see why some games may be highly praised for their immersion, only for various people to say they felt disengaged. For other games to be reviled only for some players to say they found the game incredibly immersive. It is never going to be as simple as a game being immersive and therefore drawing everybody in. There is an interplay between the game and player.

Concluding Remarks

I find myself continually coming back to the ways in which we engage with games because that engagement says a lot about us. What we accept, what we reject, what we love, what we hate, what we focus on, what we ignore. All of these aspects of our personality reveal some part of how we perceive and process the world around us. Understanding those foibles is a way for us to grow.

And the problem of immersion offers us an interesting problem to consider. Because we have all played games that didn’t immerse us. We will in the future play other games that won’t immerse us. Sometimes the game will fail to provide the invitation. Sometimes we will not accept that invitation. Or maybe we will experience a mismatch between what we and the game expect from each other.

But in encountering these issues, the question must be raised “why did I not feel immersed in this experience?” And our first thought will likely be to say that the developer has messed up. The game has failed to create the space to feel immersed. The game has not offered the invitation.

But knowing the dual components of immersion should give us pause. We should stop to ask whether we have put ourselves into the correct headspace to be immersed by the game – by any game – in the first place. If we are truly accepting the invitations given to us. Because if the fault ever lies with us and our approach to media, we may find that we will never be immersed by games. We could find ourselves chasing a phantom.