Levels of Immersion

One of Nick Yee’s facets is immersion. This is a concept with a long and distinguished history in role-playing contexts ¹, and it has been mentioned a number of times already in this book. So what, exactly, is it?

Fundamentally, immersion is the sense that a player has of being in a virtual world. The more immersive a virtual world, the greater its ability to immerse its players. Some virtual worlds (particularly non-game ones) deliberately aim for low immersion, so as not to distract from their purpose; most, however, aim to be as immersive as possible.

Although players can experience many degrees of immersion, there are conceptual or emotional barriers along the way that players must pass if they are to proceed further. Immersion can therefore most usefully be described in terms of a series of levels:

• Player

• Avatar

• Character

• Persona

The human being sitting at the computer, interacting with the virtual world, is a player. The player will be controlling an object within the virtual world that is associated with them. The way the player regards that object is a measure of their immersion. If they consider it simply to be a computer construction with which they don’t identify (as they might, say, a document in a word processor), then they are not immersed.

Most players of virtual worlds easily identify with the object they control. At the very least, they regard the object as their representative in the virtual world. For them, the object is their avatar—a puppet that they control and the conduit through which they act. Players will refer to their avatars in the third person, but may flesh them out with a few personality quirks. “Alice has a thing about cats, so she won’t go near them.” On the whole, though, avatars are mere conveniences—ways to effect change in a virtual world.

The next stage is for players to stop thinking of the object they control as their representative, but rather as their representation. The object is a tokenization of the player. This is the character level, at which the majority of players are found. A character is an extension of a player’s self, a whole personality that the player dons when they enter the virtual world. Players may maintain several characters, each a distinct and rounded personality, which the player treats as a friend. Characters are referred to by name; although a player might say, “I lost my sword last night,” what they mean is more like, “Thorina lost her sword when I was playing her last night.”

Avatars are dolls, characters are simulacra, but neither are people. The final level of immersion—the one which makes virtual worlds wholly different to anything else—is that of the persona.

A persona is a player, in a world. That’s in it. Any separate distinction of character is gone—the player is the character. You’re not role-playing a being, you are that being; you’re not assuming an identity, you are that identity; you’re not projecting a self, you are that self. If you’re killed in a fight, you don’t feel that your character has died, you feel that you have died ². There’s no level of indirection, no filtering, no question: You are there.

This is something that many people examining virtual worlds from the outside fail to understand. Avatars and characters are just steps along the way. Looking at characters to try to develop an understanding of why virtual worlds are so appealing is pointless except in the case of die-hard role-players. Sometimes full immersion is likened to an altered state of consciousness ³; this is much closer to the truth, but still misses the mark (you can daydream while in a virtual world without leaving it).

It’s about identity. When player and character merge to become a persona, that’s immersion; that’s what people get from virtual worlds that they can’t get from anywhere else; that’s when they stop playing the world and start living it.

I should point out that my use of some of the terms here is rather technical. In my explanation of the different levels of immersion, I was at pains to refer to the object that the player is associated with as just that, an “object.” In everyday use, designers will use the terms “players,” “avatars,” and “characters” almost interchangeably. Even at the technical level, there can be differences: Some designers, for example, use “avatar” to refer strictly to what I have called “character,” preferring “puppet” for what I have called “avatar;” others use it to refer to the graphical representation of a character as rendered on a screen (as opposed to the in-world object itself). There’s also a possible additional level between player and avatar, subordinate, whereby the player treats their world object as an independent agent able to obey commands but capable of autonomous action; in practice, though, virtual worlds are set up such that almost every player skips the stage entirely.

Immersion is connected to the computer-mediated communication (CMC) idea of presence—the illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated ⁴. Presence manifests in several forms, of which two (“presence as immersion” and “presence as transportation”) together correspond well with what virtual world designers mean by “immersion;” others, particularly “presence as realism,” can help effect immersion.

In a CMC context, transportation concerns is the sense a user has that something is elsewhere from where it really is; for virtual worlds, the “something” is the player and the “elsewhere” is the virtual world. The CMC idea of immersion does not rely on transportation, but is otherwise quite similar to what virtual world designers mean by the term. The main difference is one of emphasis: CMC researchers view “perceptual immersion” and “psychological immersion” as equal partners; virtual world designers view psychological immersion as paramount, considering perceptual immersion to be merely one of many possible means to achieve that end.

Immersion is also connected with the psychological concept of flow ⁵. Indeed, some designers see the two as equivalent. Flow is an exhilarating sense of control and mastery that can arise from pursuing a focused, goal-driven activity; it’s a deep involvement that transcends distractions and sense of time, leading to an ecstatic state of peak productivity. However, although flow regularly occurs in virtual worlds, it’s not the kind of immersion that I’m talking about here. Players can be fully immersed without any sense of ecstasy—indeed, they could be quite miserable. Flow and immersion (as I mean it here) can play off each other, but neither is dependent on the other.

Immersion is an important concept in virtual world design, because it plays so much a part in conveying the entire virtual experience. Without immersion, there is a fence between player and virtual world; with immersion, the barriers are lifted—players can concentrate on doing what they want to do, on being what they want to be.

That said, the role of immersion is often misunderstood. It’s an important facilitator, but that’s all it is: Although players intensely enjoy being immersed, imbuing immersion is not itself the ultimate aim of virtual world design. It does lie on the right path, but a little further back than many designers suppose.

I’m getting increasingly philosophical here, but it’s not immersion itself that is intoxicating; rather, it’s what immersion helps deliver: identity.