Influencing Immersion

People want to be immersed. Designers want them to be immersed. Therefore, designers and players can collude to make immersion happen. In this sense, immersion is easier to design for than community, because it mainly involves telling players what they want to hear. You don’t have to worry about how much immersion you want, or how quickly to deliver it—just give them as much as you can as quickly as you can, and they’ll do the rest.

The key to immersion is persuasion. The more persuasive an environment is, the easier it is to become immersed in it. The biggest weapon in the designer’s armory of persuasion is familiarity. You might at an intellectual level know you’re in a virtual world, but if everything acts just like it would in the real world then you gradually find yourself treating the world as if it were real while knowing it isn’t. Because you do know it isn’t real, you can still behave as an individual in ways that you wouldn’t if it were the real world, yet because it feels real you can nevertheless believe you’re in it. When knowledge and belief coincide, that’s immersion ¹.

Although similarity to reality is a good way to influence immersion, it suffers from the fact that at first glance players don’t want reality; if they did, they could have it by default for free—they wouldn’t be in the virtual world. Historical, magical, and futuristic virtual worlds by necessity must differ from reality; however, that doesn’t mean they don’t intersect with reality. Players can still be given a strong sense of familiarity, which will smooth their path to immersion just as much as it would in a present-day setting.

This “similarity to reality” approach to inducing immersion seems to suggest that graphical virtual worlds have the edge on textual ones, because they have pictures (like reality) whereas textual worlds don’t. Although in the short term they are indeed patently more like reality, in the long term the situation is not so clear cut. The constructs that designers are creating exist only in the minds of players: Graphics put it there through the senses; text puts it there through the imagination. Text can convey nuances that graphics can’t; indeed, it can convey nuances that reality can’t except through language. Text is also harder to deny. It is not, however, anywhere near as immediate as graphics. On the whole, therefore, text gives the more immersive experience, but it starts too slowly for many people. With graphics, you can still reach immersion, and you start off halfway there already.

The more that players don’t have to think about interacting with their environment, the less they will think about it, and therefore the more immersive their time in the world will be. As an example, consider gravity. There’s no inherent reason why a virtual world should have gravity pulling people down—it could just as easily pull them clockwise around the planet. If it pulls them down, though, players take it for granted. They know what will happen when they drop something. They know what will happen when they jump off the ledge. They don’t even have to think about it, as it matches their model of real-world physics. It enhances immersion.

If they know it, they don’t have to learn it; if it works like reality, it seems more real; if functionality is transparent, it won’t be seen. When players say that a virtual world is unrealistic, they’re complaining that it is breaking their immersion ². Magic doesn’t happen in real life, but in a Fantasy virtual world it’s not unrealistic; if it appeared in a Cyberpunk setting, that would indeed make it unrealistic.

Let players use their intellect to operate within the context of the virtual world; don’t force them to use it to maintain the illusion of reality for themselves.