Things to Demote

The twin enemies of immersion are Reality and sterility.

If players are continually reminded that they’re in Reality, it will disrupt their sense of immersion. You can’t stop someone’s significant other from bringing them a mug of coffee, but you can stop your virtual world’s interface from being intrusive and you can prevent references to Reality from sneaking in. Keeping Reality out is why commercials are unacceptable in virtual worlds, but product placement is comparatively okay.

Demoting Reality can be tricky because designers often want to provide mechanisms to support other features (particularly community) that involve reference to it. Immersion usually loses out in these conflicts, because returning to it is relatively quick. When it does become necessary, designers must first consider whether they can hide it within the virtual world’s fiction. If they can, that’s fine; if they can’t, they should formally take it out of the virtual world in some way—a separate window, a different color of font—so that players perceive it as being distinct from where they were. When the screen returns to normal, they can then (hopefully) dive right back in where they left off.

Sterility is counter-immersive because it induces ennui. While they’re having fun, players are working toward immersion; when they become bored, the direction changes and they work away from it. Note that this does not happen in the face of unpleasantness, unless the unpleasantness is relentless; players accept change while immersed, but not fossilization. It’s as if you’re watching a movie and suddenly the projector locks in freeze-frame: You may not have been enjoying the movie, but at least you were absorbed by it; now, you’re out of it.

Of all the ways to kill a virtual world through bad design, boring the players is the one most guaranteed to succeed.