It turns out that I have something of a vested interest in my understanding of immersion (beyond the fact that I suggested it). The reason for this is that if immersion is, funadmentally, interaction that is not consciously mediated then incompatible play-styles are not necessarily incompatible.
What I am suggesting is that by gaining familiarity with a given procedure one can learn to engage in that procedure without conscious intent. The implications of this are that all those mechanics that people complain ‘break immersion’ do not do so necessarily. It seems clear that they do break immersion for certain players, but at the same time players can learn the mechanics well enough that they will no longer be disruptive.
This also means that players can learn new types of immersion. The types that they can engage in are not hard-wired or anything like that.
Of course this is not to say that anyone should learn these things. Just because it is possible to learn to immerse while using any mechanic (and I do literally mean ‘any’ here) it is not necessarily worth doing. Some people are perfectly happy just not using the mechanic in question.
Because while you are learning to immerse with a mechanic, it does disrupt immersion. There is always going to be a transitional period between the introduction of a new mechanic and the ability to use it without consciously thinking about it. Further, this transtional period can be extremely long depending on how unfamiliar the mechanic is. I think it would be rather silly to recommend that players spend six months learning to immerse while using an extremely disruptive mechanic, not enjoying their play as much as they could throughout the familiarization process, unless there is a compelling reason to do so.
That said, sometimes there will be a compelling reason. For instance, sometimes there is someone that you very strongly desire to play with (a best friend or spouse perhaps), but who prefers a style of play that is currently incompatible with your own. Of course you could just do some other activity together, but sometimes you just really want to share a specific one.
Another thing to remember is that not all mechanics will take six months to familiarize. It might be worth having less-than-maximum fun for two or three sessions in order to maximize everyone’s fun over the course of a year-long campaign.
The point of all this is not that everyone should learn to immerse using disruptive mechanics. Rather, I am trying to highlight that this is one option, and one well worth considering, when a group is trying to work toward more fun play.
And now, at the end, I shall provide some examples of what I consider to be proof that this happens (The examples probably should have been placed earlier in the article, but…)
- I have seen players using homebrews involving rolling dice who do not really notice when the dice are rolled, or even consciously interpret them, but none the less utilize the results in their interactions.
- I have seen players who are able to stay immersed when the GM tells them how their character is feeling (i.e. ‘you are really getting pissed off’). Of course I have also seen players for whom this is totally disruptive.
- Most table-top immersives learn to filter out their surroundings. They can, to some extent, ignore background noise and interruptions.
- Many people who play online games consider themselves immersives, but they are able to filter out an incredible amount of extraneous information.
The question to people who immerse is: Does this strike you as accurate? Have you ever done this, or noticed other people doing it?
Tags: Theory
I disagree. For me, there certainly are kinds of mechanics that preclude immersion (even the light character-stance immersion that I do instead of the deep-IC); it’s not a matter of practice, it’s that they require two mutually-exclusive modes of thought. You can’t whistle while you hum; at best you can alternate between them. Generally speaking, mechanics that require you to reason about resources that the character can’t be aware of are tricky, and mechanics that require reasoning about the narrative in which the character is embedded are deadly. Dogs in the Vineyard would be the perfect anti-immersive game, for me. You can’t even begin to engage the mechanics from the point of view of the character.
Hey Joshua,
Thanks for dropping by. I’m a bit hesitant to say this, but… I think you’re wrong about yourself. (Wow that’s arrogant of me. I do apologize.)
Let me see if I can justify myself: In my own play, I make a lot of narrative-consideration decisions without thinking about them. At least I do now. That is, I can produce the effect of reasoning about narrative without actually reasoning about narrative. I’m so familiar with the input/output process that I can do it without conscious thought.
So, it seems to me, that doing narrative consideration is not necessarily opposed to immersion. Of course it was probably at least 8 months or so of play before I could do this stuff instinctually, and during that time it would, as you say, have directly opposed immersion. If immersion was my primary goal in play, then I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been willing to spend 8 months without it just for this skill.
Your whistle/hum analogy is interesting, and possibly quite apt. As far as I know (having read a single book on vocal anatomy) there is not physical reason that you can’t hum and whistle at the same time. Humming involves nasal cavity vibrations while whistling involves lip vibrations. It just turns out that most people learn to hum by cutting off air-flow through the mouth, and whistle by cutting air-flow through the nasal passages. And the question arises: is it worth the effort required to change all those habits just so you can do them both?
I guess what I’m suggesting is that it would be possible for you, given enough time, to internalize meta-resource decision making and other related mechanics to the point where they are evaluated without having to reason about them. Sort of how I (and I presume you, though maybe not) can drink a glass of water during play without breaking immersion even if your character isn’t drinking a glass of water.
Thomas
I think the basic problem here is that immersion is not fundamentally about unconscious mediation, but about acting from within character stance. There’s a reason that immersion was also called deep In-Character back in the r.g.f.a days. The preference for immersion is a preference for reasoning completely as the character, not a preference for reasoning completely unconsciously. I’ve never heard anyone who is content to reason OOC about character actions, whether for dramatic, social, or game-mechanical reasons, express the slightest interest in the kind of internalization that’s what it’s all about for people who value immersion. They’re looking for a mental experience that’s as close as possible to being the character, including conscious reasoning from the point of view of the character; they’re not looking just to play without engaging their conscious mind.
You’re just completely wrong (and arrogant, let’s not forget arrogant :P) when you suggest that if I could internalize meta-resource decision-making and other related mechanics until I don’t have to reason about them that would be the same thing as–or at least not break–immersion. Immersion is broken each and every time a game decision has to admit non-IC considerations. It’s not a matter of practice: it’s logically impossible for the decisions to be simultaneously purely IC and IC plus non-IC. Drinking a glass of water is not an apropos comparison, because it’s not a character decision; it’s not even a game event. Stopping to decide something about the character or game-world OOC breaks immersion, even if the result of the decision is unconscious, even if it’s really quick, and even if you don’t mind the interruption and can slide right back into immersion. That’s just a fact about what immersion is.
In the end, I don’t think you’ve really engaged why people want to immerse at all, so your advice towards how to do that under adverse conditions is really not very helpful. With practice, you can learn to hike even while riding a bicycle is not a particularly useful, even to someone who is trying to figure out how to have the most fun with a group of people who prefer bicycling to hiking.
I’ll square Thomas’ arrogance by suggesting that he may be somewhat right about immersion and mechanics but have chosen an unfortunate analogy to support his claim. Now, that’s because I think the original analogy of humming and whistling is way off–just like hiking and bicycling. Bad casuistry.
To back up Thomas: Any sort of immersion rests upon a certain degree of pattern acquisition. You don’t magically start immersing one day–it’s a learned behavior with some serious evolutionary infrastructure. Immersion is a particularly profound sort of mimicry–something that is not just superficial social behavior for us primate-types. Definitely in the case of people, mimicry tends to develop a secondary reflexive element. We mimic but almost reflexively start to qualify extended mimicry as ‘good’ behavior that is ‘good’ in its own right. Which creates some real conflicts for people who move between different sorts of mimicry (the classic double consciousness that folks like W. E. B. DuBois raised in reference to the African Americans).
Ok, back from that tangent–what makes immersion feel so intense is that the mimicry is felt as ‘second nature’–that the person doing it has so deeply picked up a pattern of mimicry that they can apply it quickly without consciously processing it. All Thomas is saying is that most people who are capable of this impressive feat are probably also capable of adding the mechanics of a game to their unconscious set of patterns which they can engage in without breaking form.
Now, that being said, you have a point–it is a different skill set to incorporate mechanical math-y bits into ‘second nature’ than it is to incorporate social bits. Some people are good at one, some at both. Those who are good at both should be able to immerse and manipulate mechanics after teaching themselves to articulate the two halves–sort of like learning to dance, where you need to move arm and legs in a way that initially seems foreign, but itself becomes second nature. In fact, even graceful second nature. You may not be a dancer, but that doesn’t mean dancers aren’t out there.
Joshua,
You’re likely right in thinking that I don’t entirely ‘get it’. I’ve never wanted to do deep-immersion, and I’ve never actually done it either. I’m basically operating on an understanding that’s based on how it’s been explained to me, and that understanding is likely flawed to one degree or another. That said, I still think I’m right about this (ah, smell the arrogance).
Let me try to get at why again. Sticking with the glass of water example…
Drinking from a glass of water is a voluntary action (not an involuntary one like your heart beating). Thus it requires intent, and that means decisions are being made on some level. If I’m interpreting your point that ‘[t]he preference for immersion is a preference for reasoning completely as the character’ correctly, then part of what deep-immersion is about is entering completely into the decision processes of the character.
There are two possible things going on here. Both of them are supported, but I happen to prefer one because it supports my point.
1) Drinking water actually does disrupt immersion because it involves making decisions that aren’t in the head-space of the character, but that the dirsuption is minor enough that you deal with it. This seems to be supported by the fact that the really hard-core immersive LARP people talk a lot about using the environment to enhance immersion. The implication is that if the actual environment isn’t in synch with the character’s environment, then immersion is disrupted to some degree.
2) Drinking water isn’t disruptive to immersion because the decisions that lead to it are made using a ‘segregated’ (for lack of a better word) set of decision-making processes. The decision to drink the water is made outside of the stream of immersion, but does not require the breaking of the immersive state. This seems to be supported by the way most tabletop immersives explain the way things work (and my limited observation of such players) which suggests that players are able to exclude certain inputs and outputs from their immersive experience. For example, players are able to remain immersed even if they sneeze and their character doesn’t, or even if they (using the above example) take a drink of water and their character doesn’t.
I clearly prefer the second interpretation, but it’s possible that the first is going on. And in all honesty it’s possible that there’s a third and a fourth (etc.) explanation that I have just totally missed.
I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this stuff because you’re more personally familiar with this stuff than I am (or so I infer from your comments). I am willing to learn, but my arrogance can make it difficult, for which I apologize. Still, if you’re willing to struggle through this with me, well, I can at least promise to listen…
Thomas
“2) Drinking water isn’t disruptive to immersion because the decisions that lead to it are made using a ’segregated’ (for lack of a better word) set of decision-making processes.”
This is not the same thing as making out of character decisions about your character. The act of drinking is *completely* separated from the IC experience. Making OOC decisions is connected to the IC experience. The break of immersion happens when the OOC decision about a something clash with the IC decision. This will never happen while drinking water.
The extent of this problem depends (at least for me) on how deep the immersion is. In deep larp immersion a simple imperfection in the physical enviroment could break my immersion. In semi-deep tabletop immersion a clash between the will of the character and player will cause a break. I guess that even lighter immersion (what I usually call setting immersion, where you immerse in the game as much as the character) do not suffer from this as greatly or maybe not at all.
Just for the record, I have been able to whistle and hum simultaneously for years. It started out sounding like a UFO imitation but grew into a two-voiced melody. (I can’t whistle two separate voices, but then I could never sing the base line even though I had the voice.)
Let’s just agree that it isn’t a good analogy here and not focus on it.
Fang Langford
What can I say? If you practice enough, I feel that eventually you will grasp the distinction between In-Gameworld vs. Out-of-Gameworld events, and In-Character and Out-of-Character decisions within the Gameworld. Once you do, you’ll be able to appreciate why the glass-of-water example is completely irrelevant, as well as being able to judge pretty accurately which mechanics in a system are likely to be problems to someone playing immersively vs. which ones are likely to fly by without them batting an eye.
Joshua,
It’s entirely possible that you’re right here. I think that one of the main reasons I’m a resistent to that idea is that my own observations of people who immerse seem to indicate that people have different things that disrupt them. Some mechanic might really screw up one person’s immersion, and not cause another person to bat an eye.
That suggests, to me anyway, that they’re either doing something different (which is possible, but they both say they’re immersing, and describe similar experiences), or they just find different things disruptive to the core immersive experience.
If it’s the latter, then it seems that the difference has to be one of aculturation or experience, not something fundamental to the act of immersion. Which in turn suggests that these behaviors can be learned and/or unlearned.
Does that match up with your own immersion, or do you think that people who are disrupted by different things are doing fundamentally differen’t activities?
Thomas
I think you’re making an incorrect assumption about the nature of the problem. You’re treating immersion primarily as some kind of a flow state that is disrupted by distraction or interruption — which is OK as far as it goes, but it’s the wrong emphasis.
That’s only the second thing about immersion.
The first thing is that it’s deep IC.
Handling time and familiarity can be distracting with respect to mechanics; and that may be something people can learn to get over. But that’s not the only problem that mechanics can have. It’s not the big one.
The big one is unbelievability.
An immersive player who finds a mechanic unbelievable — who doesn’t believe it maps properly to what’s going on in the gameworld — inevitably finds it a disruption to immersion. It’s not that it’s time-consuming: it’s that it’s telling a lie.
People differ markedly in what breaks their suspension of disbelief. They differ in how they think the real world works; they differ in what they can accept as plausible deviations from our own reality; they differ in what kind of input their models can accept; and they differ in how much consciousness of metaworld concerns affects their sense of the plausibility of the fiction.
If you demonstrated that anyone could learn to ignore the distraction factor of any mechanic, you still wouldn’t have made a case that anyone can learn to immerse with any mechanic. What you’d actually need to demonstrate is that anyone can learn to suspend disbelief in any proposition to the point where they can incorporate it into subconscious modelling and produce a compelling sense of looking through another persons’ eyes, to see another place and another time.
Keran,
Sorry it took so long to get back to you. Especially since this is an extremely good point. I’m still trying to figure out precisely what implications this has for my model, since I currently imagine that you can learn to side-step suspension of disbelief issues. But it’s definitely a consideration that I had totally forgotten to look at.
I think at this point that I simply need a massive corpus of actual play to examine in order to see how immersion works mechanically, and this is a major point to look at: how do people handle suspension of disbelief.
So, thanks for pointing this out.
Thomas