Quote from: StuartThere's actually more than two schools, and Method Acting is more than just getting into character.  It involves tying your own real experiences to those of your character.  So if you need to play the part of someone who's starving, you don't eat.  That sorta thing.

Yeah, I know.  And there are different types of Method Acting, some more like in character role-playing and some less so (mapping personal experiences onto the character's experiences).  I was trying to keep it simple and more than once, I've heard actors talk of the disconnect between actors who approach their role by trying to understand their characters and actors who emote based on how the script and director tell them to emote, be it the classic "Why don't you just act?" line that Olivier supposedly delivered to Dustin Hoffman or the two anecdotes that I just described.  The "just act" people always seem to find getting into character to be an odd way to depict a character, while the people who do it seem to have a lot of fun with it.

I'm also saying that I think I'd rather have Adam Baldwin in a role-playing game with me than Jewel Staite, at least as far as character portrayal goes.

Quote from: StuartFilm isn't entirely passive either.  If you see a shot of someone buying groceries followed by a shot of them cooking dinner, you mentally fill in the events that take place between those two moments.

Sure.  And if I fall asleep in the train, I can fill in how I got to my station.  But I can't do that if I'm driving, can I?

Quote from: Stuart"Willing suspension of disbelief" is sometimes used as well.

I think the use of "willing" is sometimes misleading, because the elements of a work of fiction can work for or against the suspension of disbelief and sometimes, even if the will is there, the work of fiction fights so hard to make a person disbelieve that they just can't suspend their disbelief.

Quote from: John MorrowI'm also saying that I think I'd rather have Adam Baldwin in a role-playing game with me than Jewel Staite, at least as far as character portrayal goes.

I'm glad you put that qualifier in there

Another quote from Janet Murray's book "Hamlet on the Holodeck":

QuoteThe pleasurable surrender of the mind to an imaginative world is often described, in Coleridge's phrase, as "the willing suspension of disbelief." But this is too passive a formulation even for traditional media.  When we enter a fictional world, we do not merely "suspend" a critical faculty; we also excercise a creative faculty. We do not suspend disbelief so much as we actively create belief. Because of our desire to experience immersion, we focus our attention on the enveloping world and we use our intelligence to reinforce rather than to question the reality of the experience.

As the literary theorists known as the "reader response" school have long argued, the act of reading is far from passive: we construct alternate narratives as we go along, we cast actors or people we know into the roles of the characters, we perform the voices of the characters in our heads, we adjust the emphasis of the story to suit our interests, and we assemble the story into the cognitive schemata that make up our own systems of knowledge and belief.  Similarly when we watch a movie, we take the separate spaces of hte various sets and merge them into a continuous space that exists only in our minds. We take fragmentary scenes and mentally supply the missing actions; if someone is seen with a grocery bag and then working over a stove, we understand the meal is effortful. If someone is wearing an Ivy League sweatshirt, we might assume they are intelligent and earnest, or maybe spoiled and preppy. We bring our own cognitive, cultural, and psychological templates to every story as we assess the characters and anticipate the way the story is likely to go.

One thing that's come up on the parallel Story Games thread, which I've been wanting to say here, is that "having the in-game events seem real" version of "immersion" still obscures differences.

It's possible for "everything to seem real" without necessarily viewing the game action from the perspective of the character. It's a little like the difference I noticed, watching detective shows back in the 70's, between shows like Columbo, where the audience had a nearly omniscient perspective and could see both sides of the conflict between the detective and the criminal, and the more traditional Holmesian whodunnit. For that matter James Bond flicks usually show the viewer far more than what Bond himself sees (though details of the evil mastermind's plot are often revealed piecemeal until the moment the mastermind explains the full ramifications directly to Bond).

To an audience, either approach can be just as "real" as the other, and it seems the same can apply to a game where the players make decisions "outside of" their characters. I don't doubt that a game of collaboratively telling a story, where there's no fixed limitation of one player controlling one character, can "seem real". As has been suggested a number of times, this mode of play may be quite natural for people who are used to GMing "immersively", which I take to mean intuitively improvising details and events based on visualization and impression, possibly also portraying several NPCs at one time.

Nevertheless based on some experience I find that games which head in that direction (e.g. through use of round-robin GMing or lots of leeway for players to improv environment and backstory) fail to provide "immersion" in the sense I usually think of it. Which is: approaching the game and acting in it from the perspective of a person inside the game world. And in that sense I'm not particularly troubled by complex mechanics, table lookups, etc., the way that I've seen some "immersionists" describe. As far as I'm concerned those are all just mechanics of representation which once mastered are easily translated into the I/O interface of the PC relative to the game world.

As well, I don't think of "immersion" in terms of having a strong sense of the character as an independent entity. Yes, I've had emotional responses to things that also affected the PC, but that's simply from putting myself in their shoes. It's harder to get that sense of the character when it's someone very different but even when it's not there I think of the game as "immersive" when there's that character/world I/O interface, and no particular need for me to steer my character as an author would toward action that "contributes to the story". I'd rather just use the character do "stuff" that has an effect, maybe become more powerful, maybe take down somebody I don't like, or talk to someone interesting in the game world, whatever.

Quote from: Elliot WilenIt's possible for "everything to seem real" without necessarily viewing the game action from the perspective of the character.

This is certainly true. Many books and movies follow the action of more than just the protagonist.  It's why I wanted to make the distinction between narrative immersion and "VR Immersion" or "deep in-character" immersion (or whatever you want to call it).

Quote from: Elliot WilenNevertheless based on some experience I find that games which head in that direction (e.g. through use of round-robin GMing or lots of leeway for players to improv environment and backstory) fail to provide "immersion" in the sense I usually think of it. Which is: approaching the game and acting in it from the perspective of a person inside the game world.

I've found that any kind of "world creation" seems to really get in the way of "world immersion"

Quote from: StuartThis is certainly true. Many books and movies follow the action of more than just the protagonist.  It's why I wanted to make the distinction between narrative immersion and "VR Immersion" or "deep in-character" immersion (or whatever you want to call it).

You should change the title of the thread, then.

Quote from: StuartI've found that any kind of "world creation" seems to really get in the way of "world immersion"

There is a difference between preparation techniques and techniques using during play that's captured badly in most theory discussions.  World creation can be a great help to world immersion (in character or otherwise), in my opinion, when it happens as preparation for a game or campaign.  For example, the D&D 3.5 game that I recently played in (run by one of the authors of Castle Whiterock) took place in a village that was so detailed that the GM knew who lived in every building, how the different characters were related to each other, and so on and it was incredibly deep and realistic as a result.  Doing world creation on the fly, in an ad hoc manner, on the other hand, can be a problem.

Quote from: John MorrowThere is a difference between preparation techniques and techniques using during play that's captured badly in most theory discussions.  World creation can be a great help to world immersion (in character or otherwise), in my opinion, when it happens as preparation for a game or campaign.

Good point.  I meant world creation when done during gameplay.  I agree that if done before the game starts it can help with immersion.

Basically I'm pointing to the experience of people who say that when they GM, they "just know" what's going on in a given situation. E.g. Sarah Kahn mentioned that she would often do things that way, in a comment on my Livejournal, here.

Apparently the approach was called "channeling" on rec.games.frp.advocacy. Here's an example, from another poster. (Bear in mind that any time you see "Simulationist" on r.g.f.a it basically just means the game-world operates according to internal principles with a minimum of metagame-motivated influence in the course of play.)

I think that the channeling concept was later applied back from GMing to the idea, for players, of "just knowing" exactly how a character was thinking and behaving, even if the player didn't "immerse" in the sense of strongly seeing things through the character's eyes, first-person-style.

Neither of these approaches/experiences jibes very closely with what I do either as a GM or player, and in fact it's distracting when a GM does it in a game I'm playing. It makes me start thinking out-of-character (i.e. it disrupts "immersion" in my sense), especially if the GM's improv includes unlikely or frustrating events. (Being frustrated by dice isn't nearly as distracting.)

But the real point I want to make here is that if people are comfortable with this approach and they're used to perceiving it in terms of the world or character "coming alive", then I can understand (a) why they'd call it "immersion" and (b) why they'd find no contradiction between "immersion" and games with round-robin GMing, or mechanics & expectations that have players making decisions and affecting things from an out-of-character perspective.

Quote from: Elliott WilenNeither of these approaches/experiences jibes very closely with what I do either as a GM or player, and in fact it's distracting when a GM does it in a game I'm playing. It makes me start thinking out-of-character (i.e. it disrupts "immersion" in my sense), especially if the GM's improv includes unlikely or frustrating events. (Being frustrated by dice isn't nearly as distracting.)

This is a great point and ties in very well to what's discussed in the Murray book, and other writings on immersion, suspension of disbelief, breaking the 4th wall, etc.

From Marie-Laure Ryan's book Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media

Quote from: Poetics of immersionThree forms of textual immersion are distinguished and discussed in two chapters.
1. Spatial: the reader develops a sense of place, a sense of being on the scene of the narrated events.
2.Temporal : the experience of a reader caught up in narrative suspense, the burning desire to know what happens next.
3. Emotional : the phenomenon of developing a personal attachment to the characters, of participating in their human experience.

Narrative techniques are evaluated in terms of their ability to promote these various types of immersion, and immersivity is shown to be more important to the effect of literary realism than the life-likeness of the fictional world.

Hmm.  More writing about the problems of having immersion and interactivity at the same time...

Quote from: Marie-Laure RyanWhile interactivity and immersion support each other in VR, it is argued that they conflict in literature because interactivity requires an awareness of signs, while immersion depends on their disappearance. The more actively and lucidly the reader participates in the textual game of the construction of meaning, the less she will be caught in the illusion of reality projected by the textual world. Some postmodern texts alternate between immersive and interactive moments, but as long as language is the only medium involved, the two dimensions cannot be experienced at the same time.

More sources, more quotes!

First from a Master's student working on a thesis related to videogames:

Quote from: kev/nullWe don't know what exactly makes a game immersive. What we do know is that a lack of suspension of disbelief (SoD) or "willingness to forgive" is likely to break immersion so we want players to maintain SoD. So we use the definition that no SoD = no immersion.

I tend to agree with this, and while there's not *that much* written about immersion, there is a good deal written about Suspension of Disbelief.  This could be very useful in game design, even if we don't have a airtight definition of "immersion" that every RPG theory-type agrees to.

From The Daedalus Project: MMORPG Research, Cyberculture, MMORPG Psychology.

Quote from: In Their Own Words: The Immersion ComponentA prevalent theme among players who enjoy being immersed in a game centers on developing a back-story or history for their characters. For them, it is crucial that their character makes sense and is rooted in the lore and mythos of the world.

A couple of the interviewed gamers:

Quote from: Interviewed Gamer 1Immersion is an important part as far as feeling like I'm really part of the game world. I don't necessarily Role-Play a lot, but feeling like I'm 'in' the game is really fun. For example, in EQ, I felt like I was just playing a random computer game. Whereas with WoW I really feel like I'm involved because there's a rich history and I know a lot of the history about it. WoW has more depth and immersion than EQ in my opinion because of this.

Quote from: Interviewed Gamer 2i started playing mmorpg games (primairly FFXI) as an escape.. a way to deal with the stress i was having. I don't do drugs, i don't smoke, i don't drink... so gaming was my method of escape... i loved being immersed in the virtual world and playing a role (i was a white mage ... level 67). i loved playing the role of a magician/healer ... working together as a team and having everyone involved play the very best they could.... it was so much fun!

Stuart, while I don't want to explain this in detail I have to say I find those quotes on the experience of literature deeply questionable, both empirically (not my experience) and theoretically (thank GOD not my experience). And as El Rabbit stated earlier on, the term "immersion" is used far too generally and far too metaphorically. IME, whenever you see something like that happening it means an intellectual inquiry has hit a dead end.

The dead end here being, I suspect, the effort to assimilate RPG experience to non-RPG experience. What needs to happen is to get at the root uniqueness of RPGs, not their supposed commonality with films or novels or comics or TV serials or music. In other words, what needs to be established is the specificity of the RPG as a medium in its own right, over against other media. *That* should be the first step.