Revising Immersion: A Conceptual Model for the Analysis of Digital Game Involvement

Game studies literature has recently seen a renewed interest in game experience with the recent publication of a number of edited collections, dissertations and conferences focusing on the subject. This paper aims to contribute to that growing body of literature by presenting a summary of my doctoral research in digital game involvement and immersion. It outlines a segment of a conceptual model that describes and analyzes the moment by moment involvement with digital games on a variety of experiential dimensions corresponding to six broad categories of game features. The paper ends with a proposal to replace the metaphor of immersion with one of incorporation. Incorporation aims to avoid the binary notion of the player’s plunge into the virtual environment characteristic of “immersion” while dispelling the vagueness of application that all too often surrounds the term. AUTHOR KEYWORDS MMOGs, immersion, involvement, incorporation, player experience. This paper proposes an analytical model for describing and analyzing players’ moment by moment involvement in digital games. The game studies literature archive is steadily increasing in volume, but there has so far been a marked shying away from a structured framework analyzing game involvement and immersion. The first step in establishing such a framework is the identification of a clear set of game involvement specific terms. Using qualitative methods conducted in conjunction with the PhD project of which this paper is part, I have aimed to create a more detailed map of the phenomena of game involvement, building a vocabulary that acknowledges its varied and complex nature and in so doing contribute to the existing body of literature on game experience. In the process of this explication the model also affirms the importance of positing specific terms for addressing game involvement over other non-ergodic media objects. The aim is thus to enact a framework which will enable game students, theorists and designers to address issues of game involvement in more nuanced ways than the current conceptualizations allow.