These days “Immersion” seems to be the big buzz-word for marketing departments. Marketing, being hype-driven as it is, tends to stick that “immersive gameplay” label on every single game retail box, console and demo video they release. On a deeper level, everyone in game development seems to agree that “immersion” is an important achievement, if not the ultimate goal of playing games. Immersion makes players feel passionately about a game and crave for more of the same.

Unfortunately, many game designers have failed to analyze the constituents of immersion, and have treated the concept as if it were magical; impenetrable to analysis! In this article, I will try to explore what immersive gameplay is, and how the state of immersion can be created…

What is immersion?

 
What is the player thinking when he/she is playing an immersive game? There seems to be no direct objective answer to that question. If we ask individual players to contemplate on an immersive game experience they had in the past, though, we will almost exclusively arrive at one answer:

Immersion is a state in which players start to imagine or visualize their next move in their mind’s eye along with the response of the game environment to it. This is totally different from merely thinking about the current state of the game or consciously planning their next move, and closely resembles the state of mind during a guided meditation. If you practice meditation on ideas, you will definitely have experienced the surge in your brain’s capability to unify ideas and synthesize new connections between various concepts, all while creating images and surfing through them. This is very much what happens in the immersive state in games. Scientific research has linked this type of meditation with a stark increase in gamma waves in our neocortex. It remains to be seen if they can be linked to the immersed state too.

If you think about it, a lot of stuff that we do can create this sense of immersion. When walking thorough a beautiful landscape, an immersed mind will not plan for his/her next move or consciously evaluate the value of the land, or even count the number of trees. Instead, it will “internalize” every part of the scenery. E.g. upon seeing a brook, the mind will replace that image completely with all the positive emotions/thoughts connected to the pure cool water flowing in the brook. The mind will basically simulate all the results of being in and around that stream of water and create all the emotional joy associated with it. All of this is done on a complex visual/ auditory/ kinesthetic level, which is referred to as a “binding condition” within the brain. Nothing about the brook will evoke mathematical or textual recall or even abstract reasoning when in a state of immersion.