Immersionist play kills off RL communication?

[Domhnall]

In the "Balance", "Fairness"? thread, Callan wrote:

And on a side point, although pushing expectations onto others is a bad thing, immersionist play has a tendancy to kill off real life communication between players. While we should support others play styles, I see immersionist play as being self destructive to itself, the deeper the immersion sought. If any help is asked for with such a play style, what can you offer but to push expectations that don't revolve around self distructive play?
PS: Only refering to immersion that starts killing off RL communication, as destructive.

Since the former thread is now closed, I'd like his (anyone's) explanation of this assertion.  

Thanks.

[komradebob]

Hey Dan:

First a warning: I'm not the best person to venture into terminology. Having said that...

Immersion can happen at two levels (commonly):
1) The individual player engages in immersionism to the extent that they sort of become "daydream-y". They're enjoying imagining the situation/world in their own head and start to disengage from the actual realworld situation. I'm not talking about some sort of mental dysfunction that you should call in a therapist for. I'm just talking about a state where the person in question is really just sort of setting back and enjoying their own head space rather than engaging with a group as a whole.

2) The second type is sometimes seen in games that actively encourage players to "stay in character", and actively discourage out of character considerations. I suspect this comes out of a lot of late 80s early 90s games like the WW stuff. When players and designers started to look more at the character as a "persona" rather than a game piece, there was a move towards a more cinematic/literary approach to gaming.

Now, personally, I think both of the above philosophies are okay when not taken to an extreme. I think Callan was probably referring to cases where immersionism was taken to a more extreme point.

The interference with real life conversation is probably more obvious in the first case. In the second case, interference comes from a similar place, but also includes an inability of players whose characters are not present in a given location or scene to participate in the game. For example, suggestions to the active players may be discouraged by a GM, since their characters aren't present or if they are present, the player may be forced to "speak aloud in character" to offer suggestions.

This stuff is all a matter of personal preference, of course. One of the things that several posters here have been concerned with in their designs are ways to allow player engagement, even when their piece/character is not present in a scene/ location. Allowing or encouraging game related tabletalk is one of those ways.

Robert

[Valamir]

Daniel, when next you have a couple of hours to kill on reading long threads, I direct your attention to:

Players never have a "free choice"  It starts off tangental to your question but served as the starting point for a whole series of split off threads on the topic of Immersion.

Group Player ownership of all PC's which got a little toasty,

and

Deep Immersion which is probably less useful than the second one as it rapidly degenerated into alot of around and around.

[Gordon C. Landis]

And I will add a link to Jay's recent Middle Earth actual play, where my comments towards the end touch upon this a good deal.

I'll just add that people can get quite good at actually communicating as real people without being obvious (even to themselves) about it.  I've seen play where people would claim "we never broke immersion" when it was obvious to me that all kinds of interpersonal communication was going on about what actions were approved/appreciated, what grated on one person's nerves, and etc.  "Immersion" most often (in my experience) becomes selfish when a player uses it to NOT engage with the other players AT ALL, usually as a response to criticism (direct or implied) of their choices(s) in the game.

Immersion is not selfish if, and only if, we can accurately say the real people are engaged with each other via immersion.  From that starting point, the practical issues of taste/style of "immersion" and degree/style of real-person communication can be sorted out.

(Note also that, IMO, this is true regardless of the GNS Creative Agenda at hand.)

Gordon

[Andrew Norris]

One of the most obvious areas where immersion reduces player communication is the old idea that if your character isn't in a scene, you shouldn't be involved, or even listening. That might be a side issue, since it's a technique that's used often in immersion-heavy play, but it does come up.

I think the more general issue as brought up in the parent thread is that certain types of communication at the table require breaking immersion, so if you're fully immersed, you don't do them (or develop elaborate ways of doing them nonverbally). If you as a player just aren't happy with what's in what's happening in a given scene, you might tell the group and initiate discussion about it. But if you're 100% in Actor stance, then you have to try to imply it. (As Gordon said, a lot of people end up developing elaborate methods to communicate nonverbally at the player level.)

(The rest of this post is anecdotal experience, but I've read dozens and dozens of Actual Play experiences elsewhere that are similar.)

My personal experience with this problem was in a D&D game a few years back, with a group that hadn't played any RPGs in years (and had never played together). My guy was supposed to be bookish but capable, with skill choices to suit (including lots of allocations to Charisma and diplomacy skills). The expected style of play (which 'just happened', in that we never discussed it, but everybody at the table seemed to fall into based on their previous roleplaying experiences) was full Actor stance in "talky" scenes.

My portrayal of the character was heavily tinged at my own nervousness at acting. (To compound the problem, some of us didn't know each other at all before play started, one of my fellow players was a woman I'd had a previous relationship with, and one of the first dialog-heavy scenes involved her using her character to take out some real-life aggression on me in front of strangers.) My words and body language meant that the character came across as a stammering, inconsistent stuffed shirt. I'd envisioned the character as something like Indiana Jones (in his role as professor, not his swashbuckling side), and he came across as Tartuffe.

I remember one pivotal scene where my (on paper) unflappable diplomat had to negotiate aid from a local ruler. I put the wrong words in my character's mouth, and may have contradicted myself. The GM played the ruler as suspicous, asking more and more pointed questions, and I became nervous, so my character looked completely guilty. Enter three hours of escape and combat, cutting us off from a large amount of GM-prepared content and leaving one player twiddling her thumbs for the entire session (she'd waited outside, since we were only going in to negotiate safe passage).

After the game the GM said that the meeting was only supposed to be a quick "Get information and move on" thing, maybe a fifteen minute scene at most, and asked why I didn't just tell the ruler the truth. If he'd broken character for a minute early on in the scene and told me that, we'd have figured out a way to salvage the scene. But the GM was so into "being the ruler" that the thought never occured to him.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Here's my favorite back-reading on the issue: Thoughts on why immersion is a tar baby.

Best,
Ron

[Domhnall]

I understand a bit better now, but have only skimmed those past threads.  

Well, Andrew, we also use that same link of PC-to-player knowledge.  In fact when I first found the Forge (and was totally ignorant of all these other styles of play) I started by posting my Mystery, the Mirth of Role Playing essay where I endorse even using headphones to expedite the process of passing on info to only the appropriate people.  (Fortunately, everyone at the Forge was quite patient with me then.)

We still use these methods, but I should clarify something.  While we hate the idea of a GM interfering with our choices by "tweaking" the cause-effect chain, the GM (in our style) certainly should have conferences with players to avoid messes like you describe.  The GM would've had the "what the hell are you doing?" conversation before the debacle.  But, we don't consider this an offense—the GM consults for clarification, not changes game-reality countermanding PC choice.  (Alliteration unintentional... really!)