Lumpley's take on 3D Model

[John Kim]

I am not certain that "Immersion" is the proper name for the middle category; that seems, to me, to be a Technique used to approach a more abstract goal. Is this a case of more misnomerism?

Well, it's a vague term, at least.  Mike Holmes originally suggested "Internal Causality", but I felt that even moreso that was a process rather than a focus.  Immersion does not to me seem to me to be a technique.  Indeed, I have often been in discussions about what sort of techniques help or hinder achieving immersion.  Maybe we have different understandings of the term?  

Within the model as I see it, Immersion is a focus -- i.e. a thing which attention is pointed at over other elements of the game.  I distinguished between, say, character immersion and world immersion and possibly other types of immersion.  This is not in itself the equivalent of an Agenda, because the centralized and decentralized approaches to Immersion are distinctly different agendas (according to the model).

[Marco]

Clearly some people draw a distinction between enjoying immersion and enjoying theme. I don't. Ralph pointed out that one means of looking at Sim was with regard to conflict: if you are "enjoying immersion" you still, in almost any real case in real actual play, have to be enjyoing the immersion of the imaginary experinece of doing something.

Quite often, if the play resembles anything that we would see in a book or movie, the action contains 'theme.' Usually it is considered a trivial matter to determine 'who put the theme there' and that's (IME) usually seen as the distinction between Sim and Nar.

Both can be immersed but if someone decides "the player put the theme there" then it's judged Nar and if the GM did it, then it's judged Sim.

I've never agreed with this and the top-middle box (Mixed) is why: I think that it's often not trivial to determine who "put it there" since once a player reacts to the theme from an immersed perspective whatever 'it' was becomes, IMO, in effect, communal property.

So there's a sense in which I don't see immersion as a literal goal.

However: clearly a lot of people *do* see it that way and I think that it serves a useful purpose there: meta-game mechanics can promote either 'theme' or 'immersion' similarily to the way that they can also (but differently) promote centralization.

If I want something that is decentralized immersionist then that means that while I plan to be 'doing my own thing' in the game and having a lot of say over where I go and how I react to things, I'm not going to want mechanics that are heavy into the meta-game to do it.

-Marco
[ I think that something like a 2x2 with Story | Challenge across the top and Centralized | Decentralized down the side would be a sort of Beeg Horshoe version of this that might be interesting. You could really make it 3d by putting Author | Actor as the 3rd dimension ... ]