Immersion, Childishness, and Understanding

[James Holloway]

I'm not sure that rolling the dice does necessarily "break the bubble of immersion".

Right -- there are certain activities that practice or training permit you to do at the same time, where one of them just fades into a background, even though you're making decisions and interpreting data to do so -- driving a car, for instance. Contra's example of eating popcorn: it's obviously external to the movie-watching experience, but it doesn't distract you because it's sort of automatic.

Question then becomes: are certain kinds of thinking about play the kind of activity you can background? Is this true for all immersive play? Is it just that people, unfamiliar with thinking about gaming a certain way, have a hard time keeping it out of the foreground and will find it gets easier with practice? I've heard immersion described as requiring double-think: one part of the brain processes the character's emotional state, the other handles the game-table stimuli. Difficult or unfamiliar things happening at the game table may force a shift.

The only time I've felt immersed is in LARPs -- it's just much easier for me. But even in my most memorable immersive experience, when I was shaking with rage and fear, there was a part of my brain running along, going "I know, I'll wait to blow up until we get to the church, that'll make a cool setting for this scene..." I wasn't concentrating on it, but it was there, all right.

[Merten]

Question then becomes: are certain kinds of thinking about play the kind of activity you can background? Is this true for all immersive play? Is it just that people, unfamiliar with thinking about gaming a certain way, have a hard time keeping it out of the foreground and will find it gets easier with practice? I've heard immersion described as requiring double-think: one part of the brain processes the character's emotional state, the other handles the game-table stimuli. Difficult or unfamiliar things happening at the game table may force a shift.

I'd guess it varies from player to player. I'm under the impression that some players are capable of processing something when they are immersed in their characters whereas others - like me - are not. Double-thinking tends to ruin the experience for me - if I have to calculate the odds for task resolution, or even think about the resolution mechanism while playing, it gets harder and harder to be in a character. After all, the character shouldn't have to think about resolution mechanics - such things don't exist in the reality of the character. I'd guess that this is one of the main reasons why immersion-heavy games tend to have light or no rules.

There are differences between tabletop playing and live-action playing when it comes to immersion - I can only base this on personal experience, but tabletop gives more room for double-thinking. I don't know if it's a learned process (we've been using resolution mechanics with dices or other randomizers for a long time; rolling dice does not break immersion. Multiple rolls might, though) or the fact that there's always some out of character -factors involved in tabletop gaming.