Analysis: The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games
by Jamie Madigan
Game discussion often revolves around "immersion," but what exactly does that
mean? Psychologist and gamer Jamie Madigan takes a look for Gamasutra at the
complex psychological concepts behind immersion with regard to video
games.]
Along with "OMGDUDESOAWESOME," one of the words that gamers
like to toss around when describing their favorite titles is "immersive."
But what exactly does that mean? And what makes a game immersive? Ask
five people and you'll probably get 10 opinions, but psychologists have been
studying immersion in various kinds of media for decades, including video games,
so they could probably shed some light on those questions.
Except they
don't call it "immersion." Instead, they call it "presence," which, admittedly,
isn't as cool. Regardless, researchers have identified several kinds of presence
in regards to how we perceive media, but it's spatial presence that I think
comes closest to what gamers think of as "immersion."
Briefly, spatial
presence is often defined as existing when "media contents are perceived as
‘real' in the sense that media users experience a sensation of being spatially
located in the mediated environment."
The idea is just that a game (or
any other media from books to movies) creates spatial presence when the user
starts to feel like he is "there" in the world that the game creates.
People who experience immersion tend to only consider choices that make
sense in the context of the imaginary world. Someone immersed in
Red Dead
Redemption, for example, might be more likely to use travel methods, like
stagecoaches, that make sense within the game, instead of methods that don't
(like fast traveling from a menu screen). People immersed in media also tend to
enjoy it more.
A Theory of Spatial Presence (aka,
Immersion)But how does this happen? What about a game and what
about the player makes her feel like she's leaving the real world behind?
Theories abound, but a few years ago Werner Wirth and a team of other
researchers sat down to consolidate the research and come up with one unified
theory Here it is:
Woah, woah, woah. Sorry. Let's just back up and take a
simplified look at the parts most relevant to us gamers.
Basically, Wirth
et al.'s theory says that spatial presence happens in three steps:
-
Players form a representation in their mind of the space or world with which the
game is presenting them.
- Players begin to favor the media-based space
(I.e., the game world) as their point of reference for where they "are" (or to
put it in psychological gobbledy-gook, their "primary ego reference frame")
-
Profit!
So, basically, the process starts with players forming a mental
model of the game's make-believe space by looking at various cues (images,
movement, sounds, and so forth) as well as assumptions about the world that they
may bring to the table.
Once that mental model of the game world is
created, the player must decide, either consciously or unconsciously, whether
she feels like she's in that imagined world or in the real one. Of course, it's
worth noting that this isn't necessarily a conscious decision with the
prefrontal cortex's stamp of approval on it. It can be subconscious, on the sly,
slipped into sideways and entered and exited constantly.
Researchers have
extensively studied how these two steps happen, but I think it's more
interesting for our purposes here to skip to the bit about what qualities of the
media (i.e., game) and person (i.e., player) that they've found facilitate both
of these steps and create immersion. So let's do that.
Game
Characteristics Leading to Spatial PresenceCharacteristics of
games that facilitate immersion can be grouped into two general categories:
those that create a rich mental model of the game environment and those that
create consistency between the things in that environment.
Let's take the
concept of richness, first. This isn't an exhaustive list, but richness relates
to:
- Multiple channels of sensory information
- Completeness of
sensory information
- Cognitively demanding environments
- A strong and
interesting narrative, plot, or story
Multiple channels of sensory
information means simply that the more senses you assault and the more those
senses work in tandem, the better. A bird flying overhead is good. Hearing it
screech as it does so is better. 3D may also play a role here, and we can all
agree that smell-o-vision will herald in a new era of spatial
presence.
Completeness of sensory information means that the
fewer blanks about the mental model of the game world that the player has to
fill in, the better. Abstractions and contrivances (there are no people in this
town because of, uh, a plague! Yeah!) are the enemy of immersion.
Assassin's
Creed 2 was immersive because its towns were filled with people who looked
like they were doing …people stuff.
Dealing in a familiar environment
also allows the player to comfortably make assumptions about those blank spaces
without being pulled out of the world to think about it. Knowing what the wild
West is supposed to look like and having
Red Dead Redemption conform to
those stereotypes goes a long way towards creating spatial
presence.
Cognitively demanding environments where players have to focus
on what's going on and getting by in the game will tie up mental resources. This
is good for immersion, because if brain power is allocated to understanding or
navigating the world, it's not free to notice all its problems or shortcomings
that would otherwise remind them that they're playing a game.
Finally, a
strong and interesting narrative, plot, or story will suck you in every time. In
fact, it's pretty much the only thing in a book's toolbox for creating
immersion, and it works in games too. Good stories attract attention to the game
and make the world seem more believable. They also tie up those mental
resources.
Turning to game traits related to consistency, we
have:
- Lack of incongruous visual cues in the game world
- Consistent
behavior from things in the game world
- An unbroken presentation of the game
world
- Interactivity with items in the game world
Lack of incongruous
visual cues in the game world is one of the more interesting precursors to
spatial presence. If we were discussing the same concept in movies, I'd cite the
example of seeing a boom mic drop into an otherwise believable scene. It's
anything that reminds you that "Yo, this is A VIDEO GAME."
Examples
might include heads up displays, tutorial messages, damage numbers appearing
over enemies' heads, achievement notifications, friends list notifications, and
the like. It's also the reason why in-game advertising wrecks immersion so much
–seeing twenty five instances of ads for the new Adam Sandler movie while trying
to rescue hostages kind of pulls you out of the experience.
Believable
behavior from things in the game world means that characters, objects, and other
creatures in the game world behave like you'd expect them to. It's also worth
noting that the cues need to make sense and be constant throughout the
experience. This is one reason that I think
BioShock's audio logs kind of
hurt the game's otherwise substantial immersion: Who the heck records an audio
diary, breaks it up into 20-second chunks, puts them on their own dedicated tape
players, and then wedges those players into the various corners of a public
place? It doesn't make any sense.
An unbroken presentation of the game
world means that the spatial cues about the imaginary world your game has
created should not just up and vanish. Which is exactly what happens every time
you get a loading screen, a tutorial, or a game menu. When that happens, the
game world literally disappears for a few minutes, and we can't feel immersed in
something that isn't there.
Interactivity with items in the game world
could probably fit under the "richness" list above, but I include it with
consistency because it's another way of giving the player feedback on actions
and a sense of consistency between various parts of the environment. Operating
machines, talking to NPCs, and fiddling with physics makes it seem like the
various pieces of the world fit together consistently.
Player Characteristics Leading to Spatial
PresenceOf course, players have some say in how immersed they
get in a game. Some people just have more spatial ability and can build those
mental models of game worlds more readily and make them more vibrant. And
researchers have found that people have an "absorption trait" which means that
they're quicker to get fascinated by something and drawn into it –something I
like to think of this as "the fanboy gene."
Other times the player takes
a more active role. Some players simply want to believe in the illusion, and
will induce their own bias towards accepting the "I am there" hypothesis. In
this state, they'll require less confirmatory information to accept that
hypothesis and less disconfirming information to reject it. This is also similar
to the idea of "suspension of disbelief" where players willfully ignore stuff
that doesn't make sense (like thunderous explosions in space or the fact that
enemy soldiers can soak up a dozen of gunshots without going down) in order to
just have a good time.
Other researchers have also pointed to a concept
they call "involvement" which is a media user's desire to act in the
make-believe world, to draw parallels between it and his life, and to effect
changes in it according to their own design. To me, this seems like an overly
fancy way of saying "some people like to role-play" which leads directly to
greater immersion.
So there you have it. Everybody can cite examples of
things that yank them out of the game experience, and it turns out that
psychologists have examined, classified, and isolated a lot of them. This isn't
to say, though, that ALL games should strive to
be immersive. I think
games are kind of unique in all media in that this is so. A game can still be a
good game without being immersive, and maybe some types of games are better if
they
aren't immersive. But that's the great thing: game designers have a
lot of paths that they can take to good art.
References:
-
Wissmath, B, Weibel, D., & Groner, R. (2009). Dubbing or Subtitling? Effects
on Spatial Presence, Transportation, Flow, and Enjoyment. Journal of Media
Psychology 21 (3), 114-125.
- Wirth, W., hartmann, T., Bocking, S., Vorderer,
P., Klimmt, C., Holger, S., Saari, T., Laarni, J., Ravaja, N., Gouveia, F.,
Biocca, F., Sacau, A. Jancke, L., Baumgartner, T., & Jancke, P. A Process
Model for the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences. Media Psychology, 9,
493-525.
