Role-Playing Communities, Cultures of Play, and the Discourse of Immersion

William J. White

J. Tuomas Harviainen

Emily Care Boss

Giving Up On Immersion?

When I could find some precious time to look around, I found that with distance, my brain was becoming more and more frustrated with the discourse of gaming in general, and in particular, with immersion. It's a word I've been using for a long time now, and a word I really was rather fond of once, but I think it's long lost any semblance of meaning. (Turkington, 2006).

The Problems With Immersion

• The varieties of immersive experience

– Character, Narrative, Reality (Harviainen, 2003)

– Sensory, Challenge-Based, Imaginative (Ermi & Mayra, 2005)

– Spatial, Temporal, Emotional, Social (Cover, 2010)

• The immersive fallacy (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004)

• Contentious “immersionist essentialism”

– e.g., the Turku Manifesto (Pohjola, 1999)

Some communities develop an alternate conception of immersion that enables them to table questions of what immersion “really is” while at the same time enabling the pursuit of a shared immersion-like ideal.

Two Cases

• The “indie scene” at the Forge (www.indie-rpgs.com)

– U.S.-based tabletop RPG community

– “Creative Agenda” (communal immersion)

• The “jeepform” movement (www.jeepen.org)

– Scandinavian tabletop/larp movement

– “bleed” (immersion via identification)

In Both Cases

• History of debates over immersion

– Deliberate exclusion from Forge’s Big Model

– Turku manifesto vs. Meilahti school theory

• Strong shared design aesthetic

– Forge: coherence

– Jeepform: transparency (player/character overlap)

• Interest in articulating & sharing design logic