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The Immersive Fallacy
All forms of entertainment strive to create suspension of disbelief, a state in which the player's mind forgets that it is being subjected to entertainment and instead accepts what it perceives as reality.— François Dominic Laramée, "Immersion"
We will return to Bateson's ideas about metacommunication and meaning in just a moment. But for now, let's bring the discussion back to the play of simulation, specifically the relationship between a game and the "reality" upon which it is based. The preceding quote is from a book on game design, appearing in an essay on "Immersion." Game designer and programmer François Dominic Laramée argues for a particular relationship between a game player and a game, between the player's state of mind and the perceived reality of the experience. He asserts that a game should strive to create an experience in which the player forgets that he or she is experiencing designed entertainment and instead believes that playing the game is experiencing reality firsthand. In fact, Laramée states that "all forms of entertainment" function in this way. This is a point of view very much at odds with our own. We don't mean to unfairly single out Laramée. His ideas about how a player experiences the "reality" of a game are extremely common in the digital game industry, the game press, and even in the public at large. Game designer Frank Lantz has called these kinds of ideas about immersion "widely held but seldom examined" beliefs. [16]We wholeheartedly agree, and in the pages that follow we refute these beliefs, referring to them as the immersive fallacy. The immersive fallacy is the idea that the pleasure of a media experience lies in its ability to sensually transport the participant into an illusory, simulated reality.
According to the immersive fallacy, this reality is so complete that ideally the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world. Although the immersive fallacy has taken hold in many fields, it is particularly prevalent in the digital game industry. Common within the discourse of the immersive fallacy is the idea that entertainment technology is inevitably leading to the development of more and more powerful systems of simulation. These technologies will be able to create fully illusionistic experiences that are indistinguishable from the real world. In an online discussion about the future of gaming, game designer Warren Spector speculated on this topic: Is the Star Trek Holodeck an inevitable end result of games as simulacra? The history of media (mass and otherwise) seems pretty clearly a march toward ever more faithful approximations of reality —from the development of the illusion of perspective in paintings to photography to moving pictures to color moving pictures with sound to color moving pictures with sound beamed directly into your home via television to today's immersive reality games like Quake and System Shock. Is this progression inevitable and will it continue or have we reached the end of the line, realism-wise? [17]
To be fair, Spector self-consciously exaggerated his views in order to spark discussion. But in the debate that followed, it was clear that many participants take for granted the propositions that Spector articulated. Spector's selective history of entertainment technologies offers one reading of the development of media. But there are others. History rarely provides such a linear progression, and in regard to immersion, cultural developments tend to be cyclical. As theorist Marie-Laure Ryan puts it, "The history of Western art has seen the rise and fall of immersive ideals." [18]According to Ryan, immersion as a representational goal has gone through a number of stylistic cycles over the centuries. In the last several decades, she asserts, immersion has in fact become less prominent and respected in fields like art and literature. Ryan may be correct in regard to larger cultural movements, but within the digital game industry, belief in the immersive fallacy remains alive and well. [16]Frank Lantz, Hacking the Holodeck, unpublished manuscript. [17]RE:PLAY: Game Design + Game Culture. Online conference, 2000. [18]Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity
in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 2000), p. 2.
