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Metacommunicative
Media The immersive fallacy is symptomatic of contradictory ideas about technology. On one hand, there is a technological fetishism that sees the evolutionary development of new technology as the saving grace of experience design. On the other hand, there is a desire to erase the technology, to make it invisible so that all frames around the experience fall away and disappear. Nowhere are these contradictory ideals more clearly expressed than in the concept of the holodeck, a fictional technology that first appeared in the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation. The holodeck is the dream of the immersive fallacy, a room in which matter and energy are manipulated to create a simulated environment of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste that is a representation completely indistinguishable from lived reality. What is wrong with this picture, and how does it relate to games? On one level, the immersive fallacy actually does make intuitive sense. When we play a game, we feel engaged and engrossed, and play seems to take on its own "reality."This is all certainly true. But the way that a game achieves these effects does not happen in the manner the immersive fallacy implies. A game player does become engrossed in the game, yes. But it is an engagement that occurs through play itself. As we know, play is a process of metacommunication, a double-conscious-ness in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation. During the same online conversation in which Spector posted his intentionally provocative question, film studies scholar Elena Gorfinkel responded:
Immersion is not a property of a game or media text but is an effect that a text produces. What I mean is that immersion is an experience that happens between a game and its player, and is not something intrinsic to the aesthetics of a game. The confusion in this conversation has emerged because representational strategies are conflated with the effect of immersion. Immersion itself is not tied to a replication or mimesis of reality. For example, one can get immersed in Tetris. Therefore, immersion into game play seems at least as important as immersion into a game's representational space. It seems that these components need to be separated to do justice and better understand how immersion, as a category of experience and perception, works.[19]
Gorfinkel makes a number of critical points. First, with her example of Tetris she points out that there are plenty of examples of games in which "immersion" is not tied to a sensory replication of reality. In fact, there are countless examples of art and entertainment media, from techno music to comic books to expressionist painting, which are clearly not premised on a simple suspension of disbelief. As Gorfinkel states, mistaken ideas about immersion can be framed as confusion between the intrinsic qualities of a media object and the effects that object produces. Gorfinkel argues that to understand the subtleties of "immersion," we need to look not just at the attributes of games (such as how detailed the graphics are), but at the way games function in relation to the experience of the player. In the case of play, we know that metacommunication is always in operation. A teen kissing another teen in Spin the Bottle or a Gran Turismo player driving a virtual race car each understands that their play references other realities. But the very thing that makes their activity play is that they also know they are participating within a constructed reality, and are consciously taking on the artificial meanings of the magic circle. It is possible to say that the players of a game are "immersed"—immersed in meaning. To play a game is to take part in a complex interplay of meaning. But this kind of immersion is quite different from the sensory transport promised by the immersive fallacy. [19]RE:PLAY: Game Design + Game Culture. Online conference, 2000.
