Immersion, Credulity, and Investment
How do games get that incredible feeling of immersion and being there? Sometimes, games don’t even need to be believable, but they have a capacity to snare in the player. They just manage to pull the player in to a mental state that is synchronized with the logic of the game world. When this phenomenon happens in a state of performance, the result is flow, which has been examined in many situations. Immersion does not necessarily require high performance flow, it may be as simple as stepping into the magic circle. Realistically, though, the magic circle is a very strange object, and its borders are permeable and fuzzy. How can we understand immersion, or at least credulity, to make use of it in game adaptations? (more…)