In-game

Gordon Calleja takes a closer look at why digital games hold players so tightly. Games can produce very different kinds of absorption, from calm wandering through lush virtual scenery, to demanding strategy puzzles, to the rush of fast team combat. These experiences set games apart from reading a novel or watching a film.

The word immersion, meaning the feeling of being inside the world shown on screen, is used so often by designers and scholars that it has lost much of its analytical usefulness and its meaning has blurred. Calleja argues against treating immersion as one uniform experience. He instead describes it as a mixture of separate experiential effects produced by engaging play. Drawing on qualitative research, he builds a framework he calls the player involvement model. It has two time-based phases: the macro, which covers involvement away from the game, and the micro, which covers moment-to-moment involvement while playing. It also has six dimensions: kinesthetic, spatial, shared, narrative, affective, and ludic.

When these effects intensify and settle into the player's experience, they can lead to what Calleja calls incorporation. He offers this idea as a replacement for immersion, presenting it as a more precise metaphor and a stronger basis for future research and game design.