Researchers have extensively studied how these two steps happen, but I think it’s more interesting for our purposes here to skip to the bit about what qualities of the media (i.e., game) and person (i.e., player) that they’ve found facilitate both of these steps and create immersion. It can be a subconscious, on the sly, slipped into sideways and entered and exited constantly. Of course, it’s worth noting that this isn’t necessary a conscious decision with the prefrontal cortex’s stamp of approval on it. Once that mental model of the game world is created, the player must decide, either consciously or unconsciously, whether she feels like she’s in that imagined world or in the real one. So, basically, the process starts with players forming a mental model of the game’s make-believe space by looking at various cues (images, movement, sounds, and so forth) as well as assumptions about the world that they may bring to the table.

Players begin to favor the media-based space (I.e., the game world) as their point of reference for where they “are” (or to put it in psychological gobblety-gook, their “primary ego reference frame”).

Players form a representation in their minds of the space or world with which the game is presenting them.

Let’s just back up and take a simplified look at the parts most relevant to us gamers.īasically, Wirth et al.’s theory says that spatial presence happens in three steps: People immersed in media also tend to enjoy it more.Ī Theory of Spatial Presence (aka, Immersion)īut how does this happen? What about a game and what about the player makes her feel like she’s leaving the real world behind? Theories abound, but a few years ago Werner Wirth and a team of other researchers sat down to consolidate the research and come up with one unified theory.

Someone immersed in Red Dead Redemption, for example, might be more likely to use travel methods that make sense within the game, like stagecoaches, instead of methods that don’t, like fast traveling from a menu screen. People who experience immersion tend to only consider choices that make sense in the context of the imaginary world. Click above for more info.īriefly, spatial presence is often defined as existing when “media contents are perceived as ‘real’ in the sense that media users experience a sensation of being spatially located in the mediated environment.” 2 The idea is just that a game (or any other media from books to movies) creates spatial presence when the user starts to feel like he is “there” in the world that the game creates. Hey, I’ve got an entire chapter about how we get immersed in game worlds in my book, Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact On Those Who Play Them.

You feel the world shift skyrim