immersion is why i keep drinking. i love nothing better than to wait for midnight, turn the lights off, put on headphones and sink away into some other place.

although aside from that i've never actually gotten the sense of anything being more immersive than anything else other than I guess bigger screens. like going to the cinema. for me it seems like it's all just about the mood. i can be just as immersed in something if it's on a reasonably small screen, during the day, in a house which can even have a couple other people in it milling about, as i can with a huge flat screen in pitch black so i can see nothing else and hear nothing else. one is more of sense experience but thoughts wise I don't think it really makes a difference, it's just about what you can tolerate in the way of distractions and your willingness to get sunk into something.

well that's how it is for me, anyway. some things work better in the day, some better at night, some it doesn't matter. i am talking mostly about films here. books are probably the most immersive. like i have the strongest memories of reading, which is obvious. reading is all about building images and stringing along thoughts and of course that is going to be more immersive than having them already partially built in front of you. it's easier to fall out of immersion with a book though, i think, since it's always effort and it's easier to get distracted. but I read alot less than I watch.

I've come to know d&d forgotten realms faerûn so well that it is pretty easy for my to get immersed in the games based upon the fictional subcontinent (eg nwn, baldurs gate, icewind dale). I think that's the biggest appeal of those games

Yeah, when I was a kid I read "The Neverending Story" at least a dozen times. It was a whole different world to escape to. Which is ironic (probably not irony) because the character in the book reads the book to escape HIS world, too.

I don't really get immersed in anything anymore! This is a boring answer and I have no real explanation for it.

Actually sometimes I kinda think as you... I won't say 'get older' because that sounds really pompous for a 20-year-old to say but as you read/listen to/watch more stuff it kind of becomes harder to get absolutely immersed in anything. Maybe because you start to pick up on uh tropes and structures and stuff, which makes it easier to analyse things but harder to get completely into them. Like how something like Family Guy became a punchline when people began to cop on to the structure of the jokes etc. A while ago people like MOG used to go around saying that everyone really liked generic fantasy rpgs but was afraid to say so because of the hivemind or whatever. Which was dumb but I think there might've been something to it in the sense that by actually talking about those games and trying to defend or attack them or whatever you kind of stripped away the charm. I remember loving Final Fantasy X at the time but someone pointed out that it was basically just a STRAIGHT PATH with random battles thrown in and I could never get into it again because I was aware I was following a track, and also that all the characters were stereotypical animes (y-yuna kun.....) and the writing was terrible etc.
Just to clarify I don't think this is a bad thing particularly in that I don't think it's very healthy or honest to just cling to nostalgia and dumb shit or to just follow you heart while ignoring what other people say about anything (I credit people like Steel for being the reason I never got into Ayn Rand as a teenager, say, despite being a gross nerd). No-one wants to be the thirty-year-old guy who still reads Batman comics. But I still find it kind of sad that I'm generally no longer capable of sitting down and getting completely absorbed by some shitty platform game or album, and that it's becoming rarer that I go WOW WHAT THE FUCK or get blindsided by something like I did by something like Natural Born Killers as a teenager before I began actually, uh, thinking about it at all or recognising the beats and tone and etc. Or even something like TWILIGHT or dumb rpgmaker games or whatever where quality aside people can still get into them to the extent it becomes a part of their identity. Tim Kreider wrote a pretty good essay on this I thought http://www.citypaper.com/special/story.asp?id=16743.

But yeah I dunno. Post immersive shit itt

Also this kinda stuff but maybe that's just nostalgia too on some level?? help im stuck in a loop

"I pity the pig that dont let me in"

haha

and yeah I was going to get at something like that in the videogame topic, like I think once you get to the point where you're like "I could make a movie/game better than this" it's hard to really enjoy it. Back when we were kids it was like 'oh all adults must be geniuses because they're the adults and we're kids' or something, and even more if you're able to program a game. Even like the ART GUY for Final Fantasy I still respected but now not so much he's got a lot of similar themes he falls back on basically every male character looks the same every female character looks the same and dress them in weird stuff but it's a similar kind of weird

People don't like to get immersed in things because other people make fun of them for it. I think we live in a world where it is uncool to be too keen about things and we make fun of people who do that. Even at GW, there were two types of people who made games. There were people who made games and never talked about their games (does Chef ever come across as a guy who is making a game?) and there's the people who have their progress in their signatures and their avatars are the main characters of their games. We'll all agree that the latter category are pretty hilarious. That's why people don't get immersed. Because we all see it as a bit wierd. Either that or people can't balance immersion with the outside world and get all asperger's about it. I don't know.

Au contraire, I would posit that that sort of flamboyancy is a sign that they are NOT immersed in their game design.

there's something about games with two levels of abstraction that draw me in, where you don't just do something as a character you play a character doing something. i guess when you take a break from doing something as a character you're yourself again, whereas when you're a character doing something when you take a break from it you're still a character.

drug

whoa ok. i'm kind of suprised of the answers here but uh i guess i am a pretty IMMERSED person? i mean maybe you already have this image of an excited guy but really, the only reason i still keep on working and listening on music is because i really uh LIVE to music. i just get really nuts when i get an inspiration and/or i get excited of something. i think i sort of can get excited of anything and it's a pleasantly intense experience for me. it's like a cacophony and you can hear the blood rush in your head and your lungs just EXPLODE.
i can analyze and break down music like an computer but really, nothing of that wouldn't matter if i didn't get inspired or KICKS out from music regulary. music keeps me sane.

Au contraire, I would posit that that sort of flamboyancy is a sign that they are NOT immersed in their game design.

there's something about games with two levels of abstraction that draw me in, where you don't just do something as a character you play a character doing something. i guess when you take a break from doing something as a character you're yourself again, whereas when you're a character doing something when you take a break from it you're still a character.

also cool post!

IMMERSIVE, that's pretty much me yeah.

ecco the dolphin is immersive. in the sense that you're immersed in water

Au contraire, I would posit that that sort of flamboyancy is a sign that they are NOT immersed in their game design.

I know what you're saying, explain anyway please

when ffx came out I thought I was missing something because I didn't think yuna was hot. but really it's just that everyone else was an rpg nerd who's turned on by PURITY and shit how disgusting. yuck. people make a big deal about a lot of harmless fetishes but I find the final fantasy fan fetishism ethos way more grotesque

immesive music to me is stuff that makes me feel like a different person. stuff like tragic mulatto, ethyl meatplow might match my gw persona a little but not at all my irl self. I remember esiann used to listen to like KMFDM years ago maybe that was the same thing

I know what you're saying, explain anyway please

i was being a dick with that bit mostly, but i'd say that's more obsession that immersion. if they were immersed in their game making why would they be taking time out to make avatars and signatures etc? i'm not saying they aren't but it's not a sign of immersion anyway. and i think it's stretching what the topic is about, getting into your own little world

Bingo. Fair point. Maybe they're getting immersed into the role of GAME MAKER rather than getting immersed into their game? It's a dumb point so I guess you're right.

drug

not being able to "become immersed" too intently on anything in particular, ended up focusing on nothingness instead.