The Ambiguous Origins of Immersion
In game studies there have been several debates over key terms and methodologies, from ludology vs. narratology to games vs. play to what exactly is a “magic circle”. But perhaps none of these have permeated the broader games culture more than the discourse over a simple three-syllable word: immersion. Whether viewed as a phenomenon occurring within one’s mind or an innate quality of digital media, immersion is what the dual videogame and virtual reality industries strive for. And yet immersion seems ever elusive — constantly being “broken” — so subjective as to be almost impossible to define what does or does not lend towards it. As far as this essay is concerned let us forget about what immersion is or what it does — the mode of inquiry here is where exactly did it come from?
While there has been a definitive breakout moment for immersion in game studies texts, a simple Wikipedia search will offer myriad applications of the term to various pre-digital practices, techniques and fields. Baptisms, language immersion, immersion therapy, immersion journalism, immersion in mathematics and scientific uses from lithography to testing thermometers are listed among the more conventional understanding of immersion as something inherently digital. In an article for The Conversation, Patrick T. Allen points to stained glass cathedrals, magic lanterns/phantasmagoria and early 3D movies as immersive forbearers. Indeed trying to find the origin of immersion so broadly construed would have to go back to the invention of bathing itself. So let’s locate that aforementioned focal point in the term’s history then work from there.
In 1997 the MIT Press published Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace whose fourth chapter is entitled “Immersion”. Murray begins the chapter with a quote from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, likening the eponymous protagonist’s obsession with the written word to the immersive draw of the computer. However, reading this for the first time I was surprised to not find the claim of immersion as something unique to digital media; if anything Murray puts the old in conversation with the new, describing film, animation, television, music, theatre, mask play, theme parks and LARPing as all capable of providing immersion, quote “visual pageantry links computer culture to ancient forms of entertainment”. Murray’s argument is rather that digital media takes immersion and makes it participatory. Contrary to conventional gamer wisdom where maintaining diegesis is paramount to immersion, Murray says that breaking the fourth wall via character idle animations in videogames “deepens rather than disrupts the immersive world”. But beyond that anecdote, a discussion of avatars in Quake and a comparative analysis of Myst and a couple of Star Trek CD-ROM experiences, Murray has little to say about videogames in the chapter, and the medium-specificity of the argument never quite solidifies as she speaks to nearly everything in “cyberspace” from MUDs to VR to the World Wide Web.
Still, the success of Hamlet on the Holodeck and its ideas would strongly resonate with many notable game-makers. For example Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto talked about immersion in interviews from around the release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998 — saying of the game “You get a real impression of immersion, as if you’re really in the game’s world” — a rather straightforward statement of immersion as presence. In another recently translated interview Miyamoto expands upon this, stating that “Video games have endured because of their immersive quality.” Although this may sound like an argument for videogames’ uniqueness, he later clarifies in a 2015 interview with NPR that “we were trying to create worlds that people would want to immerse themselves in, the way you immerse yourself in a book or in a movie.” Here the first two Miyamoto quotes demonstrate how the metaphor of immersion gets taken up literally in games culture, while the third reveals how Murray’s original stance regarding its historical basis has become somewhat atypical in the intervening years.
Then there’s Warren Spector, who comes up with the term “immersive sim” to describe his 1999 videogame Deus Ex (though the term had technically been used before to describe the helicopter flight sim Comanche 3 in Robin G. Kim’s 1997 review for Computer Gaming World). Though it is unknown whether Spector was reading Murray at the time (and I assume Miyamoto was not) still we can detect a transfer of immersivity in this late 90’s moment from New Media artists and scholars to specific videogame developers and press. Note that when I say “immersivity” I am not merely talking about a general immersiveness i.e. the quality of being immersive, but rather how media is prefigured to be immersive.
While immersivity spread like wildfire in the decades post-Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray’s interpretation of immersion was not without its critics. As early as 1999 Pierre Gander wrote “Two Myths About Immersion in New Media Storytelling”, those being that 1) the amount of sensory information and 2) the degree of audience participation will lead to greater immersion. Then in their 2003 book Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman echo the sentiments of game designer Frank Lantz in a brief section entitled “The Immersive Fallacy”, tying videogame immersion to the concept of mounting realism. Interestingly both Gander and Salen and Zimmerman cite the work of Marie-Laure Ryan, but with conflicting takeaways, with the latter claiming she complicates a fallacious history of immersion and the former claiming she has fed into its mythmaking. While it is inarguable that Murray’s writing was the turning point in the narrative of immersivity, to lay all the supposed failings of immersion at her feet is somewhat unfair, as the notion that she single-handedly authored the term is wildly false. So let’s drill down further and try to answer the question of which came first, immersion in videogames or immersion in VR?
Immersion is never mentioned in Myron Krueger’s landmark 1983 book Artificial Reality, which is what Krueger called VR before the term was popularized (though like immersion the idea of a virtual reality goes back much further). However immersion does make a one-time appearance in the aptly-titled 1991 follow-up Artificial Reality II, where Krueger writes “We are now proceeding toward immersion in a world created by the computer”, which reads less like a qualitative statement and more like a matter of fact. However we can go back slightly further to a transcript of a panel discussion held at the 1990 SIGGRAPH conference in Dallas which happened to feature Kruger alongside, most notably, Warren Robinett of Adventure fame. In the introduction to the panel chair Bob Jacobson mentions that they would be showing some videos which were produced in a class entitled “Immersive Virtual Environments” taught by New Media artist Michael Naimark at the San Francisco Art Institute (another notable figure who has written about immersion in VR, Brenda Laurel, was also involved with these videos). So we see that a full seven years before Hamlet on the Holodeck calling VR immersive was old hat among those in the field.
What else can we find by delving into print media? What did videogame magazines prior to 1990 have to say about immersion? Well probably the first thing to note is that in this era the word immersion was almost always accompanied by either “full” or “total”, especially in Italian language magazines where “full immersion” was printed in English, establishing it as a known loaned expression and not a neologism of the magazines’ invention. For example the June 1984 issue of Videogiochi describes a young woman’s “full immersion” in the game Zaxxon, while the November 1982 issue of Computer Gaming World provides an overview of programmer Gary Grigsby’s “total immersion” not in playing a videogame but in the process of creating his wargame Guadalcanal Campaign. We might understand these as being indicative of something like “absorption” rather than immersion, meaning nearly the same thing but without the 30 years of cultural baggage. They are both absorbed in activities that happen to be digital, but in the same manner that any “analog” pastime could be considered absorbing. In other contexts “full immersion” was used closer to the pedagogical sense, i.e. to play a videogame for an extended period and/or without consulting a manual. The September 1982 issue of Video Game Player specifically uses the phrase “long initial immersion” to describe the process of learning to play arcade games, and draws comparisons to sports like tennis and American football. Finally, other instances of the less declarative “immerse” and “immersed” yield so many results as to belabour the point that immersion was and remains a common expression.
Yet with this primordial pseudo-immersion we can clearly see the roots of the term’s use as marketing copy, as an advertisement in a 1988 issue of the French magazine Arcades promises “Immersion totale dans le jeu garantie” — to translate: “total immersion in the game guaranteed”. Returning to the year 1990, this tactic comes to fruition with an ad for the game Loom which ran across multiple publications. It states: “Then it’s full immersion into Loom’s 3-Dimensional, scrolling panoramic landscape. Where detailed animation, high definition graphics, startling special effects and stirring musical score combine to create a total environment.” Three-dimensionality seems to be the key here, as it was something of prime concern for videogames in the transition from 1980’s to 1990’s, but also a common ground with VR that both can provide. However videogames’ immersivity would soon be usurped by VR, as we can see in the ambitiously-titled “AFFORDABLE VR BY 1994” article in the November 1992 issue of Computer Gaming World. Here “immersive” is used as a qualifier for VR technology — literally calling a hypothetical VR console an “immersive NES” — thereby implying that ordinary videogames aren’t immersive. While that wouldn’t be the case forever as discussed, we can still trace how immersivity has bounced back-and-forth between VR and videogames until its medium-specificity unraveled and it became a blanket term that’s applied to both.
In my excavation of immersion in game magazines I came across two more peculiar findings, each mind-blowing in their own anomalous way. The first came in the form of the 1985 “Book of Maps” special issue of the U.K. magazine Computer and Video Games, which uses comic book-style illustrations to deliver a contextualizing narrative on its first and last pages. There’s a whole cast of characters who we learn about mostly in name only, but to give the gist: in the 23rd century an outfit known as the I.D.E.A.S. Corporation controls all videogames after eliminating the competition and has subsequently taken over the government. From the tone of the writing it’s not quite clear whether this should be considered utopic or dystopic, as the text says “What else could you want? Whether you’re saving your pennies on simple video and computer games, or emptying your bank account on the latest ultra-classic Total Sensory Immersion experiences, we’ve got the output to keep up your input.” This is accompanied by an illustration of a woman (presumably Melissa) wearing a futuristic jacket, low-cut top and animal print neckerchief and waistband standing next to I.D.E.A.S. Central, a space which looks like an aircraft hangar but with two full-body virtual reality devices that appear to hover in the air.
What’s so bizarre here is that the content of the issue has nothing to do with VR, it’s all maps to adventure maze games like Knight Lore and Jet Set Willy II. But even stranger is how ahead of its time it is, firstly in using “Total Sensory Immersion” to describe VR technology and secondly in its visual depiction thereof. With illustrator Jerry Paris’ Marvel UK connection, I was reminded of Professor X’s hoverchair from the X-Men comics and animated show, yet once again the Book of Maps special predates its first appearance by 6 years. It’s unlikely that Paris had access to contemporaneous full-body VR setups, so either Computer and Video Games was able to see half a decade into the future of VR discourse and imagery or there’s additional cultural context missing that is not readily found on the internet archive. Either way, the story of the I.D.E.A.S. Corporation goes to show how much virtual reality is inextricably tied to its own fictionalization.
Lastly, we come to the December 1988 edition of Computer Gaming World which features programmer Norman Koger’s “Stellar Rebuttal” in its Letters section, wherein he outlines his personal development philosophy and responds to criticisms of his game Stellar Crusade. Koger contends “I realize that not everyone in computer land has my taste for complete immersion in detail,” he then continues “Stellar Crusade is as close to my idea of a perfect wargame as I could come to at the time[…]The immersion in detail that I associate with the best of board wargames is coming to the computer world.” While he goes on to make some alarming statements about how “within the context of the game, aboriginal populations are assumed to be exploited”, what’s remarkable here is how he speaks about immersion with the exact same tone and use case as someone proselytizing the latest AAA first-person shooter today. In fact one could easily level Gander’s “more is better” criticism at Koger. Furthermore, it is quite revelatory that the expected modern relationship of immersivity between the analog board game and digital computer game is completely reversed in Koger’s purview. Overall though it’s very telling to me that these two founding moments of immersivity are necessarily bound up in capitalist and colonial power fantasies.
As in the past, so in the present can we see the slipperiness of immersivity as it relates to the non-digital. Both immersive theatre and immersive cinema productions have gained popularity over the aughts and 2010’s, despite the seeming redundancy of those labels. Even as I write this I am receiving Instagram ads for the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit in Toronto. What does this say about VR and videogames’ claims to immersion; if anything can be immersive then is in reality nothing immersive?
