In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation

by Gordon Calleja

Overview

An investigation of what makes digital games engaging to players and a reexamination of the concept of immersion.

Digital games offer a vast range of engaging experiences, from the serene exploration of beautifully rendered landscapes to the deeply cognitive challenges presented by strategic simulations to the adrenaline rush of competitive team-based shoot-outs. Digital games enable experiences that are considerably different from a reader's engagement with literature or a moviegoer's experience of a movie. In In-Game, Gordon Calleja examines what exactly it is that makes digital games so uniquely involving and offers a new, more precise, and game-specific formulation of this involvement. One of the most commonly yet vaguely deployed concepts in the industry and academia alike is immersion—a player's sensation of inhabiting the space represented onscreen. Overuse of this term has diminished its analytical value and confused its meaning, both in analysis and design. Rather than conceiving of immersion as a single experience, Calleja views it as blending different experiential phenomena afforded by involving gameplay. He proposes a framework (based on qualitative research) to describe these phenomena: the player involvement model. This model encompasses two constituent temporal phases—the macro, representing offline involvement, and the micro, representing moment-to-moment involvement during gameplay—as well as six dimensions of player involvement: kinesthetic, spatial, shared, narrative, affective, and ludic. The intensified and internalized experiential blend can culminate in incorporation—a concept that Calleja proposes as an alternative to the problematic immersion. Incorporation, he argues, is a more accurate metaphor, providing a robust foundation for future research and design.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262294546
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	05/13/2011
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	9 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Gordon Calleja is Assistant Professor and Head of the Center of Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Games beyond Games 7

2 Immersion 17

3 The Player Involvement Model 35

4 Kinesthetic Involvement 55

5 Spatial Involvement 73

6 Shared Involvement 93

7 Narrative Involvement 113

8 Affective Involvement 135

9 Ludic Involvement 147

10 From Immersion to Incorporation 167

Conclusion 181

Appendix: A Tale of Two Worlds 187

Notes 201

References 205

Index 219