Résumé
The immersive experiences literature has primarily focused on the phenomenon of immersion, particularly its cognitive nature. However, little has been directly said about what it means for a work – a novel, videogame, VR application – itself to be immersive. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on this neglected notion of work immersiveness. Specifically, building off a broadly Waltonian conception of works as props in games of make-believe (Walton 1990), I here develop two conceptions of work immersiveness. Experiential immersiveness is a relational, contextual property, such that a work is prop immersive for a user at a time to the degree that, as a prop, it facilitates the user’s make-believing prescribed content; consequently, experiential immersiveness comes in degrees – a work can be more or less immersive – and is user relative – a work can be highly prop immersive for one user but not very immersive for another. Meanwhile, narrative immersiveness is characterized in terms of how rich a choice range a fiction provides players (alternatively, how forced-choice incomplete the work is; see e.g. Wildman & Woodward 2018). These two complement each other, making sense of different ranges of cases.
To do so, I begin by quickly detailing the Waltonian background. I then turn to motivating and describing the notion of experiential immersiveness. Having sketched the concept, I proceed to apply it to a range of examples from literature, videogames, and VR, demonstrating how these works can be understood to be (non-)immersive in specific contexts. I also use the concept to explain why many generally find VR more immersive than video games, despite the two media being similar in many ways. Next, I sketch the related concept of narrative immersiveness. I then employ this alternative to explains some outlier cases of works that are said to be immersive due to how well they allow players to 'take a role in the story'.
Finally, I conclude by showing how these two conceptions of work immersiveness neatly fit with four existing accounts of imaginative immersion: those of Schellenberg (2013), Liao (unpublished), Langland-Hassan (2020), and Chasid (2021). The upshot is that these two notions provide a better understanding of what it means for a work to be immersive, and hence a foundation for an overall picture of immersive experiences.
