Immersion

Something that that sparked my interest in this week’s lectures was the subject of immersion in games. There are so many different degrees of immersion and it is interesting to look into what shapes and changes these degrees. We were discussing this in tutorial on Thursday. I feel, being a female, that the appearance of my avatar in third person or hands in first person shooter would change my level of immersion whilst playing. Some games you can choose the appearance of the player, ideally I would choose a brunette female, by doing this, I would have the ability to be more involved in the game as I would feel immersed and could get into the mindset of my character – me. However, in a lot of games, there is no choice. Typically, most first person shooters are male, Caucasian and right handed. Having a buff male hand does distract me from playing the game, and not having the other characteristics would too.

Then, comes the ability to create an avatar purposely different to you, as a way of escapism maybe, or a creation of an idealistic version of yourself. I could see this happening a lot in something like Second Life. The title of the game suggests it even. I find this slightly creepy that some people need to create a false version of themselves, but the question is – why?