Immersion

What is immersion in games?

I spent my blog post last week explaining just how little I actually know about games and the entire culture that comes with them. Due to my lack of experience, until this week, I had never myself experienced what it is like to be entirely immersed in a game. I had heard of people playing a game for 8 hours or more on end and I had never really understood how it is possible to sit in one place doing the same thing for that long. Earlier this week, a friend of mine wanted to play battlefield. I had never played before, and in the past I had always found something different to do.

The thing that I had never realised was just how easy it is to lose track of time. Once I got the hang of the game, I spent something like 5 hours straight playing this game. This somewhat surprised me, as I had seen this as something that would have to be really hard to do. Shut inside at night, with no reference as to what time it is, I entirely lost track of time.

As well as learning about how immersed in a game you can become, I also learned that the game entirely consumed me. I thought of little other than the game for those five hours. The way that I can see that games differ from movies or television, is how much attention they require. When you are watching a movie, it is easy to look around and pay little attention to the movie, but in a game, if you start to get distracted, you are shot in the face and you have to start again. This all-consuming nature of the game intrigued me and it was something that I had never really encountered before. I had never before experienced such a level of escapism that I truly lost track of anything that was happening outside of the computer and the game on the computer.

Perhaps I was merely this immersed in the game because I wasn't very good at it, so I needed to watch what was going on to avoid being shot every two seconds. None the less, I can see that it is hard to deny that there is a level of immersion in games that surpasses most other forms of media. This of coures depends on the game, but the level of concentration needed to play a lot of games compared to films or other such media is evident.