Fragment from This Is Not A Game A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming by Dave Szulborski (2005) “The immersive fallacy is the idea that the pleasure of media experience lies in its ability to sensually transport the participant into an illusory, simulated reality. According to the immersive fallacy, this reality is so complete that ideally the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world.” Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman – Rules of Play (2003) The Illusion of Immersion Let’s return to one of the definitions of immersion from the experts quoted above, the one from Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, in which they mention “the fallacy of immersion.” Salen and Zimmerman claim that true engagement or immersion in a fictional world has nothing to do with realistic graphics, three-dimensional perspectives, or any of the other techniques of immersion carefully laid out above. Instead, it is the very act of play itself, losing one’s self in that “free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life,” that evokes the feeling of engagement or immersion. This is how games like Tetris can arguably be seen as immersive, since it is theoretically possible to have the feeling of being lost in the game, as reflected by the player moving his physical body to mimic the actions on the screen. Salen and Zimmerman’s concept ties back into the idea of metacommunications and the inescapable fact that any kind of symbolic diegetic interface automatically destroys the effect of true immersion in a game. Play after all, as defined by Huizinga and quoted above, requires a conscious awareness that the play activity is occurring outside of ordinary life and therefore, by implication, an ongoing awareness that it isn’t real. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theories of new media also delve into why immersion isn’t quite as simple as some previous definitions have made it out to be. Bolter and Grusin are two media theorists whose 1998 book Remediation: Understanding New Media posits the ideas of immediacy and hypermediacy as the two possible states that any form of digital media achieves. The things we have described as the techniques of immersion - virtual reality programs, photo realistic computer graphics, first person involvement in the storyline and so on – are all attempts to achieve transparency by eliminating any signs of a symbolic interface from the game, the condition Bolter and Grusin term immediacy. This would constitute immersion by the common definitions we have used above. Bolter and Grusin differentiate immediacy from hypermediacy, which is their name for digital media that becomes the opposite of transparent by focusing attention in some way on the technology used to present it. The authors cite medieval illuminated manuscripts, video games, the Internet, most software programs, and even television, as examples of hypermediacy because they all regularly use some form of digital interface or exaggerated graphics as part of their presentations. The most interesting part of Bolter and Grusin’s theories for our purposes is the apparent contradiction between the two concepts of immediacy and hypermediacy. Still, the authors claim that it is possible to experience both states simultaneously and, in fact, that our new digital age almost demands it. They conclude, quite in parallel with the definitions of play and Salen and Zimmerman’s immersive fallacy, that there is indeed a dual consciousness in which the viewer can both be immersed in a game and still aware on some level of the technology being used. Which leads us back quite nicely to how immersion and all the related concepts apply to alternate reality gaming. Immersion in Alternate Reality Gaming To repeat what I said earlier, the concept of immersion in games, at least as we traditionally define and think of it, does not apply really at all to alternate reality games. Yes, that’s right. First I claimed alternate reality or immersive games were not really games. Now I’m claiming they may not really be immersive. Can that possibly be right? All of the above definitions and explanations, even Salen and Zimmerman’s idea of the fallacy of immersion, are based on the assumed goal of trying to evoke the feeling in the player of immersion in an artificial world, a fictional world created expressly for the purposes of the game. While that may be true for other forms of video games and all other earlier attempts at immersive media of any type, that is not the goal of an alternate reality game. As Jane McGonigal wrote when she was describing the motivations and methods of the creators of the Beast, “For them, ‘immersion’ meant integrating the virtual play fully into the online and offline lives of its players.” That begins to describe the subtle yet significant difference of the idea of immersion in alternate reality games and regular gaming, but I’d like to take it one step further. In an alternate reality game, the goal is not to immerse the player in the artificial world of the game; instead, a successful game immerses the world of the game into the everyday existence and life of the player. Once again, this implies that the very name - alternate reality game – is misleading, because you don’t really want the player to think of the game world as an alternate reality at all. The ultimate goal is to have the player believe that the events take place and characters of the game exist in his world, not an alternate reality. In a strange but very real way, the ARG creator is trying, not to create an alternate reality, but to change the player’s existing world into the alternate reality. That is why the game pieces and components in an alternate reality game are the things and technology we use already in our everyday life. Things like e-mail, web sites, telephone calls, and instant messaging, are so integrated into the player’s world that using them as game elements allows for a truly unmediated interface into the world of the game. If done right, interactions done using these game elements can be as real as the player’s interactions with the ordinary world. Because these are the same methods the player already uses to gather and comprehend information from the real world, using them in the game eliminates the level of metacommunication that game elements normally carry. In other words, they don’t scream at the player, “Hey, this is a game!” Furthermore, anything presented in game using these methods has the potential to seem as real to the player as events in the real world. For example, for most people, the only knowledge of and real experience they have with major news stories are the audio and video presentations they see of the events either on television, radio, or increasingly on the Internet. If an alternate reality game uses well-done, simulated newscasts to portray important in-game happenings, they are, in a very genuine sense, as real to the player as occurrences reported to him on the evening news. And this, of course, is the real beauty and power of alternate reality games and why players rave about them years after they have concluded. The characters they meet when they play the games and the things that happen to those characters are real to the players, in a very significant way. I’m not saying that ARG players are delusion in any sense, because like any form of true play activity, there always seems to be the dual consciousness of the activity being separate and removed from ordinary life. But alternate reality games do seem to offer possibilities for levels of true immersion and engagement that other forms of electronic media and games have no chance of achieving. As Jane McGonigal said in her pioneering work on ARGs, “This close identity in design and function enables an immersive aesthetic in games like the Beast that is much more powerful and persuasive than the immersive efforts of the so many other arts that have previously attempted the interfaceless interface.”