Weighty Papers: Fully Immersed

I'm on a roll. Like a lizard shedding its skin and prancing around with it for the world to see, I'm unleashing another one of my papers into the Internet jungle. This time I wrote about how different aspects of game design influence a player's sense of immersion. Here's me saying that very same thing, only with more and bigger words:

Many different aspects of a game’s design can have a big impact on the immersive qualities of the playing experience. Some of these rely on embodiment and physicality while others are more focused on the psychological and social involvement of the player. The remainder of this paper is dedicated to highlighting various game design aspects and to examining how all of them together influence a player’s overall sense of immersion.

Using many examples, I discuss how world building and storytelling can influence a player's sense of place by tusing (meta-)narrative techniques. I also look at how a player's sense embodiment is influenced by interface design and player perspective, paying attention to the artificiality of some interfaces versus ones that are integrated into the game world. Lastly, I look at the differences between singleplayer and multiplayer games. In some cases the presence of other people can greatly enhance the immersive qualities of a game, in other cases it completely obliterates them.

Game scholar predators can devour my work here.