Reflexive Games, Distant Play: Challenging Immersion

Immersion is an omnipresent concept in the field of video games: it appears in the players’ debates, in the discourses of the industry, in the press and in the academic research. For developers and journalists, immersion is a recurrent promise repeated at every technological turn: the promise that, one day, technology will allow us to literally enter the fictional worlds. In the academic field, the term is also at the centre of many works: researchers in game studies frequently use the concept of immersion to describe the playing activity as a “diving” into a video game universe. However, this notion gives rise to several epistemological issues. First, the word immersion continues to convey negative preconceptions against play and fiction, keeping alive the idea that they are alienating practices. Secondly, in the video games domain, the concept is extremely vague and shape-shifting. Besides, researchers rarely question the desirability of the immersion state: it is most often postulated as the purpose and as the enviable horizon of any gaming practice. As a consequence, the concepts of immersion, fun, pleasure and even of play end up getting confused and superimposed into the theories. This paper will defend the idea that it is necessary to escape from the theoretical paradigm of “immersion”: on the one hand, because it presents some incompatibility with the theories of play, and, on the other hand, because it prevents us from describing the many other forms of relationship that players can have with games.