thread: 2005-06-02 : Immersion
On 2005-06-02, Brand Robins wrote:
I?ve never been a big immerser, a quality which for years made me think there was something wrong with the way I played. In that period I made several observations that I could never articulate fully until having hung about on the Forge for a bit and dealt with the genial madness there. The first that came to my mind when reading the rant was that I find the idea that a fully built, detailed, setting helps with immersion to be false. Now, I won?t claim it doesn?t work for anyone, but for me the more detail a setting has the more my already considerable problems with immersion multiply. To often RPGers use setting details to block, rather than support, character vision and a character?s ability to fit into the world. Anything from ?it?s not on the right side of the street, the maps says its on the left? to ?dude, no one in this world would act that way? or a host of similar issues, the setting details often get used to constantly remind you that you are not your character, are not in that world, and must pay attention to externals and manuals in order to approach your character.
Even in the cases where detailed settings are used to build a community consensus, I?ve most often heard the consensus being described as a feeling of shared community between players that has little to nothing to do with the use of the detail in an immersive capacity. I have, in discussions with Tekumel players, often heard statements along the lines of ?and then the GM said the ship had three masts, and well all grinned at each other like ?Oh yea, it?s a Shen vessel? and knew we all knew what it meant? and fewer ?the GM said the ship had three masts, and I started thinking about how the Shen had killed my mother.?
Now, I do know that the details sometimes lead to immersive moments, but mostly it seems to be the shallower details ? the things that everyone knows that don?t require a particular level of mastery over the setting, that do that. The more a setting detail is seen as a mastery point, something that only initiates can speak about, the more it becomes something about geek cred between players and less about immersion in the characters. In this I?d directly contrast setting details like the coats from Dogs, caste marks in Exalted, and heraldry in Pendragon to knowing the names of the Five Arkats in Glorantha, the names of the first masters of the Traditions in Mage, or the schematics of a tramp freighter in Star Wars. In the first cases you have easy details that give a shared world in a few simple gestures, allowing people to immerse into their characters based on a simple set of shared assumptions. In the second you have increasingly detailed information that is mostly only pertinent for the mastery of knowing the information.
