In a fiercely competitive entertainment market, producers aim to create immersive environments that the story citizen inhabits for a long time. Witmer and Singer define immersion as “a psychological state characterized by perceiving oneself to be enveloped by, included in, and interacting with an environment that provides a continuous stream of stimuli and experiences” (1998, 12). Some scholars conceptualize immersion as transportation (Lu et. al, 2012; Brock and Green, 2000), based on Gerrig’s
description that the reader in a narrative is being transported to another world quite distant from the world of origin and is being changed by that journey (1983). On the basis of this description, Brock and Green define immersion as “a distinct mental process, an integrative melding of attention, imagery, and feelings” (701). They continue on to argue that during the immersive process, the story citizen’s mental capacities focus so much on the activities in the narrative that he or she loses access to the real world either on a physical level—not noticing that someone is entering the room—or on a psychological level—losing awareness of real-world facts—favouring fictional assertions made in the narrative (2000). Parts of the argumentation above are consistent with research by Holland, who claims that “humans have only a finite amount of attention or psychic energy. If we use more energy and excitation in one prefrontal function, following play or story, we have less energy available for other prefrontal functions, like paying attention to our bodies or the the world around play or story” (2009, 48), which would indeed explain why story citizens sometimes “forget” their surroundings while being immersed in a story.
It is key to note, however, that quite often simple enjoyment leads to a deep level of immersion as well. Part of this enjoyment is a willing suspension of disbelief and the withholding of counterarguments for the fictional events presented in the story. Highly immersed story citizens might want to believe what they see in order to keep the sense of immersion alive; thus, some story citizens tend to suspend the search for truth versus falsity of the information presented in
the narrative in favour of enjoying the story (Green and Brock, 2000). Murray contends that
(t)he pleasurable surrender of the mind to an imaginative world is often described, in Coleridge’s phrase, as “the willing suspension of disbelief.” But this is too passive a formulation even for traditional media. When we enter a fictional world, we do not merely “suspend” a critical faculty; we also exercise a creative faculty. We do not suspend disbelief so much as we actively create belief. Because of our desire to experience immersion, we focus our attention on the enveloping world and use our intelligence to reinforce rather than question the reality of the experience” (1997, 110).
Some research links the concept of immersion/transportation to presence in the narrative world or virtual environment (Witmer and Singer, 1998; Kim and Biocca, 1997; Lombard and Ditton, 1997). The concept of presence has been extensively discussed in the context of virtual reality, as presence in this environment might give the illusion that the presented world is unmediated. Lombard and Ditton, for example, contend that “a number of emerging technologies including virtual reality, simulation rides, video conferencing, home theater, and high definition television are designed to provide media users with an illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated” (1997, 1). The authors further the argument that the story citizens forgets his or her physical environment in favour of the illusion of being part of the experience.
Regardless of how immersion is conceptualized, it remains a subjective, unstable, and individual feeling, as story citizens experience it differently with
varying degrees, often depending on the medium. In video games, for example, the level of immersion changes based on perspective and game type; immersion is not a quality equally inherent to all video games. A number of studies have shown, for example, that first person perspective in video games leads to greater immersion than third person perspective (Denisova, Cairns, 2015; McMahan, 2003; Taylor, 2002); thus, the production/design process plays a crucial role in the level of immersion. Other factors determining the level of immersion might be the richness of the narrative environment, the meaningfulness of the experience for the story citizen, or the consistency of the information presented in the world (Witmer, Singer, 1998). Contemporary storytellers may appropriate new technologies to create more immersive environments, with virtual reality certainly being the current trendsetter in this regard.
In transmedia environments, the immersive feeling might be presented within each single medium of this environment, but might also be interrupted when this engagement has ended. One of the goals of transmedia projects might then be to create “trans-mersive” environments — environments that provide immersion across (trans) media and that allow for seamless re-immersion in the same storyworld. A story citizen, for example, might be immersed in watching a film and then read a graphic novel with the sense of never having left the storyworld — a true sense of “transmersion.” The critical mind might wonder, though, if immersion is an obsolete concept, given that contemporary story citizens engage with other activities or platforms such as tablets or cellphones while watching TV programs or online videos on Netflix or Hulu, for example. The
Nielsen Advertising Audiences Report from Spring 2012 found that even during prime time, the majority of story citizens checked their emails or sports scores, visited social media or checked for information related to what they were watching on TV (www.nielsen.com). Keeping the story citizen immersed might become increasingly difficult in the future of entertainment.