Evan Torner - Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-Playing

This edition corrects the order of names of the authors of the essay Role-Playing Communities, Cultures of Play and the Discourse of Immersion.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Immersive gameplay : essays on participatory media and role-playing / edited by Evan Torner and William J. White ; foreword by Zach Waggoner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7864-6834-8

1. Fantasy gamesSocial aspects. 2. Role playingSocial aspects. 3. Mass mediaSocial aspects. I. Torner, Evan. II. White, William J., 1966
GV1202.F35166 2012
793.92dc23 2012018314

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

2012 Evan Torner and William J. White. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover images 2012 Dark Geometry Studios

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To Kat, to my parents, and to the far-flung indie game community.E.T.

To my brother Mel, in honor of years of gaming together.W.J.W.

The editors would like to thank the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) for accepting the panel at which much of the work contained in these pages was originally presented, as well as for providing a travel stipend for our colleague Markus Montola. The opportunity for transAtlantic collaboration and collegiality that was thereby enabled was instrumental in bringing this project to fruition.

The editors additionally owe a debt of gratitude to Zach Waggoner for his participation in the project; he responded to our entreaties with verve and intelligence. Finally, Evan Torner is grateful to the Department of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for partially subsidizing his travel to the aforementioned NeMLA conference.

Immersion. I remember the first time I encountered this word in an academic context. I was conducting research for my dissertation on identity construction in video-role-playing games. The text? Janet Murrays Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Over the years, Ive reread and discussed her text with students in my videogame theory courses many times; I remain astonished by how prescient, how remarkably present Murrays ruminations are today for new media scholars, fifteen years after the fact. Murrays definition of immersion in that text remains branded in my subconscious:

Immersion is a metaphorical term, derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, [...] that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus. We enjoy the movement out of our familiar world, the feeling of alertness that comes from being in this new place, and the delight that comes from learning to move within it. In a participatory medium, immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible [pages 9899].

For a young videogame theorist like myself, the concept of immersion was fascinating. Of course, I wasnt the only person who became enamored with the term. In the first decade of the 21st century, immersion became a trendy buzzword, used by scholars, journalists, and the masses alike to superficially and generically explain the ever-growing appeal of videogames and other new media. As a result, immersion lost its theoretical and terminological potency. It sunk into the abyss of over-used jargon.

Immersive Gameplay helps dredge it back up. The essays here contribute to the reclamation of immersion in scholarly inquiry, delving into topics from larping to the archetypes of reality television. As a scholar who fixates primarily on videogame theoretical terminology, I was pleased to encounter terms and concepts (agentic imagination and bleed, to name but two) that resonate with my own digital media studies. Of course, my realization is part of the point of Immersive Gameplay: the studies of play, of games, and of immersion are conversations that require a wide range of perspectives, from digital to tabletop to pop culture performativity. In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray proved she knew this fact. In Immersive Gameplay, Evan Torner and William J. White demonstrate they know it too. But dont take my word for it. Go ahead: dive in. Immerse yourself.

ZacharyWaggoner has aPh.D. in rhetoric and composition from Arizona State University, where he teaches classes in videogame theory, writing and rhetoric. He is the associate director of ASUs writing programs, the largest such program in the United States.

This book is driven by a theoretical commitment to immersion as a fundamental concept for making sense of mediated (popular) culture in contemporary society. It may fairly be said that immersion is to the 21st century entertainment industry what illusion was to that of the 20th century. No longer constrained by the traditional divisions of work and life within industrial modernity, post-industrial society turns to technologically mediated gameplay in order to construct alternate (and hitherto unanticipated) blendings of living and working.

Theorists such as Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno have leveled worthy critiques at cultural industries that under the guise of entertainment serve as distraction and act to alienate labor. But rather than adopt such a positionone which has historically both grounded anti-establishment critiques as well as served the interests of a high cultural elite in condemning mass culturethe authors of this volume all assert that immersive media establish their own unique terms of engagement and must be taken seriously if the rapid shift toward a participatory digital media culture is to be understood. Live-action role-playing (larp), digital games, and reality television all demand a research apparatus that portrays the immersive emotional experiences they offer in all their complexity. The immersed subject, a person ensconced within a gamespace or artificial (virtual) reality, is thus the focus of our overall study.

Gamespace itself is a daunting concept that should give the reader pause. In what ways do games serve as the dominant hegemonic force, shaping our discourse and the very topoi of which we speak? Much like, Michel Foucaults totalizing concept of the panopticon or Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris equally totalizing rhizome, Australian scholar McKenzie Wark has used the term gamespace to signify the topological merger of reality and fantasy. Such a merger operates via the construction of all-encompassing information flows that simultaneously constitute the objects of experience and render them susceptible to manipulation, modification, and repetition. One plays a quick round of Battleheart on a tablet computer, only to exit out to do ones homework for the score-like reward of a grade, so that then one can make progress toward ones chosen career with its own systems of punishment and reward. In his research on