In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation

by Gordon Calleja

An investigation of what makes digital games engaging to players and a reexamination of the concept of immersion. Digital games offer a vast range of engaging experiences, from the serene exploration of beautifully rendered landscapes to the deeply cognitive challenges presented by strategic simulations to the adrenaline rush of competitive team-based shoot-outs. Digital games enable experiences that are considerably different from a reader's engagement with literature or a moviegoer's experience of a movie. In In-Game, Gordon Calleja examines what exactly it is that makes digital games so uniquely involving and offers a new, more precise, and game-specific formulation of this involvement. One of the most commonly yet vaguely deployed concepts in the industry and academia alike is immersion—a player's sensation of inhabiting the space represented onscreen. Overuse of this term has diminished its analytical value and confused its meaning, both in analysis and design. Rather than conceiving of immersion as a single experience, Calleja views it as blending different experiential phenomena afforded by involving gameplay. He proposes a framework (based on qualitative research) to describe these the player involvement model. This model encompasses two constituent temporal phases—the macro, representing offline involvement, and the micro, representing moment-to-moment involvement during gameplay—as well as six dimensions of player kinesthetic, spatial, shared, narrative, affective, and ludic. The intensified and internalized experiential blend can culminate in incorporation—a concept that Calleja proposes as an alternative to the problematic immersion. Incorporation, he argues, is a more accurate metaphor, providing a robust foundation for future research and design.

Genres: Games, Nonfiction, Game Design

240 pages, Hardcover

First published May 13, 2011

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Calleja's summary of the issues with how game scholars have used the term "immersion" is excellent, as is the way he thinks through how different aspects of the game experience contribute to the phenomenon of "incorporation." However, he didn't do enough to forward his argument from the beginning, nor to show how his theory could be applied. Similarly, I wanted to see more of a distinction between "incorporation" and his "player involvement model"--how is this analytical approach different from the others he mentions, and what unique results can it yield? By focusing just on two MMORPGs as his case studies, he neglects other types of games that could have nuanced his argument. In particular, his assumption of the primacy of the avatar was frustrating as someone who studies alternate reality games in which players play as (idealized versions of) themselves, rather than as avatars. Nevertheless, I can see how his concepts can be useful for my own theorizing about immersion in transmedia.

[Zach Jensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this work Calleja presents a six-faceted model (kinesthetic, spatial, shared, narrative, affective, ludic) in order to explain player experience when it comes to videogames. Specifically he wants to overcome the confusion the academia has seen when it comes to presence and immersion. He does this by introducing the model along with his own term, incorporation.
There is a lot of stuff to keep track on doing the course of the book, but Calleja handles the terms and descriptions very well, making it easy to follow his trail of thoughts.

The only thing for me that was missing, is a more hands-on approach of the model: The two examples Calleja gives at the end of the book is, for me, not really enough of a reason to why the player involvement model is good and whether or not it is even usable. And seeing how this is called "Player Involvement Model"... Where are the specific usage of said model?

Apart from the above only one flaw stood out for me, and that was the misplacing of two pictures (157-164). It does not make any difference, but it is a somewhat unprofessional mistake when so little pictures are used throughout the book to begin with.

[Mjhancock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Calleja presents a six-faceted model (kinesthetic, spatial, shared, narrative, affective, ludic) to explain player experience on videogames. In particular, he wants to build a model that overcomes the confusion he sees in game studies between presence and immersion, building eventually to his own term, incorporation. In terms of engaging with the existing scholarship and being precise with terminology, Calleja is excellent. The level of clarity and attention to terms in this book can't be overstated.

At the same time, I think he goes a little overboard at times in insisting on the specificity of digital games (though he does note similarities in the section on affect and the section on narrative), and the downside to being extremely precise term-wise is that you wind up being a little pedantic. All in all, though, it's an incredibly thoughtful investigation, and worth reading for the section delineating the discussion of immersion in game studies alone (chapter 2).

[Tom Kline · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent conceptual framework for eliminating the ambiguity of the word "immersion" from game studies' vocabulary. Now I find myself rolling my eyes every time I hear or see people taking about immersion in games...