Alter Existence-Research On Immersion In Role-playing Games

Immersion has often been used to describe the captivating experience of playing video games,but the term itself is not as clear as it seems to be.For one thing,it could refer to all kinds of engaging experi ence in everyday life,for another,it has been adopted by VR schol ars to describe specifically the fidelity of virtual environments.It’s uncertain on what ground people are talking about game immersion.The only thing for sure is immersion varies from genre to genre.This dissertation attempts to understand immersion in RPG(Role-playing game)genre since it usually contains a virtual world in which players can engage in much more profound and complicated experience than the other ones.On the other hand,player experience has long been ignored by past game studies which mainly concerned itself with the ontological question of ―what is a video game‖.This renders immersion homeless in terms of theoretical foundation.Concerning that,this dissertation proposes an existential ontology approach(as opposed to traditional ontology)to game studies.Derived from Heidegger’s existential phenomenology,existential ontology focuses on human-world relations especially when people are using tools.It is through tools that man relates to the world: the handier a tool is,the more one will experience ―being-in-the-world‖ without noticing the tool itself.It should be noted video games are also tools,designed artifacts to be more specific.When playing RPG,players are actually using(playing)the game artifact to relate to the virtual world,the more refined the game design is,the more players will immerse in the virtual world without realizing it’s just a game.Hence immersion is exactly a state of being or existence.However,it’s different from actual existence since game artifact is no ordinary tool and thus the mediation of game artifact in player-virtual world relations differs from that of ordinary tool in human-world relations.The term ―alter existence‖ is thus proposed to summarize RPG immersion: a state of existence bearing altered existential relations.Based on this,a thorough inspection is conducted to understand how the designed and technological conditions mediate player-virtual world relations and eventually bring about player’s being-in-the-gameworld.This further includes two aspects: alter world hermeneutics and player existentialism.The first looks at player-virtual world relations from the world pole,explaining how the game world is presented in player ’s experience,including the study of time and space in RPG.The second looks at the relations from the player pole,describing how players realize their existence in the game world through designed and technological conditions of RPG,including the study of player actions as well as corresponding motives and emotions.Through describing these two aspects,this dissertation not only presented alter existence in detail,but also clarified immersion in RPG.More importantly,it is through analyzing existential ontology of game world that we could have a unique opportunity to get a glimpse on our own actual existence.In real world,men are ―thrown‖ into being,design can only help improve this condition.Yet game world condition is created directly by design,knowing this would make a huge difference when designing RPG.The reason contemporary games are still rife with downright violence and vulgar desire is not because we don’t understand games but rather we still haven’t comprehended human condition.