Quote from: Fiasco;327487It sounds like the vast majority of games you have played in haven't involved much high quality roleplaying.  Thats cool, but I don't see how it applies to the rest of us.  I know you are partially rebutting the whole desirability of immersion thingy, but immersion it self is only tangential to the central discussion of character substance.  

Immersion doesnt happen the whole time.  It would be a real worry if it did because obv people need to tell the difference between game and reality. When it does happen, however (and that is more likely with characters of substance) its usually great.

Mostly I was rebutting the notion that meta-game mechanics damage immersion, but you are correct that is somewhat off-topic.

Quote from: RPGPundit;327433Gamers are getting off on playing a character, and how that character ends up getting a life of his own in an imaginary world.

Storygames-Swine are getting off on "crafting a story", ie. how clever they imagine themselves to be.

That's the difference: One is about losing yourself, the other is about jerking off to the wonderfulness of your own alleged genius.

Serious question: you've never seen a gamer getting off on how allegedly brilliant his character is?

Quote from: Thanlis;327495Serious question: you've never seen a gamer getting off on how allegedly brilliant his character is?

Yea, and we all tend to back slowly out of the room when that happens...

Quote from: Nazgul;327496Yea, and we all tend to back slowly out of the room when that happens...

Well, yeah. But it's not a story vs. character distinction, it's an asshole vs. non-asshole distinction.

Quote from: RPGPundit;327433Gamers are getting off on playing a character, and how that character ends up getting a life of his own in an imaginary world.

Storygames-Swine are getting off on "crafting a story", ie. how clever they imagine themselves to be.

That's the difference: One is about losing yourself, the other is about jerking off to the wonderfulness of your own alleged genius.

RPGPundit

I just find the idea of getting off while playing this game kinda of icky.

Otherwise I have no problem with immersion or story crafting.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Nazgul;327496Yea, and we all tend to back slowly out of the room when that happens...

Dude!  My characters rule.  Wanna hear about them?

Where did everyone go?

Quote from: Soylent Green;327493Mostly I was rebutting the notion that meta-game mechanics damage immersion, but you are correct that is somewhat off-topic.

They do.  Well, at least a certain sort does.

I think it's enough to acknowledge that a lot of people have independently arrived at a common sense of what immersion is and what harms it.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;327577I think it's enough to acknowledge that a lot of people have independently arrived at a common sense of what immersion is and what harms it.

Okay, so what harms it?  What fosters it?  And how does it help create (or show) character substance?

Not a lotta time at the moment but you know there was some consensus reached on rpgnet on stuff like benchmarking etc.

Quote from: Thanlis;327508Well, yeah. But it's not a story vs. character distinction, it's an asshole vs. non-asshole distinction.

This.

-clash

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;327589Not a lotta time at the moment but you know there was some consensus reached on rpgnet on stuff like benchmarking etc.

There was.  And, hell, I have my own opinions.

But if I was just trying to gather what has been said, I'd ask my buddy Google.  He's kind of a pain in the ass about this stuff, but I can usually trick him into finding just about anything given time.

I'm asking about your opinion.

Still, if you're busy, real life wins, as it always must.

Dunno how much I can type before I'm called away again...

Harms: having to make many decisions "about" the character during play, rather than "as" the character. This can be mechanical (as e.g. a game that makes you expend metagame resources to do anything, as opposed to just having them as a reserve that you can use optionally), or social (straining to conform to group play that doesn't make sense from the player's perspective--and yes, this does include [excessive use of] common tropes like "you meet up in a tavern and agree to be hired by a mysterious stranger"). I'm not really bothered by complex mechanics per se; I know some people are but they can speak for themselves.

I'll see if I can answer the fostering bit later, as well as the specifics of the OP (tying immersion to it as necessary).

I'll play.

It is easy to think of harms.  This list isn't exhaustive, and of course may only apply to me:

 

• Tricky social mechanics (Burning Wheel's, for instance),
• OOC "Do you really want to do that?" questions by other players,
• "You think X" or "You feel Y" from the GM,
• Obviously "railroady" situations (where I think "Oh, the GM wants us to do X"),
• Being expected (or rewarded, or whatever) to play to my characters explicit social traits, beliefs, and so on,
• Any case where someone else gets to "play" or "narrate" for my character.

It is a curious fact that it is much harder to think of pros.  I'll try in a later post.

EDIT: one I just thought of, feeling pressure to play to your character's INT stat (or whatever it is called in your game).  I've broken out of some good IC situations when I realized there is no way my character would be using that vocabulary.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;327460Except that everyone who talks about immersion as something they value, and which is often harmed by certain mechanics & techniques, sees it as distinct from flow.

I've never heard anyone distinguish it from flow until you just did. I think such distinctions are themselves wrong, since flow is about attaining complete immersion in an activity. You can try to artificially constrain this so that it only applies to left handed Sikhs on Sundays, or people pretending _really_hard_ to be elves, or whatever, but I can't see any reason that isn't political to do so. Some people become immersed because of roleplaying and thinking things through without extensive metagame mechanics to shape the situation, some get it from other things. It is still all the same psychological experience.

QuoteIt is, sorry.This is a fatuous argument particularly given that the people who really care, care about that particular state, not the superset described by "flow".

The description of the superset contains the necessary information to enter into a flow state. This debate about immersion being some sort of super-special thing that isn't regular immersion but is instead a special, anti-Forgist kind of immersion, is just silly.

QuoteNo, it's not an artificial constraint. You are the one engaging in Forgism, in precisely the way that Jim Henley has laid out. Whether that's sophistry or simply because you (and, to be generous) the Forgites simply have a tin ear for this particular mode of enjoyment, I can't say. It does seem though that practically every effort to pooh-pooh immersion is part of an effort to sell people a bill of goods and get them to disbelieve their own sensibilities.

I'm not pooh-poohing immersion. I'm simply not treating it as some special kind of anti-Forgist enjoyment that isn't flow. How that counts as "sell[ing] people a bill of goods and get[tting] them to disbelieve their own sensibilities" is unclear. In fact, I'm trying to show that people have the same sort of experience for varying reasons. That experience is "flow" and what it causes is the feelings associated with "immersion", at least so long as you're using "immersion" in an ordinary sensible way and not in some artificially constrained and jargonistic way intended to win arguments through simple definition.

Here's a simple question Elliott: Why is "immersion" as you use the term not just "immersion" as the term is normally understood?