The idea that role playing involved a property called "immersion" occurred to the early adopters of the 1970s fairly early. The earliest explicit use I've found was that of Pieter Roos, as shown in this excerpt above from The Wild Hunt #15 (1977), where he identifies it as the overall goal of playing RPGs. Before the end of the decade, calls to "immerse yourself" began to appear in games and modules published by TSR. The Elusive Shift pays particular attention to the uptake of "immersion" as a term because of its relationship to how people in the 1970s understood the nature of role playing.
Almost as soon as people started experimenting with Dungeons & Dragons, they recognized the potential for losing yourself in a role, feeling in some sense as if you were actually in the situation of the game character. Sandy Eisen, a D&D player at Cambridge University in 1975, reported that as a beginning player, he felt like he was really "living the part" and that through "willing suspension of disbelief" he found himself "in the dungeon."
Eisen did not have any particular word for this property (no one was even saying "role playing" then), but he found it compelling enough that he vowed that when he ran D&D for new players, he would not tell them the rules -- he found that understanding the system bogged him down in "wargame mechanics," rather than focusing on the "real-life considerations" that a person in the game situation might. This does have some precedents in Kriegsspiel, in how wargamers would relay troop orders to a referee in order to experience the closest approximation to actual command, but Eisen valued it for a unique way it made him feel... even if he didn't know quite what to call it.
Two years later, Kevin Slimak wrote in The Wild Hunt #12 about role playing a character such that you "can put yourself into his place, submerging yourself to the extent which you are able." He referred in particular to acting within the rolled characteristics of characters -- like not making smart decisions for a stupid character and vice versa -- which is at least requires some rough understanding of the system. This idea of "submerging" your personality into that of a character also has some antecedents in wargaming, especially in the lead-up to the release of D&D. Mike Carr, designer of the First World War aerial wargame Fight in the Skies, had recommended that a player direct his pilot to "perform according to his personality, not yours," and recommends developing "Personality Profiles" and backstories for pilots that would help determine how their characters should be played.
When we begin to see appeals to immersion in TSR publications, maybe we shouldn't be surprised to find them coming from Carr. The tips for players in his module In Search of the Unknown (B1), for example, concludes with the following:
Similar language can be found in Boot Hill (1979), which Carr edited. Carr clearly connects "playing your character's role" with his call to "immerse yourself in the game setting," but no one really explained exactly what that immersion entailed. Maybe it meant something like what Ed Greenwood talks about in Dragon #49, speaking very much to the properties that Eisen sought back in 1975. Greenwood explicitly positioned "role play" as the answer to the question "How can one play a game without knowing the rules?"
"As a player, state what you (the character) are trying to do, and the referee (who knows the rules) will tell you what is actually happening," Greenwood explains. As late as 1981, Greenwood still knew well the roots of this practice in free Kriegsspiel, and was aware that that it had attracted controversy, as referee decisions could seem "arbitrary" to players. And indeed, this approach to role playing has always had its critics. While Greenwood does not directly label his approach "immersion," that is perhaps for the best, as we have been told to "stop saying immersion" since it can mean so many different things: whether Roos, and Eisen, and Slimak, and Carr were talking about precisely the same thing is debatable. But their attempts to "live the part," to "take on your character's persona," played a significant part in how the practice of role playing defined itself.
Perhaps this is the key to theory I'm working through. Immersion is such a personal experience that the game master's role is to modulate the game such that everyone is immersed as possible. The perfect balancing point is a constant, moving target that requires human oversight (as opposed to mechanical adjudication).
ReplyDeleteIn other words, no TRPG rule set can autonomously produce immersion. It requires human application, oversight, and adjustment on a moment by moment basis. Immersion, being prized over mechanical fidelity, causes that moderator to at times ignore the rules *but only if doing so preserves immersion*.
The trick I think is that immersion is itself a moving target, where some players may want to 'inhabit' their characters where others want a level of engrossment based more on participating in the system resolution than the blissful ignorance of the pure role player. Which only compounds the problem, because then human GMs have to divine what players with very different expectations hope to experience...
DeleteI think you two are both right. Immersion is an idiosyncratic matter, personal to individuals. For example, some players report feeling more immersed when all the rules are invisible and dice are behind the Referee's screen. Others feel more immersed when they roll the dice for everything affecting their character and consciously know the artificial odds for each attempt at the uncertain.
DeleteIn my view, the best we can do is to have as complete a toolkit as possible. Each play group will find its way towards immersion on the collective terms of its individual participants.
Great post, Jon. It's another reality check against one of the entrenched myths about "the original game."
I do think we are thinking along the same lines. The difficulty the GM faces lies in bringing varied desires together. A good system, as Lich Van Winkle points out, offers a complete toolkit to serve many needs.
DeleteI think this might be why so many RPG theories fall flat when applied to trad games. Narrow designs work well for groups with similar interests, but games like D&D, Vampire, and GURPS need to cater to broader desires within a play group and within a single session.
I've been enjoying The Elusive Shift and these posts. Having been part of the Boston scene and The Wild Hunt, I know many of the folks, either in person, or at least via their TWH (and a few A&E) writings.
ReplyDeleteBoston back then was quite the scene.
DeleteIt was indeed. The immersion had both pre- during, and post- phases. It was akin to Tennessee Williams say on sat around the table discussing what you were eating and comparing it tho what you ate before and what you were planning to eat if you could such and so ingredients. One would plan what you were going to buy for a character and think about what world would produce the right kind of characters. Thus there would be practical and theoretical discussions before and after sessions.
DeleteThis how LARP, though not called that, was first introduced - a more total immersion.
I'm in the final pages of I.S. I have to admit to feeling a little uncomfortable with Kanterman and Elsden's comparison of D&D to the use of psychodrama, as if roleplay was a means to self actualization through fantasy (even knowing the origins of roleplay in Psychology). Yet, perhaps there's something to this sense of immersion being achieved through the suspension of reality. I would say it likely happens in degrees. In most cases it's desirable, but too much can be unhealthy. Bigglestone seems to allude to this when he talks about giving up a character that a player grows too attached to and a need to "re-enter the 'real' world".
ReplyDeleteThere is the permission in media but not the requirement, if enforced, by the GM and other players. Thus it is going farther in the same general direction as the SCA is to imaginative reading of history.
ReplyDeleteI agree, but I think it's taken from a different angle. Nobody would really think about immersion to that degree from board games, or war games, which is what D&D emerged from, so this was something new. Dungeon Masters weren't really encouraged to be the storytellers to the same extent they are now, only referees.
ReplyDelete1. You obvious did not watch Squad Leader players. They were immersed. Think of it as the Morss Hall versus SS Ralph school of thought (50 vs 66)
ReplyDelete2. Immersion was very much in play from the 1970's in Boston. YMMV.