The nature of Immersion

The image in this post is from the astonishing 80s comic series Moonshadow.

I have a novel coming out later this year. It's now going through the advance reader process. If you're on Netgalley, take a look here.

I consider the breadth of my storytelling influences to be one of my greatest strengths. It helps me bring new ideas and unique perspectives to my client work. So this seemed like a good time to revisit some thoughts on story and experince.

For as long as I can remember, I've been an obsessive reader. I think I peaked in my early twenties, when I consumed at least five books a week. I'm now back up to a good pace, even if a bit less than that. Reading may be my favorite thing in the world, and in some ways, writing is an extension of that love. I create worlds for the same reason I dive into others': I want to live in those worlds. I want to know the characters, survey the landscapes, feel the environments, and go on the adventures.

I want total immersion.

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

I've pursued immersion through my experience design work for about fifteen years now. It often involves physically surrounding people with the story. This seems to be the common definition of "immersive," what I call the "stuff all around you" definition.

But as I've worked on projects at almost every scale, I've come to distrust this definition.

Industries define themselves in order to sell. Many colleagues consider "immersive" a genre or a format. They talk about an "immersive" dinner, or an "immersive" theater show.

Too often, I find experiences dependent on this "stuff all around you" definition, miss the true nature of immersion. Immersion is not a category. It is not a genre. It is a result.

Norman Holland is an author I come back to time and again. In his articles and book Literature and the Brain, he talks in depth about Coleridge's phrase “suspension of disbelief.” He uses the play Othello as an example. When we suspend disbelief, the human mind does something remarkable. It believes Othello is murdering Desdemona on stage enough to get emotionally involved in the act, enough to feel terror, sadness, whatever we feel, but not so much that we leap onto the stage and attempt to stop the crime.

To achieve this state, we must feel safe. Usually this means being physically passive; sitting in the dark, watching kings and rogues battle on stage, safely seated in a Doom Buggy, coasting through a haunted world.

Immersion means transporting to another place, and “stuff all around you” is not necessary for the journey.

I always tell the story of Nilaja Sun's one-woman show, Pike St. The performance was so engrossing, I quite literally forgot where I was, and nearly talked back to a character on stage. The immersion happened in my mind.

I've had similar experiences watching movies, the most recent example being the Bowie doc Moonage Daydream in IMAX. The scale of the screen, combined with the visuals and music, absolutely consumed me, and I soon felt like I'd left my body and magically transported to the locations in the movie; on stage with Bowie, strolling through Tokyo, cast in his music videos. This film deserves a whole essay on immersion.

I've had the same experience with audio drama. Back during the COVID-19 lockdowns, I got my exercise walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and listened to some truly great audio drama podcasts, often losing myself in the story and looking up to be a bit surprised about where I was.

And of course, I've missed train stops because I was so deep in some book.

When I think about the true nature of immersion, I don’t remember an immersive theater show, and certainly not a VR thing. I think about experiences like these.

"STUFF ALL AROUND YOU"

The usual definition of "immersive" in my industry is "stuff all around you." Creators invite you to sit in the actual cafe from some TV show. You vacation aboard a real(fake) starship, and you can play with the controls and talk to the actors.

However, I feel like this approach usually misses the mark on immersion. This is because when you're physically inhabiting a space, you have to reserve some small part of your brain to remember you're not actually in this space. If you don't, you might hit some poor actor with a sword. You might break the scenery. You cannot truly get lost in the world because you're not physically safe. You have to resist the suspension of disbelief, to some degree, because your body may act on your emotions. You might actually try to prevent Othello from murdering his wife and ruin the show. I've seen this happen. I've seen people get so into it, they forget where they were and they ruined the show. But we can’t blame them. It was some experience designer who used the word “immersive.”

STORIES ARE ALWAYS INTERACTIVE

This is related because we experience designers often conflate the words "immersive" and "interactive."

True immersion requires safety. A movie theater seat, a big, comfy chair with a good book. But as experience designers, we call these states passive. We want to smash the proscenium. We want to throw away the chairs. But this impulse depends on a misunderstanding of the nature of immersion.

Reading a great book, you are in fact collaborating with the author to create the book's world in your mind. You take in the words, then you do the work of creating the sights, smells, sounds, and physical sensations of the story. Listening to a great audio drama, you do the same. The sounds come in, but you have to do the work of creating the worlds in your mind. You are interacting.

As experience designers, we often want audience members to fiddle with the scenery, or solve puzzles, or talk to an actors. Without these actions, we consider an experience “passive.” This is a mistake.

Stories are always interactive.

ALL STORIES ARE PERSONALIZED

As technology continues to evolve, we experience designers continue to speculate on possibilities for "personalized experiences." Lately, with the rise of cheap pixel regurgitators, some have called for movies perfectly personalized to our likes and tastes. We’ve been hearing this call for a long time now. This is incredibly sad, and part of what led to the social media disasters of 2016.

But more importantly, we already personalize stories. Our brains are wired to do this. It's one of the primary functions of stories. When I watch a character go through something, I think: "I've been there. I know what that's like." When I pick up a great book from hundreds of years ago, I travel across space and time, and I enter the mind of another human being.

When we think about personalization as a tech problem, as tailoring stories to our existing likes and tastes, we denigrate storytelling and we lose one of its most profound functions.