“Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus . . . in a participatory medium, immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible . . . the enjoyment of immersion as a participatory activity.”
Murray, J. (1997).
Examples of immersion include reading a compelling book, watching a good movie, or playing computer games. When reading, we are relying completely on the author’s ability to knit sentences and sometimes images that swamp our imaginations to create the sense of immersion.
On the other hand game developers and designers have access to almost all of our senses.
In a fast paced real time fun action packed game your vision is completely fixed on the computer screen as you tackle one or more problems simultaneously, your hearing is consumed by the sounds coming through the speakers, and your brain is working to coordinate with allies in multiplayer games, and to solve problems. Unlike the book which you can put down and continue at another time, tuning out of a real time game is not an option if you want to win!
Types of Immersion:
Immersion can happen in many different forms. Adams, Ernest (2004) talk about at least three kinds of immersion in computer games: Tactical Immersion, Strategic Immersion, and Narrative Immersion. We can easily imagine how Adams and Ernest’s types of immersion also apply to online learning:
Tactical Immersion: Experienced in rapid paced environments when performing challenges simple enough to allow players or learners to solve them very quickly while being “in the zone”.
Strategic immersion: This has more cerebral involvement than tactical immersion. Strategic immersion is about observing, calculating, and deducing. An example would be a chess master who concentrates on analyzing situations deeply before deciding on the next best move. Another example would be writing a scientific paper where the author is reading and analyzing previous work in a similar area and/or observing and analyzing the results of a scientific experiment.
Narrative Immersion: For example in a game with a story line, and is the same as when watching a movie, or reading a book. This happens when the player in a computer game or the student reading a book begins to identify with and care about the characters, is captivated by the story and wants to know how it is going to end. Adams, Ernest (2004) put it simply by saying “What creates narrative immersion is good storytelling, and what destroys it is bad storytelling”.
Within most kinds of immersion that we experience in all walks of life including learning and in particular online learning, whether we are actually there individually or as part of a collaborative learning group, whether we are performing tasks of varying levels of complexity, relying on sophisticated graphical environments to transport our senses to those locations, or whether we are using our imaginations to identify with situations and characters we are compelled to follow and care about, in all these and many other kinds of immersive situations a central component that creates this sense of immersion is our ability to morph and reshape ourselves to fit within different scenarios, and to enhance and create for ourselves identities that can interact successfully in new environments.
Category: E-Learning
