A video essay about the term ‘immersion’ and why I think it should be replaced.

While video of Richard Lemarchand’s GDC talk is behind the GDC Vault paywall, his slides and text from the talk are online here.

I’ve received a few very nice replies and comments – Shawn Trautman wrote out some of his reservations and emailed them to me, and he quoted some of my reply here.

Robert Yang commented on the video when I posted it to my Facebook account, and he had the following to say:

I’d get more polemical than you and say that the industry actively encourages this fallacy, and the idea of the holodeck / this technology fetish results in an “immersion industry” where the Crysis 3 box says ridiculous shit like “aliens behaving realistically” — what the hell could that even possibly mean and who wrote that copy? But no one cares, because we’re used to it, and that’s what’s worth $60 instead of 6 indie games.