Ben Abraham elaborates on why the term “immersion” is a really shitty way to describe experience with videogames, and I would say, other media.
Gordon Calleja’s book In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation extends this idea in an interesting way. He puts attention (as he terms it “involvement”) as a necessary step between disinterested media consumption and that special state of playing games (which he calls “incorporation”). It still suffers from some of the problems of immersion (for instance, into what are we incorporated?), but it’s worth consideration.
