Here we go, another post on the Substack. I think I can claim that I'm back at it. There are already two new essays lined up, and I'm aiming at one a week with one of those for those who have also subscribed. I can say one more thing: people are seeing the posts and it gets Likes, which is far and beyond of what blogger is offering. Good. Anyway, check out my new essay:
.jpg) |
| [link] |
Excerpt:
Sometimes I just get hit by a topic. This is one of those times. You know how some issues will just not stop returning into the general discussion how a thing is done or not? The performative aspect of that aside (which has gotten worse, tbh, but it’s just a phase), it may be an indicator that something is either not understood properly or (and?) that an idea really needs looking into. Immersion is one of those.
What we agree upon is not what we think.
There is a new kind of meme going viral just now where someone takes music videos of famous bands and replaces the music and singing with just squeaky shoes and grunting. It’s unbearable (and funny, to a degree), but it manages to point something out that we tend to forget: many of the visual media we look at need something as abstract as music to even allow immersion. It’s not just what we see, it’s the combination of seeing and hearing that may create the kind of trance we need to lose ourselves in what we see.
Language can be, in that sense, like music and entrance a listener just the same (and that will be important later on). That is mostly due to the fact that we are reduced to seeing and listening with visual media. Many are not aware that those are skills we learn, actually.
It is hard to tell if allowing that kind of immersion for playing video games (which has an active part, of course) needs the training we naturally receive for growing up with visual media. But assuming that you need some proficiency in how moving pictures work before you could play something like Quake seems to be evident. Just give your grandma a controller and see how she’ll fare.
Anyway, the base line here are two factors: rhythm and the skill to interpret it towards an experience. That’s a good start, but not the whole picture, because we need to know the frame of what we explore, too. In other words, the experience needs to pose a question we need to be able to understand in order to work our way along the rhythm towards an answer.
Very broadly speaking, that question needs to be rooted in our understanding of reality. Specifically speaking, if the question leading into an experience is based on a compromise we can agree upon, then we are more willing to leave that base towards where the experience is leading to (which is why playing a character helps along the way so easily).
