The Middle Ages in Modern Games: Conference Proceedings, Vol. 2 (2021)

1: Immersion as an Intermedial Phenomenon in Medieval Literature and Modern Games Florian Nieser, @FlorianNieser, University of Heidelberg Introduction In this paper I want to present some thoughts on the topic of immersion. I will build my argument up to the concept at the end of this paper by presenting ways of understanding and interpreting immersion before presenting my observations on the interdependency of reception and construction of fictional worlds. These observations are shown in the diagram at the end.

The ways of understanding and interpreting immersion as a literary and medial reception phenomenon are diverse. Within this piece I try to differentiate between the most important ones and to show basic lines of connections between them. To begin it must be stated, that no medium is made to be involuntarily immersive, but there are certain conditions that work to encourage Immersion. Although Immersion has become some kind of a vague concept involving ‘including’ or ‘absorbing’ the recipient, there are specific characteristics and conceptual lines.

Aside from the more audiovisual character of digital games, with which their mode of presentation can depict supposedly 'lifelike' spaces, the sentence "I was completely immersed" is primarily linked to a literary experience in the English language (Curtis, 90) – where does this connection originate from?

This is not a coincidence, although one might initially associate immersion with audiovisuality, but there is no need to seek the primacy of the immersion experience exclusively in audiovisuality: "Immersion in a pictorial space is possibly not a genuinely optical question at all" (Bleumer, S. 8). As far as I can tell, there are two main conceptions to categorize and analyse Immersion. There are the more passive types of interpretation and the considerations aimed at active participation of the recipient. In both cases, however, an underlying basic concept can be identified.

Passive aspects of Immersion A more common conception of immersive phenomena seems to be that the recipient experiences Immersion as “perceptual superimposition” - it is about the “experience side” of a media-induced “(out-)controlled occupation of perception” (Lechertmann, 105). The text almost ‘captures’ the recipient and the immersive effect results from “the interplay of apparatus and disposition”. A performativity of the text that stimulates the imaginatio of the recipient and ‘draws’ him out of the role of viewer into the text seems to be central to this (Nemes, 43). Following these perspectives on immersion as a primarily experienced phenomenon, one ‘gets’ immersed by getting drawn into an artificial world, i.e. a state of self-forgetfulness and emotional involvement, when the distance between the recipient and the medium is reduced. The aesthetically staged and the real world surrounding the recipient are blurred. Apart from these research approaches there is also the thesis about Immersion as an active construction of fictional realities.

Active aspects of Immersion Starting from a more ‘active’ approach on Immersion gets more complex. It is distinguished by very dense hybrid and ambivalent mode of reflection and perception. H. Bleumer speaks of the “active, self-observing immersion in imaginative worlds that are produced by the viewer as paradoxical aesthetic objects [...]” (Bleumer, 7). Based on the concept of Fascination as an emotion with a high cognitive component it can be stated that there is an alternation of attention between the 4