So this is the final year of my university life. The year where I am tasked with creating a dissertation.
Initial thoughts on the topic of my dissertaton took alot of deliberation. What would I find interesting? What would be useful for future use? What would I get out of the whole year? What qualities and expertise can I showcase?
I have always been interested in the actual design aspects of games, coding is often beyond me and my art is increasingly getting better as the weeks go on. However the area that excites me most is the inner workings when designing games and concepts. What makes the game good, how is it fun, why does it engage the player and so on.
Creating a dissertation based on these questions led me in one distinct direction.
Immersion.
How do games immerse players?
There is various terms we can use instead of 'immersion', 'presence' for example or further still 'spacial presence', either way I first need to understand exactly what immersion means.
Jamie Madigan talks about how "a game creates spatial presence when the user starts to feel like he is “there” in the world that the game creates", he goes on to discuss, when the player is truly immersed he may make different decisions to not 'break the illusion'.
"Someone immersed in Red Dead Redemption, for example, might be more likely to use travel methods that make sense within the game" (The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games). Many gamers will often say that they can lose themselves within games. After telling themselves 'Just an hour before bed' the statement will quickly turn into 'Well its too early in the morning to sleep now'. Being a victim of this situation myself I am excited to search further into the psychology of gaming and how to create immersive play.
With a vast area of study and multiple examples to draw off I will end my initial research thoughts here.
Ross, Out.
Bibliography
Jamie Madigan, 2010,The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games Available at: http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/07/the-psychology-of-immersion-in-video-games/, Last accessed - 10/12
Ok you want to do something on immersion, this is an enormous and rather vague topic. Have you thought about exactly what it is you want to demonstrate? What skills do you want to show an employer? If you do this, then you can ask yourself how you can do this through the vehicle of immersion.
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