The term immersion is widely used to describe games but it is not clear what immersion is or indeed if people are using the same word consistently. This paper describes work done to define immersion based on the experiences of gamers. Grounded Theory is used to construct a robust division of immersion into the three levels: engagement, engrossment and total immersion. This division alone suggests new lines for investigating immersion and transferring it into software domains other than games. Author Keywords Games, immersion, engrossment, engagement, flow, barrier ACM Classification Keywords K8.0 Personal Computing: General: Games; H5.1 Information interfaces and presentation: Multimedia Information Systems: evaluation.
Emily Brown, Paul A. Cairns