More on immersion confusion

I totally agree, this new "critique" of immersion is poorly founded. It conflates being "engrossed" with what has historically been meant by immersion (aka character immersion). It's fair enough to argue that immersion doesn't have to be the ONLY goal of a game, but they use this to then cast aspersions on it as any goal.

It doesn't make too much sense to me to discuss immersion with only a very minimal reference to the participant themselves. Immersion, imo, requires at the very least motivation on the part of the active performer, a desire to "immerse" oneself (hence, why one can become immersed in tetris or freeciv)

Incidentally, I mean to respond in more detail to the two pieces.

Anyway, let me see if I understand your comment. Obviously, a conscious definition of immersion isn't needed for one to have "motivation". But the person's motivation or interest certainly affects reception of the game, right? Thus for example why as a player I engage traditional RPGs from an in-character POV ("IC-POV", roughly equivalent to "presence", with some qualifications, or certain definitions of "immersion"), while others can and do engage more from a collaborative storytelling perspective or a kind of virtual puppetry perspective.

Switching gears, I may be getting ahead of myself but for my purposes the idea of immersion-as-IC-POV requires that there be a relatively easy answer to the question, "What person do you represent in the game?"* Or more precisely, "What person's thought processes in the game map to your thought processes?" So e.g. for Tetris, an IC-POV would require positing some kind of in-game persona whose job it is to manipulate the blocks--which doesn't IMO improve in any way on just seeing the whole thing as an abstract exercise.

*Yes, this means that directly playing multiple PCs makes it harder to support an IC-POV. There are more challenging configurations to be sure but e.g. it's easier to put myself in the shoes of a particular member of a dungeon-expedition if there are mechanics which limit my direct control of the other members--loyalty/morale mechanics, or having the GM run them as NPCs, etc.

Elliot, you've got it in one :)