‘Being’ Alyx Vance : an autoethnographic analysis of immersion as experienced within narrative-based virtual reality video games

Abstract

Human beings have been fascinated with the notion of submerging themselves into other spaces since antiquity (Therrien 2014). Immersion has been employed in imagemaking as a strategy to place viewers with, or amongst, the art of early landscapes, frescoes, and panoramas (Grau 2003). Today, immersion has become one of the fundamental objectives of video games (Brown & Cairns 2004; Gard 2010; Dansky 2021), a new medium that has quickly grown to become the largest in the entertainment industry (Read 2022:[sp]). As a diverse and multifaceted medium, video games immerse audiences in innovative ways, employing an amalgamation of the strategies used by various media. New technological advancements in emerging media, such as virtual reality (VR), have given rise to the advent of VR video games, which open new fields of enquiry about novel forms of immersion and the role these new kinds of games play in people’s lives.

The novelty of VR is to elicit and sustain higher levels of immersion and presence by positioning the user in virtual spaces where they can interact using bodily movements (Lanier 2017; Slater 2018). As each iteration of head-mounted displays (HMDs) gets smaller, lighter, and more capable, bringing more of the user into the virtual world, major technology and media industries place this technology as a foundation for the ‘metaverse’. Scholarly debates viewing VR as an emerging (mass) media, however, pivot around two polarising camps; on the one hand, ‘utopians’, ‘instrumentalists’, or ‘evangelists’, embrace the interactive and spatial affordances of VR and foresee its potential as a life-altering technology, while the ‘dystopians’, ‘determinists’, or ‘sceptics’ caution against the potential for such technology to drastically alter lived experience (Ihde 2012; Bender & Broderick 2021; Du Toit & Swer 2021).

Moreover, the concept of immersion has become diluted across the various fields where it is applied, including virtual reality research, video game studies, film studies, and music studies (McMahan 2003; Nilsson et al 2016). Loose applications of the concept of ‘immersion’ often equate the experience with feelings of ‘presence’. Furthermore, many studies that analyse and measure various notions of immersion and presence within virtual environments (VEs) employ quantitative approaches, using focus groups and questionnaires (Jennet et al 2008; Bender & Broderick 2021).

Such research provides valuable insights into immersion and presence within various contexts, but may struggle to address the multidimensional layers that constitute immersive experiences, specifically when considering the multifaceted and lengthy nature of contemporary video games. Since insufficient research on extended reality (XR) derives from the social sciences (Girginova et al 2023: [sp]), more research is needed to understand the sensation of immersion as it relates to the player’s experience in the growing medium of (VR) video games.

By analysing the various immersive strategies experienced in (VR) video games, the primary aim of this study is therefore to present a qualitative method for analysing immersion using autoethnography and phenomenology. Through this method, the researcher/player explores the subjective experience of immersion in (VR) video games in depth. The development of this method necessitated a new (revised) model of immersion – the Player’s Immersive Experience (PIE) model – which more profoundly frames the player’s multidimensional experience of immersion in (VR) video games. Through an application of the PIE model to the pertinent VR video game Half-Life: Alyx (2020), this study analyses the nature of, and extent to which, a player experiences immersion in emerging (VR) video games.