“A Zen-like state where your hands just seem to know what to do, and your mind just seems to carry on with the story… When you stop thinking about the fact that you’re playing a computer game and you’re just in a computer” (Brown & Cairns, 2004).
Immersion is created when the player feels he/she is enveloped in the story. While it can be easy to create this feeling of immersion, it is also very easy to break it. Structural incoherence, where something does not make sense within the rules of the game is a big factor in breaking this immersion and possibly making you want to stop playing. There are 3 types of structural incoherence which contributes to this, and all which i have experienced in my gaming career are:
Incoherence of Causality = Where something can have a dramatically different level of effect depending on context. All gamers have experienced this and i have in GTA 5, where i was driving a tank and crushing everything in my path but was stopped dead in my tracks when i hit a small tree. This usually makes you laugh at the stupidity and completely defies what should logically happen
Incoherence of function = Where an object can only be used in a specific context, when logic dictates it should be usable elsewhere you no what an object is and could use anywhere. I have experienced this with the Pokemon games and im sure most of us know the time where you cant ride a bike inside or go catch pokemon in a certain grass area. This creates an annoyance for the person playing it because logic dictates you can run inside
Incoherence of space = Where there are spaces that cannot be entered/used in a consistent way eg. a door you can open but some are there for decoration. This is common in most games we have played and ive encountered it in many FPS and many objects you should be able to get past, but can’t for some strange reason
The real question to all this is do these structural incoherences break a gamer’s immersion? In my opinion, i believe it doesn’t really. For the very intense gamer, this may be something that can affect their experience in becoming immersed and they may see this as a very big issue in creating that immersion. For the casual gamer like myself, I think that these immersion breakers are not an issue and somewhat amusing. I also believe that breaking immersion occasionally isn’t a bad thing and helps to stop a player falling too deep into a virtual world.
FTVMS 212 & 328, 2014 - Videogames 