What even are Immersion and Roleplaying?

The answer: Different things to different people. But I'm going to try to make the case - as seems to be my regular mode of writing - that people think about them wrong a lot of the time. And this one's going to be tricky, because it's going to involve skirting close to breaking my number 1 rule: Write about things only because they're interesting, not because they annoy or frustrate you. Because there are things in here that have really rubbed me the wrong way in the past. But that's all ancient history, and I feel like we can learn from it. So here we go.

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What is roleplaying? As in, what you do in a roleplaying game? Don't worry, the broad question has a specific answer. A lot of people would say it's being/thinking in character. And that looks right - you are playing a role. But there's a shallow way of reading that and a... well, a right way, which is distinct from the shallow reading.

The shallow reading has roleplaying, being in character, being almost synonymous with acting. As in, speaking in character, adopting your character's voice and mannerisms, stopping the game to act out a little scene. Now, most GMs will probably realise that this definition is a little reductive, so would push back against this as the definition they use.

But if you want to see the definition someone actually has in mind for a word, what you want to do is look at their patterns of usage of the word itself. And the word 'Roleplaying' usually gets used to contrast the situations where you're speaking in character from those where you're doing almost anything else. Combat, exploration, interacting with dungeon rooms, shopping - on the definition standardly used, it makes sense to ask, for any of these activities, "Were you roleplaying or doing x activity?" This definition is the one being used when you hear "We didn't roll any dice, we just RP'd the whole session." Meaning: We were speaking in character the whole time. If you're reassuring yourself that you don't personally fall prey to this thin definition, ask yourself if you can make sense of that sentence or anything like it, and if you'd ever say a similar sentence yourself.

The upshot of this is that roleplaying is downgraded to play acting - you're only roleplaying if you're doing a silly voice. And play acting is all you need to keep putting the 'RP' in 'RPG'. But there's a deeper, more substantial sense of roleplaying that this misses. And that can be summed up, basically, as "Making choices in character, and expressing your character through those choices."

Note that "in character" here has nothing to do with voicing your character, or acting out what they're doing. It just means making decisions as your character would make them. And that means that all of the situations above that didn't count as roleplaying on the thin definition do count in reality, provided they present enough options that the player can make choices and express their character through their actions. On the flip side, a lot of "flat" interactions that take place "in character", but where no real choices (at least not expressive ones) are present, don't make the cut on this more substantial definition. The thin conception of roleplaying leads to less focus on what actually helps players express their character and occupy a role, and more focus on unsatisfying interactions, purely because they happen "in character" - by which I mean in silly-voice-mode.

I can't help but feel that Critical Role has a hand in this somewhere. Not that the unseelie archfey Mercer is purposely trying to corrupt the youth by having characters who are "always on" - his players are voice actors, and they'd be wasting their talents if they didn't use their amazing voice skills. But honestly I was quite surprised when I learned that the "Matt Mercer effect" meant pushing GMs to be stressed out perfectionists, and not the (false) idea that everyone has to be "in character" at all times. In my opinion, that phenomenon would be much more worthy of the name.

Now, I don't want to argue that silly voices are bad. They make a lot of people very happy. And they help a lot of people roleplay, on either definition, by helping them get in character and see things from their character's perspective. But what I am arguing is that, if we're going to have a term "roleplaying" for a specific phenomenon or part of the game, the definition put forward here is better than the one currently used in practice. Better, that is, in that it seems to track the essence of roleplaying better, but also in that it is just pragmatically better; it leads to more satisfying games, with more satisfying choices for players to use to express their characters. You can still have silly voices and play acting for all the people who are made happy by them (and that includes me, honest), but if we rehabilitate the word to the more substantial definition, we can clue people into what really makes a roleplaying game tick.

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With this more substantial definition mind, what is immersion? Hoo boy, now we're asking the right questions.

Immersion likewise has a thin, surface-level definition and a more substantial, and potentially more helpful one. The thin definition is linked to the play acting definition of roleplaying - if you're speaking in character, if you have feelies (props) to handle, if there's music and detailed battlemaps and 3d terrain and miniatures then... well, you're not necessarily immersed, but those are the sorts of things that are immersive, that breed immersion.

If you hadn't worked it out already, I don't think these things are actually essential to immersion. Or rather they're chasing after a sort of surface level concept of immersion that isn't the real deal. This "fog-machine" immersion is a coat of paint, like funny-voices roleplaying; it's not essential to the experience, and if you lack the right foundation, it won't breed actual immersion (just like you can speak in all the funny voices you want, you won't feel like you're inhabiting your character if you're not expressing yourself through your actions).

Real immersion comes from a similar place to real roleplaying: Making choices. Except here I'm going a little further out on a limb. I want to say that real immersion comes from a "flow state". This is a state where you get lost in an activity, to the point where you don't even think about doing it - you just do it, sans noticeable thought. Most video gaming aims at this state, and most successful video games achieve it well. And it's in that state where you'd say you were immersed in an activity - see how that works?

But notice this: The activity in question isn't anything to do with flowery descriptions or 3d terrain or smoke machines. Those don't have a characteristic activity associated with them, except maybe passive appreciation - they're addons that dress up the existing activity of the game. The activity in which you're achieving flow is the core activity of the RPG itself - making choices. The GM presents the situation, the players respond, the GM adjudicates; repeat. When that system is humming, whether it's in dialogue, in combat, or just prodding things in the room, you don't notice the different stages. And it's achieving flow in that core loop that constitutes immersion, as in, that gets people immersed, so they forget they're playing a game, portraying characters etc., and just cut to thinking about what they're going to do next.

I think the roots of fog-machine immersion come from the understandable place of wanting the players to feel like they are the characters, to experience things as the characters do. But that's starting at entirely the wrong end of the problem. You're never going to make someone feel enough like a Tabaxi pirate roaming the high seas or an exiled druid living in the deep desert that they forget themselves and get lost in the character. Those experiences are just too different from your own to step into by trying to simulate what they're seeing, feeling etc. And the idea that simulating their perceptual experiences and so on will make players forget what they're doing and become engrossed in the character is a hopelessly reductive take on what being "in character" means anyway. You have to start by helping your players lose themselves in the act of making decisions. That's how to make players "lose themselves" - that's the solid core of immersion, the thing you need to sort first, and can't do without. Everything else is literally set dressing.

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Maybe some of this caricatures what GMs think, and many people don't actually use these definitions. On the flip side, maybe there are players out there who really do get immersed by a well crafted battlemap, or get a feel for their character by dressing up as them. I don't doubt that there are. And I'm not here to say people's preferences are wrong - I'm saying that there are concepts that these words, 'immersion' and 'roleplaying', could be better attached to, that would help GMs run better games if they knew what they meant. Because these words do get used like this, and they do refer, when so used, to features that aren't core to the RPG experience, which subsequently get favoured over features that are.