gurugeorge
Arcane
immersion doesn't exist if you're allowed to control more than one character
As NJClaw says, that's not quite right, immersion is more to do with the virtual world rather than any virtual character in that virtual world. So it can either be one character, or be any number of characters, or even be a floating objective viewer - so long as one feels like one is there in that virtual (counterfactual) world, and one forgets for a while that one is a poor schlub sitting at a desk in a dingy city, one is immersed in the relevant sense.
It's just like being carried away by a novel - one needn't necesssarily identify with any particular character (though one can do that too), but rather one is, as it were, floating about etherially in the virtual world depicted in the novel that's vaguely being imaged in one's mind's eye.
One particularly strong moment of immersion I had was in a costume competition in Champions Online. It was just after the thing was done, and people were milling around showing off their superhero finery and powers, and I was zoomed in quite close to the action, third person, and all of a sudden some guy next to me teleported from one spot to another, and he had a really zany-looking cozzie that really expressed a teleportation ability. Just for a fraction of a second, it felt really real, in the way that a "magic eye" 3-d object suddenly "pops." I wasn't particularly identified with my character at that moment but I was "in" that virtual space. A trick of the mind.
That's a particularly striking example, but I'm sure we've all had moments like that in videogames. For example, as shitty a game as Oblivion was (without mods), there were moments of cresting a hill on one's horse, suddenly seeing a beautiful sunset, when one felt a strong sense of "being there" - I'm sure we've all experienced that with one of those types of games.
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