A Few Words on Media Experience
In last Friday’s Gamasutra article, I brought up three elements to game addiction that I feel are often overlooked: agency, media experience, and culture. Today I wanted to point out a very short paper that discusses media experience, Middle Earth and Brain Chemistry: J.R.R. Tolkien Explains Immersion. This paper looks at the possibility that human beings might experience game worlds in much the same way that they experience real life. It discusses JRR Tolkien’s ideas on fantasy, and how they might relate to the ways that we use games today.
Most particularly – Tolkien distinguished between the primary world, our everyday experience, and secondary worlds – worlds that completely immerse us in fantasy. In the sense that Tolkien uses primary and secondary, humans very well may have a real experience of some literature. An adventure can be colored by only a person’s mind, their past, and the way in which they read a particular book. On the other hand, games now have the ability to present us with a perceptual reality. What happens when we begin to actually interact in that reality? This paper looks at the ‘secondary’ experience that we may have in a game, and how it relates to ‘primary’ experience.
Flying through a forest in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft
The best critiques that I’ve heard on this paper ask how media experience works with philosophical conceptions of the mind. If you have suggestions further examination in this area, then by all means email me or post the suggestions here!
Neils Clark :: Jan.08.2007 :: Media Experience ::
