The idea that role playing involved a property called

Playing at the World: Immersion and Role Playing in the 1970s

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2021-08-10 01:00:06

The idea that role playing involved a property called "immersion" occurred to the early adopters of the 1970s fairly early. The earliest explicit use I've found was that of Pieter Roos, as shown in this excerpt above from The Wild Hunt #15 (1977), where he identifies it as the overall goal of playing RPGs. Before the end of the decade, calls to "immerse yourself" began to appear in games and modules published by TSR. The Elusive Shift pays particular attention to the uptake of "immersion" as a term because of its relationship to how people in the 1970s understood the nature of role playing.

Almost as soon as people started experimenting with Dungeons & Dragons, they recognized the potential for losing yourself in a role, feeling in some sense as if you were actually in the situation of the game character. Sandy Eisen, a D&D player at Cambridge University in 1975, reported that as a beginning player, he felt like he was really "living the part" and that through "willing suspension of disbelief" he found himself "in the dungeon."

Eisen did not have any particular word for this property (no one was even saying "role playing" then), but he found it compelling enough that he vowed that when he ran D&D for new players, he would not tell them the rules -- he found that understanding the system bogged him down in "wargame mechanics," rather than focusing on the "real-life considerations" that a person in the game situation might. This does have some precedents in Kriegsspiel, in how wargamers would relay troop orders to a referee in order to experience the closest approximation to actual command, but Eisen valued it for a unique way it made him feel... even if he didn't know quite what to call it.