Immersive Gameplay – Interview with J. Tuomas Harviainen

Evan Torner – You are defending your doctorate in Information Sciences in the fall. What is the focal point of your research?

J. Tuomas Harviainen – My dissertation, within the discipline of Information Studies and Interactive Media, deals with the information-systemic properties of physically perfomed role-playing in its various forms (larp, BDSM and so forth). The core idea is that, by adopting the social contract of play, people create temporary spaces in which access to information is significantly altered. I claim that by looking at the information-environmental properties of those temporary social systems, we can understand a lot more about both play experiences and the way social contracts affect our information seeking and distribution in everyday life.

ET – What is an example of the kind of information-seeking that happens in role-playing games that would then be directly applicable to everyday life?

ET – How do rituals, information systems and game systems intersect?

JTH – On many grounds, which is what led me to my current line of research. The adoption of temporary rulesets, limitations and boundaries, the change of social identities, and the act-as-if with things one cannot really perceive, these are very common in both games and rituals. I do not claim that they are all information systemic things, but I do parts of them can be very well analyzed from an information studies perspective. The ritual-game connection in particular has been noted by many earlier researchers, but I dare claim that it has not been properly examined until very recently. Games being highly ritualistic social systems, it is actually hard not to see a connection, yet scholars and designers both have been quite happy to just rely on a quick nod towards Johan Huizinga and Victor Turner, plus a set of black-box thinking where ritualistic games are expected to provide ritual-like results, without going into the actual mechanics of why and how.

ET – What key role-playing scholarship are game studies scholars not reading, but should?

JTH – My two pet peeves are game scholars’ focus on digital gaming and the way they tend to read just their own field’s research. The former has lead to a kind of tunnel vision, where people publish brilliant stuff on, say, immersion in digital games, but talk about it as if that description were descriptive on all sorts of game immersion, while their concepts would not actually hold water in a larp or tabletop role-playing context at all. And vice versa. So people really should look beyond the confines of their chosen platform.

The second thing that does not get sufficiently read is original works. Too often, game scholars just quote from quotations or excerpts, leading to a build-up of bias. The recent discussion on the differences between what Huizinga actually meant with the “magic circle” and the way that concept was appropriated to game studies is a good example. If one reads Juul’s or Salen & Zimmerman’s descriptions of Wittgenstein or Suits, one gets a distorted picture of what they actually said – and then very likely propagates that false impression. So I think reading the actual base references should be mandatory for any serious researcher of games of any type.

ET – Do you know what concept might replace “immersion” within the next decade as it is exhausted within the discourse? With what term would you replace it, if you could?

JTH – I doubt “immersion” will be replaced, despite being very problematic. I would, however, like to examine it from many more perspectives, and to add new clarifications and potential ideas to the current discussion. For example, presence research, traditionally conducted in the context of telepresence or virtual environments, offers a lot of useful concepts that game scholars have thus far, in my opinion, neglected to take into proper account – especially on the question of immersion vs. spatiality and the sense of place. (As a great starting point, I’d recommend this article: Turner, P. & Turner, S. (2006). Place, sense of place, and presence. Presence, 15(2), 204-217.)