Immersion

Experience of being absorbed in a storyworld through imaginative or technological simulation, often along spatial, temporal, and emotional dimensions
Joshua Lee 2026-09-18
DOI: 10.64773/fee7-1482

Explication

Immersion describes the experience of being so absorbed in a narrative or virtual environment that its world seems to displace one’s actual surroundings. Immersion as a term is an aquatic metaphor, drawing upon the experience of being surrounded or submerged in an environment not one’s own. The experience predates the term, reaching back through theories of aesthetic illusion to Aristotelian mimesis. Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001) proposes a typology of narrative immersion. Spatial immersion involves the reader or user’s transportation into the storyworld as a place (120–30); temporal immersion involves the reader’s absorption in the story’s unfolding narrative (140–48); while emotional immersion concerns the reader’s depth of emotional response to an investment in fictional characters (148–57). This tripartite schema allows the narrative to be discussed not solely as immersive (or not), but according to how it immerses audience members. 

 In 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge described the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment” before supernatural or romantic elements in poetry (2:6). Janet Murray, in Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), characterises immersion as not Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief but the active creation of belief akin to reader-response criticism, where meaning is made through reading (107). To Murray, the consumer of immersive media seeks a sense of being “surrounded by a completely other reality”, drawing on their pre-existing “cognitive, cultural, and psychological templates” (108). This immersion can be passive, i.e. being ‘flooded’ or ‘drowning’ in the sensory detail of the storyworld, or participatory, what Murray terms ‘learning to swim’ (99). Murray notes the fragility of immersion: boundaries between audience and text must be renegotiated with each new medium’s narrative conventions (100). 

Immersion did not originate from literary theory. The term was already circulating in virtual-reality research (see Steuer) when Ryan adapted it in 1994 to describe the reader’s relocation into a literary world (“Immersion vs. Interactivity”). In VR research, immersion is used alongside ‘presence’. Mel Slater and Sylvia Wilbur define immersion as an objective property of a technological system, measuring the extent to which the system shuts out physical reality and delivers an inclusive, surrounding, and vivid illusion to the senses (sec. 2.1). Presence describes “a state of consciousness, the (psychological) sense of being in the virtual environment”, which an immersive system may produce but does not guarantee (sec. 2.2). A well-made VR headset running a poorly realised virtual world may be immersive without producing presence. Conversely, an interactive-fiction game lacks the immersive technologies inherent in virtual-reality systems but may still provide a psychological sense of a virtual world, creating presence (or something closer to the literary immersion discussed by Ryan and Murray). Digital game theorist Gordon Calleja, working from both VR and literary theories, highlights a lack of scholarly consensus on whether the term refers to a level of involvement in a medium (what he calls “immersion as absorption”, which might be applied equally to non-narrative games) or the “immersion as transportation” to a narrative world referred to by Ryan and Murray (17–34). 

Despite Calleja’s objections, immersion has remained in scholarly and public discourse. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide new avenues for digital immersion, primarily along two lines. One involves the LLM as a storyteller. In an ongoing project, Melanie Walsh, Neel Gupta, and Maria Antoniak have found that a third of the English-language conversations in WildChat, a public dataset of user-ChatGPT conversations, involve fiction generation (“AI Fiction in the Wild”, 00:14:14). Jill Walker Rettberg argues that the formulaic quality of LLM storytelling resembles collective oral storytelling (232–35). Beyond individual narration, LLMs serve as generative storytellers in roleplaying games (Hua and Raley). The other involves the increasing use of LLM chatbots as digital companions, which coheres with Ryan’s emotional immersion and the rise in “digisexuality” in virtual realities (McArthur and Twist). Chatbots, such as Replika, emotionally immerse users in an artificial relationship, which may be preferred over human connection (Beguš 121–23). Immersion remains central to discussions of digital media, and participatory relationships between audience and storyworld evolve as new technologies do.

See Also

• Chatbot - Software application designed to simulate conversation with human users, often used in digital narratives to provide interactive storytelling experiences
• Embodiment - Experience of bodily presence within digital narratives, often the result of content or mechanics intended to make readers aware of their physical and sensory experience
• Interactive Fiction - Born-digital electronic literature where users navigate narrative and ludic elements by inputting textual commands or making choices
• Virtual Reality (VR) - Technology that creates immersive digital environments, allowing users to spatially interact with and experience a computer-generated world as if it were real, often used in digital art and narrative to enhance spatial and sensory engagement

Works Referenced

Beguš, Nina. Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI. University of Michigan Press, 2025. 

Calleja, Gordon. In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation. MIT Press, 2011. 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Princeton University Press, 1983. 2 vols. 

Hua, Minh, and Rita Raley. “Playing With Unicorns: AI Dungeon and Citizen NLP.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 4, 2020, www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/4/000533/000533.html. 

McArthur, Neil, and Markie L.C. Twist. “The Rise of Digisexuality: Therapeutic Challenges and Possibilities.” Sexual and Relationship Therapy, vol. 32, nos. 3–4, 2017, pp. 334–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/14681994.2017.1397950. 

Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. 1997, updated ed., MIT Press, 2016. 

Rettberg, Jill Walker. “Repeating Ourselves with Generative AI.” CounterText, vol. 10, no. 3, 2024, pp. 232–37, https://doi.org/10.3366/count.2024.0360. 

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 5, no. 1, 1994, www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/24/immersion-vs-interactivity-virtual-reality-and-literary-theory/. 

---. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 

Slater, Mel, and Sylvia Wilbur. “A Framework for Immersive Virtual Environments (FIVE): Speculations on the Role of Presence in Virtual Environments.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, vol. 6, no. 6, 1997, pp. 603–16. 

Steuer, Jonathan. “Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence.” Journal of Communication, vol. 42, no. 4, 1992, pp. 73–93, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1992.tb00812.x.   

Walsh, Melanie. “AI Fiction in the Wild.” Cultural Analytics Series, UC Berkeley School of Information, 24 Oct. 2025, www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/2025/ai-fiction-wild. Lecture recording.

Further Reading

Biocca, Frank. “Virtual Reality Technology: A Tutorial.” Journal of Communication, vol. 42, no. 4, 1992, pp. 23–72, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1992.tb00811.x. 

Dooley, Kath. Virtual Reality Narratives: Embodied Encounters in Space. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 

Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. Yale University Press, 1993.

Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, translated by Gloria Custance, MIT Press, 2003.  

Huhtamo, Erkki. “Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion.” Critical Issues in Electronic Media, edited by Simon Penny, State University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 159–86.  

Nell, Victor. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure. Yale University Press, 1988.  

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.   

Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Harvard University Press, 1990. 

Young, Katharine Galloway. Taleworlds and Storyrealms: The Phenomenology of Narrative. Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.

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