Summary
Two research models are widely used to talk precisely about immersion. Brown and Cairns (2004) describe immersion as graded: players move from engagement to engrossment to total immersion, and each step requires the game to remove a barrier. Ermi and Mäyrä (2005) describe immersion by its source: sensory, challenge-based and imaginative (the SCI model). Used together, they let a designer ask both “how deep is the player?” and “where is their immersion coming from, and what would break it?”
This page complements the course model on presence-and-immersion, which classifies immersion as tactical, strategic and narrative and presence as spatial, social and self.
Key ideas
Brown and Cairns: three stages, three barriers
| Stage | What the player experiences | Barrier the game must remove |
|---|---|---|
| Engagement | Wants to keep playing; invests time, effort and attention | Access: the player’s preferences (do they like this kind of game?) and learning the controls |
| Engrossment | Emotionally invested; notices less of their surroundings | Game construction: visuals, interesting tasks and plot |
| Total immersion | Feels “in the game”; presence | Empathy and atmosphere: identifying with characters and a world built from coherent sound, visuals and plot |
Total immersion is described as rare and fleeting. Immersion is also fragile: a badly placed interruption can drop the player back a stage.
Ermi and Mäyrä: the SCI model
| Source | What draws the player in | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Sensory | The audiovisual (and haptic) world overpowers the real one | Hellblade’s binaural voices, Journey |
| Challenge-based | Matching skill to motor and mental challenge; closest to flow | Tetris, Celeste, Beat Saber |
| Imaginative | Caring about characters, story and world | The Last of Us, Disco Elysium |
Different sources have different weak points: a competing sound attacks sensory immersion; an out-of-world question or a tonal clash attacks imaginative immersion; a difficulty spike or unclear goal attacks challenge-based immersion.
Flow and immersion are not synonyms
| Flow | Immersion | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Total absorption in an activity | Being drawn into the game and its world |
| Comes from | Challenge matched to skill | Sensory, challenge-based or imaginative sources |
| At its peak | player-agency: effortless control | presence: “I was there” |
| Without the other | Tetris, chess, juggling: no world needed | A walking sim: a world, little challenge |
They share the middle ground: deep concentration, fading awareness of the room, distorted sense of time. Challenge-based immersion in the SCI model is the overlap.
Relationship to the course model
The course model on presence-and-immersion uses tactical, strategic and narrative immersion and a Control → Agency → Presence → Immersion → Flow synergy chain (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures). The models answer different questions and can be used together:
- Tactical immersion (moment-to-moment play) sits close to SCI’s challenge-based immersion.
- Narrative immersion sits close to SCI’s imaginative immersion.
- Strategic immersion (long-term planning) is arguably a form of challenge-based immersion over a longer time scale.
- SCI’s sensory immersion has no direct counterpart in the tactical/strategic/narrative triad; it overlaps with spatial presence.
- Brown and Cairns’ stages describe depth rather than type, so any of the types above can be at the engagement, engrossment or total-immersion stage.
This mapping is an interpretation for teaching, not a claim made by the original authors.
In practice
- Find your game’s main source. A puzzle game should protect challenge-based immersion (clear goals, fair difficulty); a story game should protect imaginative immersion (consistent tone, see thematic-coherence); an atmospheric game should protect sensory immersion (audio design, minimal HUD, see diegetic UI).
- Remove barriers in order. Onboarding and controls (access) come before spectacle (construction), which comes before atmosphere and characters (empathy).
- Audit interruptions. Pop-ups, loading screens, store prompts and tutorial text all risk dropping players a stage; place them in natural pauses (see closure-points).
- Measure it. Immersion questionnaires such as Jennett et al.’s (2008) Immersive Experience Questionnaire and the Game Experience Questionnaire can be used in playtesting.
Evidence
- Brown and Cairns (2004), “A grounded investigation of game immersion”, CHI ‘04 Extended Abstracts, used interviews with gamers and grounded theory to derive the three stages and their barriers.
- Ermi and Mäyrä (2005), “Fundamental components of the gameplay experience: analysing immersion”, DiGRA 2005, proposed the SCI model. It grew out of interviews with children who played games and their parents, who mostly did not (Ermi, Heliö and Mäyrä, 2004), and the three components were then tested with a self-evaluation questionnaire completed by players of several popular games, whose experiences differed as the model predicted.
- The course lecture series teaches both models and the flow/immersion distinction, using the Juggle Circle activity as an almost purely challenge-based case (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures).
Open questions
- Immersion, presence, engagement and flow are used inconsistently across research; there is no agreed single definition.
- Can sensory immersion alone produce total immersion, or does it need empathy and atmosphere too, as Brown and Cairns’ model implies?
Related
- presence-and-immersion — the course model and the synergy chain
- flow — absorption in challenge matched to skill
- presence — the feeling of being there
- player-agency — meaningful action with visible results
- thematic-coherence — protecting imaginative immersion
- diegetic — UI that supports immersion
- emotion-in-game-design — emotion as part of the experience
- source-player-psychology-lectures