Drawing on Heideggerian phenomenology, this paper examines immersive experience in digital art, especially virtual reality (VR) and video games. It does so in critical response to David Chalmers’ Reality+, perhaps the most famous recent contribution to the philosophy of virtual worlds.
For Chalmers, what is distinctive about VR is that its virtual worlds are immersive, while the virtual worlds of video games are not. Immersion is reserved for fully three-dimensional audio-visually represented VR, which makes you feel as though you are actually in a virtual world and have a perspective within it. Video games can be deeply engaging but, being merely two-dimensional representations on a screen, they do not achieve immersive experience.
I think immersive experience in these forms of digital art is more complicated, multifaceted phenomenon than Chalmers allows for. If being immersed in a virtual world consists in an experience which structurally resembles our being immersed in our actual world, immersion should be thought of as extending far beyond just our perceptual faculties. Furthermore—and by Chalmers’ own admission—immersion comes in degrees.
By turning to Heidegger’s analysis of being-in-the-world and reading the concept of immersion phenomenologically, I show how video games represent our being-in-the-world by inserting us into a context of significance and involvements, our engagement with which is only partially constituted by perception. Hand in hand with perception go the disclosive processes Heidegger called ‘understanding’ and ‘mood’, both of which play fundamental roles in how we apprehend, relate to, and manipulate the objects in our world in terms of what they mean for us and our projects. Because they insert us into a world in this sense, video games deserve to be called immersive, and their virtual worlds are often more immersive than VR experiences as the available technology currently stands.