Discussing immersion is dangerous space. It’s slippery and it bites. With respect to gaming in particular, when people talk about it earnestly and passionately it still looks like everyone is talking about something different. Efforts to pin it down qualitatively (and no one dares measure it quantitatively!) are either met with derision (“That’s not what I am talking about at all!”) or are so broad and so complex as to at once apply to almost anything and at the same time be difficult to understand and use. ¹ I just want to babble a bit, so I’m not going to go there. In fact, what I discovered (anew, I’m sure — I am not claiming originality here but only a personal epiphany) is that we can sidestep the argument.

Because really, who cares what immersion really is? In particular, if the experience of immersion is so varied that it is no longer practical to talk about it qualitatively, then why don’t we skip it? Acknowledge that the experience is highly varied and there are different kinds, certainly, and that one might have one kind as a higher goal than another, but also that there is one measure by which we can all agree that a successful time-killing entertainment was achieved: the degree to which we lose track of time.

Now I’m not offering that up for argument. I am offering that up as a definition that I will use to go forward, because I didn’t actually want to talk about immersion in detail but rather I wanted to use the concept in support of some other ideas. So I’m laying that down as foundation and don’t care if you agree: we are immersed (and this is fun) when we lose track of the time. We can even measure it — the time between starting the endeavour and first glancing at the clock is a quantitative measure of immersion.

Okay so yesterday I got the Kindle 2 that my wife bought for me. Most abrupt segué ever, I know.

From the beginning: my wife ordered it for me on Friday night and it arrived at my door with no border fees of any description (all handled by Amazon, it seems, and reliably — something I would have declared unlikely given that the delivery is by UPS) on Tuesday. Fast and no bad surprises. Awesome.

I open it up and turn it on and it works. It is already downloading a book I bought on Saturday evening. I configure nothing and I do not pay for data access. I open it and it works. Someone has been watching Apple very closely. In fact even the packaging smacks of a very smart design process aimed at the end-user, again an Apple hallmark. The designs are not the same or even similar — they are refreshingly novel (taking advantage of the fact that plain brown boxes already evoke “oh boy, an Amazon delivery!” for people) and functional. Out-of-box experience: superb.

It has a nice heft — not too light, which I was worried about. This is a luxury item and I want to feel like I got something. Mass is a visceral way to believe you got something. See also: gold. Not too heavy though — lighter than the volume of Solzhenitsyn that I replaced in three minutes and ten bucks.

And so today, on the bus, I got a chance to use it rather than play with it. See, my other big fear was that I would lose the immersion that I get with a book — gadgets tend to distract me and so, if this one distracts, it fails at its chief objective: delivery of immersion in text. Using it was a rich experience. To wit:

Text is laid out on the fly (as with HTML, for example) and some bad choices are made. Now, let’s back this up a tad and realise that the essential competitor to something like the Kindle is the paperback, and I’ve already talked about how the paperback makes all kinds of concessions to good typography because it has different objectives than “real” books do. So I don’t mind that there are poor typographic choices made here as long as my bus-ride read is immersive. Anyway, there are some bad choices. Worst is the fact that all text appears to be justified flush with both right and left margins but no hyphenation is done. Even that would be okay except that the justification is accomplished solely with inter-word spacing (as opposed to tiny inter-letter spacing), so the result is ugly and occasionally profoundly so. Nonetheless, we tolerated this in newspapers and some paperbacks for a very long time. I’ll live.

There is a lag in page refresh where the screen goes black and then returns to text. This is analogous enough to the narrative break in page turning that it doesn’t bother me (and in fact handling Kindle page turning is far less annoying than a page turn near the beginning or end of a 1200 page book). But that disjunct does exist.

The text rendering is flawed but, frankly, beautiful. This startled me but, again, let’s diverge slightly in order to get a grip on it.

Most typefaces designed for books were originally cut in metal, rubbed in ink, and pressed firmly into paper to make the textual image. This process frequently yielded inconsistent results — some words might be more completely transferred than others as metal type wore down or consistency of ink application varied, for example. But the type that emerged from several hundred years of this process was (implicitly — we don’t need an explicit effort) designed to accommodate those variations. It’s only fairly recently that we have come to expect near-perfect rendering and yet we still use these robust letter forms.

Well, good for us. See, the Kindle uses a technology called eInk to render text, and this process is still imperfect. It has enormous advantages though — because it actually aligns a physical ink on the device, it emits no light (only reflects, like a book) and it uses no power except to transition between presentations (which is why the device has a battery life measured in days or even weeks). It doesn’t get every single pixel right, though, and results vary by ambient temperature, humidity, and a million other variables. It’s never illegible and it’s never even awful, but each letter does vary a little in outline and in weight. But this is exactly what serifed roman fonts are designed to deal with. In fact, I would argue that they are optimally viewed under these conditions. The slight variation in page colour is frankly beautiful and echoes printing from as recently as the 19th century. The serifed font hasn’t been as well used in a hundred years. And how nice an echo for a device on the verge of a new kind of textual delivery to offer a visual parallel to the last big change?

Anyway, reading the thing is a treat. The letters are lovely to my eye, though perhaps for esoteric reasons. The layout is packed with bad choices, but nothing that can’t be changed through a software update (dear Amazon: hyphenation, inter-letter spacing, and optional justification as priorities).

So the bottom line is, was my reading experience immersive?

I experience three distinct forms of immersion when reading and they are mutually inconsistent. I can experience them in sequence but never simultaneously. This may be a feature of immersion. The first is immersion in the story: I lose track of the time because I am engaging the story itself so deeply that I lose track of my external space. The second is immersion in the idea: I lose track of the time because I am running down ancillary ideas and ramifications of what I am reading — I am applying the content actively to my world. The third is immersion in the text: I am lost in the book itself — its layout, its art, its typography.

Well suffice to say that (with this post as evidence — it being in part my memory of my internal monologue on the ride) I was completely immersed. On this critical measure — can I immerse in my text when read on the Kindle — the Kindle handily replaces the paperback. I still want books, but this is also a kind of book that I want. I engaged the story, the idea, and the text and my commute was effectively instantaneous. And this was for Solzhenitsyn, so we’re not talking about an adventure paperback here, but an effort at rich communication on several axes. And the Kindle delivered it.

Oh and the dictionary look-up appears to know some Russian, which is bloody handy when the author throws out a native word.

–BMurray