Immersion is that which takes a story and creates an experience. So critical is this part of design, it has become an artform itself. It’s the half of any construct we see and interact with, and some would argue, is the most important aspect of the entire design. Good immersion is typically praised as good design, because it doesn’t matter how complex a device/work/concept is, as long as it’s accessible to its intended audience/users.

 Some of the best ever in the immersive arts were The Implementors. Now, I don’t know if many people still remember Infocom. If you’ve heard of Zork or happened by someone mumbling profanely about babel fish, then you might recognize the legendary ’80s computer game company. And the people who worked there were known as, you guessed it, The Implementors.

 Infocom had such a mind-bendingly simple way of telling an immersive story. But even if, in some weird alternative timensional plane, the game company was merely a book publishing company, I still would be a fan, because their stories are some of the best literature of the past 30 years. I bet if Infocom had been a print publisher, they still would have packaged feelies with their books, which were another testament to their immersion prowess. (And on a side topic, why have feelies been relegated by marketeers to “special collector’s edition” status?! I’m not sure if I believe that “increased production cost” hoopla!)

 As I was saying though, the people at Infocom had a way with words. Yes, they were efficiently creative coders as well, but all that was under the hood. And I especially didn’t care when I was kid about such things. I just wanted to crawl through a trap door set in the floor of a white house, on my way to, “Hit troll with sword.” But something else came from playing those games too, something even more exciting than the fantastical childhood fervor those stories helped fuel.

 Infocom taught me how to create an immersive experience.

 That is, it gave me the ability to string words together in a tolerable way. I already possessed the raw creativity and imagination, but I have to admit, my ability/style of writing was primarily born out of the influence of guys like Steve Meretzky who created several of the greatest Infocom games. Meretzky’s work may have actually been the first headlong plunge into the bottom of that amazingly dense and flat, cracked concrete pool floor of critical language cohesion. Of course, there are definitely other writers I attribute to my prose as well. (For those others, be sure to check out The List !)

 Writing, though, is just one method of immersion, albeit one of the more pure manifestations. At its minimum everything built into the design of a piece of literature can be done with words and typography. Pretty cool when you think about about how simple text is on the surface, but unfathomably deep and complex when you write it, despite how atrocious of a writer one can be.

 Like me!

 But I want to be better, and not just at writing either. I want to know how to immerse people visually, with sound, color, motion, etc. And so I explore, experiment, and reverse engineer everything. I want to peek at the man behind the curtain. I want to know the whole story… What the cause is to the effect.

 Like the unknown multitude of the hacker/DIY mentality, I want to know so I can recreate it. Immersion is what people want to know. It’s the key to every design endeavor. It’s why I, in addition to a lot of other people, enjoy reading forums, doing tutorials, taking classes, and on and on. One of my favorites is watching making-of/behind-the-scenes featurettes. Even still, these things have a certain degree of accessibility designed into them. And perhaps this represents the ultimate truth about how life draws us into anything we encounter. Immersion is an increasingly layered concept.

 Like the quantum abyss of the universe, there’s never an end in sight.