immersion and objecthood

Sat in the dark, a projector humming in the background, the Brookhaven Hospital section of Silent Hill 3 flickers to life. Sat knelt before the light. I navigate my digital body through the labyrinth, interacting with the game’s controller in a slew of gestures interpreted and actualised through the game's code. Turning the corner towards the southwestern hallway of the hospital, I am attacked, two reanimated corpses have appeared in front of me. As my virtual avatar is hit, I flinch, ducking my arm out of danger, a move mirrored on the screen. I am lost inside of the game, my physical body displaced between physical and digital space. In the virtual space, I am haunting this digital body, unable to materialise my own, I possess another's.

screenshot from "Silent Hill 3 (2003)"

Within video game scholarship, there is this concept of being in “flow” or “self-presence”. These are states of interaction with game texts characterised by relative unawareness, where a player may experience a heightened sense of their physical self being present in the game environment or an increase in their ability to perform gaming actions (such as using a controller or demonstrating technical skill). You become immersed in the game’s environment, and the digital representation of you, of the world, becomes inseparable from your own. I believe these states of presence and flow are representative of our wider relationships with digital texts and our attraction to them.


The “unawareness” described in relation to these states is more an unawareness of one's physical body or action rather than an unawareness of how to play. A player will no longer have to think about their inputs and can solely focus on their digital representation; the gestures required of them in the physical space now appear natural and obvious to them. As a player's desires are more and more accurately actualised on screen (as they learn to better communicate through the controller) thus heightened states of flow and presence are achieved. Like learning a new language, the player no longer needs to “think” but simply “do”.

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1982)

The language of physical to digital becomes common, an instant translation, and your physical body becomes attuned to the digital one. Once the language (in this case, the controls or mechanics) of gaming becomes understood, it becomes far easier for one to translate their physical experience into the game, resulting in self-presence and flow.

In her seminal essay Video Haptics and Erotics Laura Marks explores the idea of touch in relation to the screen.

She describes cinema as an ultimately visual experience, but still an exchange between two bodies, responding to the video as another body and the screen as another skin. She argues that video, or images with ‘electronic texture’ (such as video games) have an aspect of “haptic visuality".

“Haptic visuality draws upon other senses; the viewer's body is more obviously involved in the process of seeing than is the case with optical visuality.”

This kind of push-and-pull interaction becomes the exchange, it's this oscillating distance which allows you to fall inside of the haptic image//text.

“In other words, optical representation makes possible a greater distance between the beholder and object that allows the beholder to imaginatively project him/herself into or onto the object.”

Videodrome (1983)

When being a participatory viewer having cinema/visual experiences as physical exchanges, the video as body and the screen as skin, it makes it appropriate to consider touch. How do we touch the screen? How does it touch us, as your eyes skirt across its surface, how does the image feel? Touching, exchanging, lying up against the image in this way, the viewer may give up their own sense of separateness from the image, completely immersed, losing oneself in relation with another which cannot be known.

Marks considers this touch as something erotic, an exchange of subject/objecthood, this loss of separateness from the image allowing you to become an object with the world, the loss of subjecthood itself being erotic.

       You touch a video image with your eyes, but you can become one with its body through the controller

Existenz (1999)

There are some clear parallels which can be drawn from the haptic visuality of film and gaming aesthetics. Marks invokes Antonia Lant’s term “Haptical images” which was used to describe early experimental works that exploit the contrast between visual flatness and depth. Almost all video games do this, utilising the 2D space of the screen to explore the “depth” or 3D space of the game. Within the contrast of these two, in the folds of the strudel, is where we experience touch.

This sense of touch, eroticism, objecthood or immersion is greatly enhanced by gaming aesthetics. Not only do many video games, particularly those on sixth generation consoles, share aesthetic similarities to video’s surface density (a kind of shared electronic texture) but often exploit the visual flatness//depth contrast with HUD’s (heads up displays). Images which are placed right on the surface of the image with helpful information. This image data invites a kind of caressing glance, your eyes sliding across the digital surface, pushing you away some distance before ultimately pulling you back in.

screenshot from "Resident Evil 4 (2005)"

It is more than just a conversation of aesthetics, though; gaming requires direct physical interaction with the text, you are able to actually touch what you are seeing, and impact the actions represented on screen. Influence and change the kind of haptic exchanges you are having. It is the physical artefacts, in other words, the controller, which is the material difference between gaming and watching. If the video is the body and the screen its skin, the controller is the brain. Able to translate your actions to digital code, interpreting your desires and making them manifest in its video body.

When again looking at the “unawareness” of flow or self presence, this conversation with the machine, and the physical exchange of touch between your body and that of the controller//brain, once reaching a state of unawareness, suggests a kind of symbiosis. You no longer need to think about your actions, its almost as if the video//body is preempting your inputs the controller/brain becomes an extension of yourself, shaping your body, hands into a convenient form, shaped by the video//body controller//brain you are now losing that sense of separateness.

Becoming one with the video//body of the game, making its screen//skin react to your caress of its controller//brain. Losing your separateness or subjecthood in this way, is scary erotic even. Projecting yourself onto your virtual avatar inhabiting the vessel of an unknown digital other. You are represented on screen by this virtual body as you hold its brain in your hands, your organic self being transcoded into the digital plane, leaving this world behind.


Plugged into the controller, I continue through the hallway, laying up against the skin of the game. I rest my head upon the screen trying to access an unknowable other, losing myself to this immaterial body.