What is immersion anyway?

[MrSandman]

Over the last few months, in these forums I have read people talk about this thing called immersion. People say things like:
- People playing characters of the other gender breaks my immersion.
- Things that remind me that we're playing a game break my immersion.
- Talking about the game at a metagame level breaks my immersion.
But the experience they seem to refer by "immersion" eludes me.

The closest I can get to this immersion, I think, is what I'd call a state of focus on the game to the exclusion of most other things. That is, there is an experience in which I am so absorbed in the game that I hardly pay attention to things outside of the game.

In this experience, things that would "break my immersion", would be things that claim my focus outside of the game. So it would be stuff like receiving a phone call, someone coming and turning on the TV or asking what we want for supper, even a long-winded discussion about rules. However, as soon as the distraction disappears I can focus back on the game without much trouble. So I wouldn't really understand people's extreme aversion to breaking immersion. Things like rolling dice, talking at the metagame level, or even stopping the game to discuss how to go about a particular scene are examples of things that wouldn't divert my focus and therefore wouldn't "break my immersion."

So, in order to better understand what people mean by "immersion," I'd like you to describe how you experience it, what sort of things do and do not break it, and the relationship between these things and immersion.

Thanks in advance for your input.

[Altheus]

I think immersion is feeling intensly involved in the game. I've had sweat rolling down my head in an iaijitsu duel in L5R (I was the gm but I always roll duels openly).

Or, getting your players so involved they have nightmares afterwards.

[Psyren]

I'd say it's less about simply denying the world around you - after all, ARG games like Pokemon Go can be immersive even while they force you to actually pay more attention to your surroundings.

Rather, immersion is the ability to accept the fiction of the world the game is taking you to. Deep down you know the events aren't actually possible or probable, and you also know the activity of gaming itself doesn't really fulfill any of your fundamental needs, like food or shelter. But immersion lets you find value in that anyway.

This video sums it up well for me:



Some of the specific techniques for crossing that threshold are unique to videogames, but (a) a surprising number can work for tableop (e.g. music) and (b) the actual definitions of what constitutes immersion are applicable to the question in this thread.

[Segev]

Psyren has it right, I think. Immersion is the ability to suspend disbelief. It's acceptance of the fiction you're being presented as "real" for the purposes of engaging with it on its level. So, for example, when I say, "I don't play female characters in games that aren't text-based because hearing my deep voice come out of my mouth when speaking for her breaks my immersion," what I mean is, I am immediately reminded, upon hearing not a female voice, but my own baritone, that I am not a convincing girl. It doesn't match my mental image, and does so in a way that calls attention to itself in my own mind.

It also tends to be subjective. I am not torn out of it by jokes at the table, OOC or otherwise, in the same way, because in the moment of the joke, it's not simultaneously trying to get me to think of things as this character acting this way.

[Zakhara]

Immersion is when you don't question it.

[MrSandman]

Psyren has it right, I think. Immersion is the ability to suspend disbelief. It's acceptance of the fiction you're being presented as "real" for the purposes of engaging with it on its level. So, for example, when I say, "I don't play female characters in games that aren't text-based because hearing my deep voice come out of my mouth when speaking for her breaks my immersion," what I mean is, I am immediately reminded, upon hearing not a female voice, but my own baritone, that I am not a convincing girl. It doesn't match my mental image, and does so in a way that calls attention to itself in my own mind.

It also tends to be subjective. I am not torn out of it by jokes at the table, OOC or otherwise, in the same way, because in the moment of the joke, it's not simultaneously trying to get me to think of things as this character acting this way.

How does the female thing change or stay the same when you GM? Or when another GM portrays male characters with a female voice?

Immersion is when you don't question it.

When you don't question what? Immersion itself? The game? The world being portrayed?

Rather, immersion is the ability to accept the fiction of the world the game is taking you to. Deep down you know the events aren't actually possible or probable, and you also know the activity of gaming itself doesn't really fulfill any of your fundamental needs, like food or shelter. But immersion lets you find value in that anyway.

So what sorts of things break immersion, then? Or do they? I don't see anything in your definition that would lead to the conclusion that somethings do break it.

[Segev]

How does the female thing change or stay the same when you GM? Or when another GM portrays male characters with a female voice?

Like I said, it's subjective. There's a difference, to my mind and perception, between running an NPC as a GM and playing a PC as a player.

But in general, "immersion" is just how easy it is to keep taking the game seriously in the moment.

[ErdrickOfAliaha]

"immersion" is "being completely surrounded (in all 3{4?} Dimensions)" in our physical world, it exists as a state for solid objects to be in relation to liquids.

Transposing into mental, we can use the following analogy: our perception is that solid object, and the game world has replaced the liquid of the physical world.

My eyes are looking at the room my body is in, but I'm 'seeing' the cold, stone masonry of the dungeon. I 'smell' the musty corridor, and when I look at my companions, there's a transparent overlay of their character in my mind's eye.

For vocals, this is why specific accents or peculiar turns of phrase are helpful additions to an "in character" voice.

Historically, my most immersive moments are when, as a group, we're plotting or strategizing, prior to an infiltration or a foreseen combat.

Things that break it are the things that point out that the game world IS a game. Just like so many other forms of storytelling, it is the "suspension of disbelief" that makes it work.

[Zakhara]

When you don't question what? Immersion itself? The game? The world being portrayed?

Yes.

For some, just one will suffice. For others, most or all.

[Koo Rehtorb]

Immersion isn't real.

[Mordar]

For me immersion is something like being deep in the role of the character I am playing and the scene/story I/we are experiencing. Being able to visualize, to process and react as the character would/should/could and having the others at the table do the same.

It doesn't apply, for me, to anything other than in-person games. It doesn't apply, for me, to the more "gamist" games (I'm not a GNS proponent or expert, I just know what I think I mean by gamist) and isn't even a goal in such games. But it does apply, it seems, to my favorite game experiences.

As such, I do have the metagame immersion break, and the external devices/distractions immersion break. The gender thing doesn't seem to impact me. Generally a little bit of die rolling isn't an immersion break, but that depends.

So...I guess that means for me it is "immersion in the character and setting, achieving a more first-person perspective, and interacting with others as characters, not players".

- M

[Tajerio]

Immersion isn't real.

Though I don't quite agree, I also don't have a ton of use for the word, mostly because I think it has been used as a stick to beat games with for too long now.

I prefer "verisimilitude," but even then I'm not a huge stickler for it. As long as NPCs in the game act in ways I can conceive of intelligent entities acting, and gravity doesn't work backwards unless someone casts a spell, I tend to be fine.

[Max_Killjoy]

Though I don't quite agree, I also don't have a ton of use for the word, mostly because I think it has been used as a stick to beat games with for too long now.

I prefer "verisimilitude," but even then I'm not a huge stickler for it. As long as NPCs in the game act in ways I can conceive of intelligent entities acting, and gravity doesn't work backwards unless someone casts a spell, I tend to be fine.

"Immersion doesn't exist" said by a gamer is usually underpinned by an exaggerated/distorted "definition" of what other gamers actually mean by "immersion" anyway. If someone raises the bar for immersion really high, then of course nothing ever gets over that bar.

[The Library DM]

In the context of a role-playing game, immersion is indeed related to the suspension of disbelief which all fiction demands in order to be effective. As with reading a novel or watching a movie, play, or television show, the sense of immersion is the sense that one accepts that the imagined reality of the story being told is effectively real to you, to the extent that on some level you are more than willing to ignore all the clues and evidence that the setting, characters, plot and situations are entirely imaginary and even highly improbable, if not impossible. A role-playing game takes this even further, with the players themselves willing to fully imagine that they are heroes in a fantasy world on a dangerous and even deadly adventure, facing hazards and foes that are utterly fantastic (and in fact impossible)— “You are there,” as the old books and tv show used to say.

Given the above, whatever “breaks the immersion” is an element that takes the individual out of that imaginary world— as if a prop wall has fallen over in the middle of a Star Trek episode, revealing the various studio personnel running around behind it all. In the examples you give, it’s a bit more subtle than that— more like if Gimli greeted Legolas with “How y’all doin’ up there in Mirkwood way?” (Well, okay, that’s not exactly subtle...) But the idea is that some element of the moment has reminded the player that he is not an elven prince of the woodlands, but a guy from Detroit sitting at a kitchen table rolling dice with his friends and their cousin visiting from Georgia.

To some extent, the loss of immersion is dependent upon the suspension of belief which has already been established by your group as a baseline for the game. If you regularly play with friends of various accents, and your DM uses a baritone voice because he can’t really do anything else, then you will likely not “lose immersion” from these factors— you already have set those bits of actual reality aside to achieve immersion in the first place. So it’s more likely that the “breaking” element will be whatever is new and unusual to you, than anything others necessarily mention here. Different people have different triggers.

[KineticDiplomat]

Segev has the right of it. While there are no doubt higher and lower orders of immersion, for an RPG the baseline for being immersed is the ability to act as a character in the world without the real world intruding to the point where the role-playing aspect is completely lost. Like watching a movie, it may be utmost fiction and you may be in an air conditioned theater, but you want to be able to focus on the enjoyable story at hand without Keanu Reeves turning to the camera and pointing out he is not, in fact Neo, he is Keanu Reeves and you should call this all hogwash because it's obviously not true.

No one expects players to have graduated Julliard and take up method acting. In general, if asking about immersion, it is enough not to blatantly and openly remind people of the real world. Which is harder than you might think; I believe most people feel in some way shamed and humiliated by acting in character - particularly people without A class social skills.

Hence why you can find a player who loves fantasy, sci-fi, what have you. Who is unrepentantly nerdy. Who really, above all else thinks these worlds and characters are just that cool. And he'll make sure to let everyone know he's real life cool right - the monty python jokes, the 'wacky-go-nutz" playstyles of less mature players. All some desperate way to say "nuh, uh, I'm not actually playing an elf mage. That'd be dorky or a dram nerd or whatever." Which is typically what ends up breaking immersion.

Now, if you enter a purely sophist debate where you peel back layer after layer of meaning and try to poke holes in it, you will inevitably be able to do so far longer than people will answer the question, modify, and refine. And ultimately we will admit we are people sitting at a table at which point you can throw your hands in the air and declare it is all a lie. Though since you inevitably have enjoyed some form of fiction, and apparently enjoy the fantasy setting of games when there are strictly speaking more mechanically well done games, I would ask about how honestly you carry that conviction to real life. None the less, you can grasp the essence of what immersion is if you can think of all the behaviors players do to prove to themselves they aren't playing a role-playing game. if you have those behaviors, you're probably breaking immersion.

[Mechalich]

I prefer "verisimilitude," but even then I'm not a huge stickler for it. As long as NPCs in the game act in ways I can conceive of intelligent entities acting, and gravity doesn't work backwards unless someone casts a spell, I tend to be fine.

Immersion and verisimilitude are two quite different things. Verisimilitude is a property of a fiction - it's the ability of a fictional framework (whether a world, plotline, character, or other element) to present a convincing appearance of truth to an outside observer. Immersion is, in the context of people relating to fiction, a state of mind. It represents the ability of a person to subsume their awareness of the physical world and enter into an at least partly imagined fictional world.

A world can be highly immersive while being extremely low in verisimilitude, Harry Potter being a very good example in modern popular culture. Conversely a world can have high verisimilitude but lack immersion, often because something that appears truthful may disrupt the flow of storytelling. Translation is a great example - it happens all the time in the real world, but almost never in movies, because it breaks up conversation structure.

[Jay R]

It's hard to give a clear, unambiguous definition of immersion, because the difference between immersion and non-immersion is neither clear nor unambiguous.

Let me start with an analogy. If I'm watching a movie, immersion is thinking about Thor's hammer or Iron Man's suit. Non-immersion is thinking about special effects. Obviously, making either the suit or the hammer work requires special effects, but I'd rather be thinking, "Oh, that's cool! Captain America can lift the hammer because he's worthy," rather than, "What a seamless effect of the hammer flying from Cap to Thor and back."

Similarly, immersion in D&D is thinking about my gnome illusionist and the illusion he's trying to cast. Non-immersion is thinking about the rules for casting illusions. Obviously, I have to go through the mechanics. But Ideally, I come up with a great idea for an illusion, and I'm thinking about it. The DM asks me what the DC of the illusion is, I quickly look at my character sheet, the DM rolls the die, and we are quickly thinking about how the owlbear saw through the illusion, or how he's fooled by it, rather than the mechanics that made it happen.

That's why I think a Diplomacy roll should happen only after the PC has described what arguments he is using and what he hopes to accomplish. I want to think about how he convinced the king, not what number he had to roll to do it.

To the extent possible, I want the mechanics to be used as quickly as possible, so I can think about a Guisarme of Thundering, or the illusion of a black dragon, rather than BAB or spell DCs.

Since I actually have to use the mechanics to have a story, the crucial immersion skill is not staying immersed, but re-immersing into the fantasy.

[Imbalance]

I'm immersed right now. I'm playing the internet.

[Inchhighguy]

I get the feeling that most posters above are not immersion type gamers.....

I think Immersion is three basic things:

1.Not bringing real life to the game. You don't like Player Clyde, so in the game you have your chatacter attack his....only because you don't like the player. Or the classic ''flirt with the pretty woman player"...constantly...in the game.

2.Playing the game mostly as a free form role play and not constantly using the rules to play the boring mechanical game. Role-Playing your character in the game as much as possible, and only breaking into light Out of Character occasinaly.

3.And not Metagaming, really out right exploting or cheating the fact that you know your playing in a fictional reality.

Two and three really go together.


A lot of games have very little immersion, and the game is played as a strightforward mechnical rule based game. In this game ''character 1" can move X, as per the rules, and do X per the rules. Exactly.

Metagaming is knowing that the game will end at 11 pm real time...so ''amazingly" the DM will have the Big Monster show up at about 10:30...and then the player saying ''oh, my character readys and action to do X" to take advantage of that real world knowladge.


A great example of immersion vs mechanincal is he simple pit to jump across:

In the mechanincal game, the DM will either freely give the players ALL the game related mechanincal information (the pit is exactly 10 feet wide, you need a DC of 20 to jump across, etc.) or the players will bully and demand such information from the DM(this player would say something like thier character is such an expert on pits and jumpping that they would actomataicly ''know" hard hard the jump was AND they would know what to do...and that because of this the DM MUST tell the player the mechanical details).

Then, once the player has all the mechnicnal details, the player plays the mechanincal game: They want thier character to do X, so they look through the rules to find a way to do exactly X. So a player might have the character use a spell or skill or ability to exactly ''get a 20" or over to beat the set DC, to jump across the pit.

In the immersion game, the DM will only describe things TO THE CHARACTER ''in game", and will avoid any and all OOC rules or mechanincs unless needed. So the DM would say ''your character see a wide pit, at least as wide as your character is tall..and a couple more feet. The immersed player will stay in character as thier character, and again not bother with rules or mechanics, and simply say ''A pit? Bjorn the Brave will get a running start and attempt to leap across. The DM would ask for a roll/check(using the rules and mechanincs for a split second), and then describe the result. In the most pure immersion, the player does not even need to worry about or even know the rules...the DM will take care of the behind the screen.

NOt, please don't take anything above as ''one way is better". They are just diffrent.

[NichG]

Immersion and metagaming have a funny relationship for me. One of the most immersed experiences I had with a tabletop game was in a setting/system that took the constraints of 'this is a tabletop RPG' and not only explained them within the fiction, but allowed those factors to be interactive and actually part of how to understand and take control of the characters' situation. On the other hand, something like drown healing or other meta-constraints like 'the PCs have to always go everywhere together' does break immersion for me.

What I mean by immersion is the feeling of being able to react in the moment to the world presented to me as if that situation were actually real and I, as my character, were actually in it. That's opposed to acting as if I were controlling my character, who is in it while I was separate and not. So being able to feel that it's not just my character acting afraid because I'm deciding for them to do so, but that 'yeah, this is scary', and such.

So things that are presented in a way that is in conflict with how they will actually proceed tend to break immersion for me. If the fiction and the metagame are in conflict with each-other, then metagaming can break immersion. But if the fiction embraces the metagame as an inevitable truth about the world and plays into it, then metagaming doesn't actually break immersion for me, or could even enhance it. But for that to work, the way that the fiction embraces the metagame has to make sense for the fiction itself - if its default fantasy world, but there's a 'god' called the 'DM' for unknown reasons who 'sets arbitrary rules just because' then even if that's acknowledging the metagame, its doing so in a way that makes the default fantasy world obviously a false image. Whereas, if the twist is that the campaign takes place in the characters' shared afterlife and all of the weirdness of the metagame is essentially external interference trying to guide them out of a torment that the characters' souls have imposed on themselves, or cement them deeper, then somehow that sounds more like something that would let me be immersed.

Other peoples' characters tend not to have nearly as much effect on my immersion as how the DM portrays things. If talking to the baker next door and talking to the judge of the courts and talking to the 10000 year old deity who shaped a continent all feel like just talking to palette swapped versions of a similar set of life experiences for example, then that can sort of sour things.

[Kaptin Keen]

I don't even like immersion. I like to play the game like a game - not like a theatrical performance. Even worse, I don't like playing with anyone (IRL at least) who get's into the actual role-play too deeply. There was this one guy who was just amazingly insistent on everyone around the table knowing and relating to his characters angry, lesbian, latino ex-cop background - made me quit the group, actually, because I just didn't care about his backstory. Or mine, or anyone else's for that matter.

But what is immersion? Well, it could be that guy. He had an enormously detailed backstory - unpleasant too, drugs and abuse and beatings and rape - fitting, honestly, quite well with the personality he had assumed for her. He was deeply immersed. It just isn't my kind of thing.

[Tajerio]

Immersion and verisimilitude are two quite different things. Verisimilitude is a property of a fiction - it's the ability of a fictional framework (whether a world, plotline, character, or other element) to present a convincing appearance of truth to an outside observer. Immersion is, in the context of people relating to fiction, a state of mind. It represents the ability of a person to subsume their awareness of the physical world and enter into an at least partly imagined fictional world.

A world can be highly immersive while being extremely low in verisimilitude, Harry Potter being a very good example in modern popular culture. Conversely a world can have high verisimilitude but lack immersion, often because something that appears truthful may disrupt the flow of storytelling. Translation is a great example - it happens all the time in the real world, but almost never in movies, because it breaks up conversation structure.

Fair enough. A better phrasing of my point would have been that the extremely limited amount of verisimilitude I require is an absolute precondition for the similarly limited amount of immersion I experience, on the rare occasions I do experience it.

[MoiMagnus]

Over the last few months, in these forums I have read people talk about this thing called immersion. People say things like:
- People playing characters of the other gender breaks my immersion.
- Things that remind me that we're playing a game break my immersion.
- Talking about the game at a metagame level breaks my immersion.
But the experience they seem to refer by "immersion" eludes me.

The closest I can get to this immersion, I think, is what I'd call a state of focus on the game to the exclusion of most other things. That is, there is an experience in which I am so absorbed in the game that I hardly pay attention to things outside of the game.

In this experience, things that would "break my immersion", would be things that claim my focus outside of the game. So it would be stuff like receiving a phone call, someone coming and turning on the TV or asking what we want for supper, even a long-winded discussion about rules. However, as soon as the distraction disappears I can focus back on the game without much trouble. So I wouldn't really understand people's extreme aversion to breaking immersion. Things like rolling dice, talking at the metagame level, or even stopping the game to discuss how to go about a particular scene are examples of things that wouldn't divert my focus and therefore wouldn't "break my immersion."

So, in order to better understand what people mean by "immersion," I'd like you to describe how you experience it, what sort of things do and do not break it, and the relationship between these things and immersion.

Thanks in advance for your input.

A lot of good answer before, but here are my 2 cents.

Immersion is a lot things mixed up, because everybody care about different things in different intensities.
I would personally split immersion in those different points:

1) The mood. For example, if you're playing a dark horror game, and you see a looney toon, it will feel out of place. It just does not match the mood around the table. That's like saying a joke at a funeral, it might fall flat, and peoples might even "hate" it because it interferes with the emotion they were experiencing. [Note that well done, you can change the mood instead of breaking it]

2) The identification/bleed. If is how much the character you're playing feel like "yourself", and how much their emotional state "bleed" to your emotional state. Different peoples have more of less ease to identify with peoples of different gender, or different personality than them, or different informations level than them.

3) The theatrical game. Simultaneously to you "tabletop RPG", you might be playing a "role playing game" (in its original meaning). As every game, it has rules, which are here implicit, fuzzy, and dependent on each table. If you break those rules, you're breaking the "theatrical game".

4) The internal consistency/suspension of disbelief. Universes have rules. Having "soft and changing" rules in not a problem (if well done), but presenting something as an "hard rule" and latter making something inconsistent with it is. It break the mental image of "how the world works" of your players, and prevent them to guess "what will reasonably happen if I do this action?".


Now, on the subject of metagaming (and "out-of-the-game" behaviours):

• Metagaming breaks the mood, unless the mood is a "gamer mood" (metagaming is at the core of this mood). Some tables have no problem changing mood back and forth between a "gamer mood" and another mood, but it need to be clearly done.
• Metagaming breaks the identification of peoples that have problems "thinking without this information". If you (the player) know a secret of another character, that your character do not know, then it might be more difficult to identify with him/her. Or maybe you're good as "forgetting" informations and you have no problem with it. EDIT: moreover, the more time you take metagaming, the less time you take trying to immerse in the character, to the less you identify with it.
• Some theatrical styles hate meta. Other love breaking the 4th wall.
• Metagaming can improve suspension of disbelieve, as it allows for the DM to communicate "how the universe works" without having to rely on indirect communication that might be misunderstood.

[MrSandman]

So, it seems from what most of you are saying that we could define immersion as a subjective experience of engagement with and focus on the game in which one feels part of the fantasy world portrayed. Or something along those lines, I'm not particularly concerned with coming up with a perfect definition, but I think we all can agree it's a subjective experience, it relates to being engaged with the game and it tends to shift the focus from the self to the imaginary world.

I find interesting that most people seem to derive a sense of immersion from two things:

1) A certain coherence and internal consistency in the imaginary world. Things that make the fantasy seem unreal/arbitrary tend to work against the feel of immersion.

2) A certain neglect for things outside of the imaginary world. That which reminds you of the external reality breaks the illusion of being immersed.
2b) Including those elements which help in creating and shaping the imaginary world, such as game rules, metagame information and other such things.

I have to say that 1) resonates with my experience a lot more than 2) (and especially 2b), which I have hardly experienced as a hindrance). But hey, that's just my subjective experience.

Feel free to keep bringing your points and expand or challenge my conclusions so far. But this has been an enriching discussion. Thanks for that.

[Inchhighguy]

I find interesting that most people seem to derive a sense of immersion from two things:

1) A certain coherence and internal consistency in the imaginary world. Things that make the fantasy seem unreal/arbitrary tend to work against the feel of immersion.

As an Immersive Gamer, I think very, very few immersive gamers care about this. The whole coherence and internal consistency of a game world is a thing, but it's not ''immersion". Even more so Immersion is Rules Lite type play......and the players that care about coherence and internal consistency are the hard core rule gamers.

After all...how do you make fantasy feel unreal?

2) A certain neglect for things outside of the imaginary world. That which reminds you of the external reality breaks the illusion of being immersed.
2b) Including those elements which help in creating and shaping the imaginary world, such as game rules, metagame information and other such things.

Defentaitly.

[Max_Killjoy]

As an Immersive Gamer, I think very, very few immersive gamers care about this. The whole coherence and internal consistency of a game world is a thing, but it's not ''immersion". Even more so Immersion is Rules Lite type play......and the players that care about coherence and internal consistency are the hard core rule gamers.

After all...how do you make fantasy feel unreal?

Inconsistency and incoherence and contradiction in the setting... one of the fastest ways to knock me out of being engrossed in the character-level goings on (that is, "ruin my immersion").

[Mechalich]

After all...how do you make fantasy feel unreal?

I think you're confusing traditional fantasy, which tends to rely upon detail (or at least borrowing detail through use of classic archetypes like in LotR or Star Wars) and verisimilitude in order to support drama, with Magical Realism, in which things just happen. Magical realism is inherently unreal, and thereby always fantastical, even if there are no overt fantasy elements (in something like Twin Peaks, for example), and largely disregards any idea of verisimilitude as desirable. It is possible, and in fact may even be useful, to play tabletop RPGs as magical realism rather than high fantasy. There are certainly games and settings that are pretty much explicitly this. Planescape, for instance, approaches D&D from what is essentially a magical realism perspective and makes no apologies for being totally gonzo. However, this is uncommon, as most RPGs and the settings within them at least pretend to have setting rules that strongly hold and generally hew very hard to the 'Like Reality Unless Noted' trope. This isn't surprising, since embracing the weird and glorious surrealist glory of magical realism requires a particular mindset at a table and a GM willing to roll with ever changing concepts. it has high trust barriers to entry to work well, even though it may often be very low immersion. This is the same sort of barrier required for high immersion games, even though those might be firmly grounded and very gritty.

[Inchhighguy]

I think you're confusing traditional fantasy, which tends to rely upon detail (or at least borrowing detail through use of classic archetypes like in LotR or Star Wars) and verisimilitude in order to support drama, with Magical Realism, in which things just happen.

I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing.

Most players that complain about a certain coherence and internal consistency in the imaginary world fall into two big groups:

The Rule Watchers-Their idea of fun in to crazy watch the DM for any rule mistakes or slip ups...or, of course, anything ''against" the rules.

The World Watchers-This player asks for a huge ''handout" that details EVERYTHING possible in the world. Then much like the above they have fun watching if the DM uses anything not in the handout.

Most of the rest are just mosly disruptive types.

Again, unless you are taking about something else.

Though how do you say ''like reality...but with tech/magic/fantasy/fiction" with any sort of meaning? How do you say ''oh except the 1,000 things"..and list them somehow?

[Mechalich]

Though how do you say ''like reality...but with tech/magic/fantasy/fiction" with any sort of meaning? How do you say ''oh except the 1,000 things"..and list them somehow?

Most fantasy settings have a discrete set of systems in play, usually no more than a handful, often only one. Those systems are usually positioned as explicitly violating the laws of physics in discrete ways, such that when the powers are not active everything is otherwise assumed to function as it does in normal reality. Depending on how prevalent magic is, most people in a given setting might function under otherwise normal constraints the overwhelming majority of the time. For example, in the Wheel of Time, almost everything fantastical can be traced to the One Power (the few other abilities are much more marginal), but when no one is actively channeling anything, or no artifacts are in use, the universe operates according to the same physical laws that reality does. Since most people in that world have very little contact with the One Power because Channelers are quite rare (at least at the beginning of the storyline) their lives correspond in almost all the important ways with ordinary medieval peasants or urban dwellers.

In general this is by far the most common world-building framework for fantasy: the author or authors formulate a generic medieval world and then add in permutations according to whatever mystic elements they choose to include. Now this does run into problems if you include too much and that's why D&D settings, which are overstuffed fantasy kitchen sinks, are incoherent babble and fundamentally do not work (which is why Planescape eventually said 'screw it' and embraced magical realism).

High technology settings are different, since technology is, by its very nature, far more pervasive than magic or superpowers. However, there are actually very few truly high tech RPG settings (Star Wars, Warhammer 40K, and their kin are space fantasies wherein technology is deployed as magic its implications are largely deliberately overlooked) and those that do embrace their concepts - like Eclipse Phase - offer serious barriers to actually conducting gameplay because players and GMs will regularly struggle to get a handle on how different life is like for citizens in any sort of detailed vision of the future.

[Inchhighguy]

Most fantasy settings have a discrete set of systems in play, usually no more than a handful, often only one.

The thing is here your talking about things way beyond Immersion.

That there are very low fantasy/tech/fiction games made for the people that want a very ''just like real life...with one or two offical set twists'' really is a whole other topic.

The other settings, like D&D or any Star Wars or Star Trek based setting really do have an ''anything goes" clause bulit right into the game.

But again, this is not really ''immersion" as it's more ''some players don't like supprises" or even more ''some players don't like things they can't immedeatly explain".

And the rest you are talking about is more world bulding.