Abstract
Our sense of presence in the real world helps regulate our behaviour within it by telling us about the status and effectiveness of our actions. As such, this ability offers us practical advantages in dealing effectively with the world. It is also an automatic or intuitive response to where and how we find ourselves in that it does not require conscious thought or deliberation. In contrast, the experience of presence or immersion in a movie, game or virtual environment is not automatic but is the product of our deliberate engagement with it, an engagement which first requires a disengagement or decoupling with the real world. Of course, we regularly decouple from the real world and embrace other, possible worlds every time we daydream, or engage in creative problem solving or, most importantly, for the purposes of this discussion, when we make-believe. We propose that make-believe is a plausible psychological mechanism which underpins the experience of mediated presence.
Highlights
Presence, as an academic discipline, dates from the early1990s with the publication of the first journal dedicated to its research
We regularly decouple from the real world and embrace other, possible worlds every time we daydream, or engage in creative problem solving or, most importantly, for the purposes of this discussion, when we make-believe
When we stop pretending we return to the real world. (Before we develop this argument further, we should emphasise that we not are suggesting that pretending is in any sense concerned with deception or the wilful duping of innocent researchers)
Summary
1990s with the publication of the first journal dedicated to its research This is not to suggest, that designers, artists and writers have been unaware of the power of their media to create a sense of immersion or transportation or. Stories of all kinds, irrespective of medium, have this power to transport, immerse, engage and to create a sense of being other than where we currently are. The English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term, ‘‘the willing suspension of disbelief’’ to describe the apparent willingness of readers to engage with stories irrespective of their credibility. Returning to the examples we have already considered, we do not propose that the people who first gazed on cave paintings believed themselves to be in the presence of aurochs nor, while in churches, to be in the company of spiritual beings. Neither do we propose that people believe themselves transported to a ‘‘stately pleasure dome’’ after reading Kublai Khan nor fighting aliens
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