To what degree do you feel "immersed" in Second Life?

[Gopi Passiflora]

When people play video games or explore virtual worlds, they often talk about the feeling of immersion. I suppose what it means is how much they feel they are actually in the virtual world itself.

I think Second Life has pretty great immersion. It's hard to describe, but when you log into Second Life it feels like you are your avatar and you are actually living his/her/its life.

[Ren Toxx]

Head just above the flotation line.

[Conifer Dada]

It varies, depending on what sort of SL environment I'm in, how well SL is performing at the time and what my RL mood is.  

Sometimes I feel very immersed, others I can't get beyond 'moving pictures on a screen'.

[Gabriele Graves]

Very immersed but then I can easily fall through the pages of a book into a story world too.

[BelindaN]

I live my Avi's life here, but it's not about the scenery. It's about my connections, and the friends I've made since I joined. The fact that we hang out and have fun. It doesn't always last long but it's amazing. That's how I measure my immersion. 

I value those friends, even though I know next to nothing about them, and would never ask. And of course I think about SL when I'm in RL...……….what to do next, and so on.

So I'm immersed and addicted...……… 

 

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, BelindaN said:

I live my Avi's life here, but it's not about the scenery. 

You’re probably the best scenery!

[ThorinII]

I feel very immersed in Second Life. When I'm inworld, I often feel like I'm actually there: I imagine the voices matching the written word (I have voice disabled); I imagine smells matching the scenery or looks, I imagine many things that can't be shown inworld at all, or only be described by emoting it.

Although I often have the same grade of immersion when I read a good book - but when I'm reading, I'm reading. There's almost no stopping it. For example, I managed to "binge-read" Stephen King's "The Stand" within one weekend. 😏

However, I must admit, I sometimes even dream to actually be in SL,  to actually be my avatar. Although, whenever I have such dreams (which are very vivid, by the way), waking up in RealLife is a tad confusing for a few moments. 😮

[Ceka Cianci]

I think the time I am most immersed is when I'm shopping.. I know it may sound superficial to some,but it's a time when I'm really concentrating..The same for when I'm setting up a scene for a picture or trying to come up with an idea..

I don't just shop for clothes..I shop for things for the scenes or find ways to make things for them..

It's really hard for me to RP as someone I'm not and then jump into a sim and try to be that other person.. I think I get more immersed in doing things rather than being something else.

[Selene Gregoire]

38 minutes ago, ThorinII said:

However, I must admit, I sometimes even dream to actually be in SL,  to actually be my avatar. Although, whenever I have such dreams (which are very vivid, by the way), waking up in RealLife is a tad confusing for a few moments. 😮

Been there done that. It all started way back in Active Worlds before SL ever existed. It doesn't happen anymore because I don't allow myself to become that deeply immersed. It can take over your RL if you aren't careful. 

[Bree Giffen]

I'm not feeling too immersed in SL right now which is where I want to be. Weaning myself from the glass teat as Harlan Ellison would say. 

[Eva Knoller]

When I first started SL back in ‘07 I was extremely immersed. Nowadays, not so much. Like Ceka, I am most immersed when setting up and trying to get the perfect photo. My loud family does their best to break that immersion, though. 😜

[kali Wylder]

I think I was the most immersed back when I first started.  I felt like everything that happened to my avatar happened to me. I set out to make an avatar that looked like me and she made the same decisions the woman at the keyboard would make.  I wouldn't do anything in SL that I wouldn't do in RL. I actually created my first alt to try some of the things that I(meaning my first av) wouldn't do.  Now I'm that alt and the immersion is not as intense.  I am still pretty much immersed most of the time.  When I'm hosting.  I am that person in the blues club who is in charge, who's job it is to make sure everyone there is having a great time. When I make friends with someone in SL, I consider them a real friend, not just pixels on a screen. I care as deeply for people in SL as I do in RL. When my feeling are hurt in SL, the real me suffers the pain. Knowing this, I try really hard to be kind to everyone I meet in SL, knowing that they have real feelings too.

[ChinRey]

I'm easily immersed in what I do in Second Life. I can completely loose track of time an place when I build or script or design a landscape or have a really interesting chat with a good friends.

But Second Life in itself, no, not at all. My avatar is sometimes I doll I have some childish fun dressing up, sometimes something that keeps getting in the way of my work. The landscape is, well kind'a like the digital equivalent to what moder railroad enthusiasts love to create, only not quite as realistic.

[BloodSlaughter]

0 degree, 0 immersion in 2019

[Scylla Rhiadra]

45 minutes ago, kali Wylder said:

I care as deeply for people in SL as I do in RL.

I think this is the only kind of "immersion" that really matters.

Arguably, the kind of immersion that leads to a sort of fuzzing of the borders between SL and RL is potentially dangerous. Not because SL isn't "real": it certainly is, and our experiences here, as kali suggests, impact us emotionally and intellectually in very real ways. But SL is different, and when we get lost in the illusion, we lose a sense of those all-important differences.

I actually think that SL is more "real" than reading a book or watching a movie, because it's populated with real people, but there is one way in which the analogy holds: if you go to a movie or play or read a book, and forget that you are experiencing art, you are in danger of becoming a kind of Don Quixote, tilting at windmills that you've convinced yourself are ogres. In SL, even the best mesh windmills don't actually power anything, and they hardly ever battle against knights errant.

[Alatar Luik]

It all depends on where I am, and who I'm with.

My usual hangout works hard to be an immersive RP style sim, and people there do a good job.  It's a team effort, really - everyone kinda shares the same goal.  We might not all be trying to live another life, or be another person, but in some ways we're all looking for a little escape from the everyday.  

SL gives you all the tools you need to do that.  It just comes down to finding the right people to do it with.

[Selene Gregoire]

1 hour ago, kali Wylder said:

I think I was the most immersed back when I first started.  I felt like everything that happened to my avatar happened to me. I set out to make an avatar that looked like me and she made the same decisions the woman at the keyboard would make.  I wouldn't do anything in SL that I wouldn't do in RL. I actually created my first alt to try some of the things that I(meaning my first av) wouldn't do.  Now I'm that alt and the immersion is not as intense.  I am still pretty much immersed most of the time.  When I'm hosting.  I am that person in the blues club who is in charge, who's job it is to make sure everyone there is having a great time. When I make friends with someone in SL, I consider them a real friend, not just pixels on a screen. I care as deeply for people in SL as I do in RL. When my feeling are hurt in SL, the real me suffers the pain. Knowing this, I try really hard to be kind to everyone I meet in SL, knowing that they have real feelings too.

You've described me quite well. 

[Selene Gregoire]

47 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I think this is the only kind of "immersion" that really matters.

Arguably, the kind of immersion that leads to a sort of fuzzing of the borders between SL and RL is potentially dangerous. Not because SL isn't "real": it certainly is, and our experiences here, as kali suggests, impact us emotionally and intellectually in very real ways. But SL is different, and when we get lost in the illusion, we lose a sense of those all-important differences.

I actually think that SL is more "real" than reading a book or watching a movie, because it's populated with real people, but there is one way in which the analogy holds: if you go to a movie or play or read a book, and forget that you are experiencing art, you are in danger of becoming a kind of Don Quixote, tilting at windmills that you've convinced yourself are ogres. In SL, even the best mesh windmills don't actually power anything, and they hardly ever battle against knights errant.

But... but... I like tilting at windmills. 

[Selene Gregoire]

32 minutes ago, Alatar Luik said:

SL gives you all the tools you need to do that.  It just comes down to finding the right people to do it with.

The only real problem is, the field is a bit narrow when you consider the number of people who log in on a regular basis. The concurrency is about 50k. When you think about it, that is rather a small group of people to try to find friends in. It gets even smaller when considering only those who RP. SL's concurrency is the same size as the town I grew up in. 

 

[lucagrabacr]

Both the physical world and the virtual world of Second Life are equally real and I see them as such so I won't really use the phrase "feeling immersed" for my experiences within SL, more like I know I'm existing within Second Life as much as I know I'm existing within the physical world. 

Might sound a bit weird and I know this is just my opinion, but to me the word immersed in this context makes it sounds like SL (or virtual existence or embodiment in general) is a lesser substitute to one's physical existence while to me they are equal.

It's like asking, "How immersed are you when you eat?" or "How immersed are you when you visit Colorado?", I don't feel immersed doing those things, I just do those things.

Edited February 19, 2019 by lucagrabacr
Typo, typed "don't feeling" instead of "don't feel"

[Selene Gregoire]

1 minute ago, lucagrabacr said:

I know I'm existing within Second Life as much as I know I'm existing within the physical world. 

I'm sorry. I just can't resist...

Quote

 

I think.

I think I am.

Therefore, I am.

I think.

 

~Moody Blues, On the Threshold of a Dream album,  In the Beginning

[kali Wylder]

1 minute ago, Selene Gregoire said:

I'm sorry. I just can't resist...

~Moody Blues, On the Threshold of a Dream album,  In the Beginning

but of course you are

my bright little star!

[lucagrabacr]

5 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

I'm sorry. I just can't resist...

~Moody Blues, On the Threshold of a Dream album,  In the Beginning

I knew it! I don't know why but I thought existing instead of exist would make more sense, brb editing

Edit: Oh wait I'm stupid, I thought you said I made a typo, I don't know anymore. This is what happens when I didn't eat enough.

Edited February 19, 2019 by lucagrabacr

[Selene Gregoire]

1 minute ago, lucagrabacr said:

I knew it! I don't know why but I thought existing instead of exist would make more sense, brb editing

It was fine the way it was Luca. I understood you perfectly. It just made me think of one of my favorite Moody Blues passages is all.

[ChinRey]

45 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

The concurrency is about 50k. When you think about it, that is rather a small group of people to try to find friends in.

Subtract the bots, the multiple alts logged on simultaneously, the newcomers who never make it out of the starter sims, the builders so immersed in Blender they've forgotten they're also logged on to SL, the...

But you can find friends here and you can find close friends, much closer than I've ever experienced at any other internet forum.

 

12 minutes ago, lucagrabacr said:

Both the physical world and the virtual world of Second Life are equally real and I see them as such so I won't really use the phrase "feeling immersed" for my experiences within SL, more like I know I'm existing within Second Life as much as I know I'm existing within the physical world.

Good for you.

Not to me though. A good book, a Salvador Dali painting, and old Star Wars movie, those are a few of the works of art that can become real enough I can loose myself in them for a little while. Not Second Life. There are just far too many illusion breakers built into the system.

Edited February 19, 2019 by ChinRey