Making Sense in Ludic Worlds: The Idealization of Immersive Postures in Movies and Video Games

Making Sense in Ludic Worlds argues that video games and fiction films should be understood on a common footing rather than as fundamentally different kinds of experience. Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi's flow model and Schaeffer's theory of mimetic immersion, the author contends that both forms are unified by an "optimization of experience," in which immersion arises from a balance of skills and challenges within clearly bounded, self-contained worlds. The work challenges teleological narratives of game evolution, including those advanced by scholars such as Aarseth and Juul and by Nintendo's marketing, which portray games as steadily converging toward reality. Instead, it maintains that mimetic games, like fiction, depend on selective modeling of reality rather than faithful reproduction of it.

The analysis develops this claim by examining the shared mechanics of illusion in film and games. Following Schaeffer and Carroll, the author treats fiction as a playful, mutually accepted framing of illusion rather than deception. Both media rely on hypernormal simplifications, causal clarity, and overt guidance from an editorial intelligence. Parallels are drawn between classical continuity editing, x-ray shots, and extradiegetic cues in film and simplified motion controls, radar overlays, and blinking indicators in games. The author concludes that even first-person games operate through a hypermediated layer of signs, undermining claims of pure immediacy.

The final portion of the work characterizes immersion in both media as an idealized posture rather than a realistic one. Viewers are cast as "ideal perceivers" in fiction films and players as "ideal performers" in games, supported by hypernormal worlds and by interface and design aids such as HUD elements, directional arrows, save and restore options, and performance scores. These overt aids reveal information and optimize experience, shaping user expectations in ways that differ fundamentally from everyday perception and action. Drawing on Pavel's notion of a "fictional self," the author notes that many game rules are inconsistent from a fictional standpoint and calls for further study of how optimization of experience sustains player gratification.