Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence. NY: Oxford University Press, 2003.
While reading Natural-Born Cyborgs, by Andy Clark, I found his understanding of presence helpful for thinking about what might make players in virtual worlds feel immersed and present. This is an especially tricky question when accounting for the differences of logging into the world from a PC and a cell phone. Clark's conclusion is in part that interactivity enables presence. Luckily, games have plenty of that.
I also enjoyed Clark's description of the self as inclusive of tools and abilities that can change depending upon circumstance and environment. Just as an amputee has a self without a limb, so too can a prosthetic (or even virtual identity) be considered part of the self (more detail below). The self is maleable, which is good news for gamers looking to take on new selves.
Terminology
Action-space - A space in which we can perform actions (i.e. have agency)
Telepresence - The feeling of or being present at a distance
Soft self - The self has no strict boundaries and can change
Direct control - controlling something without causal gaps. E.g. controlling our own hands versus controlling a table by controlling our hands. Interestingly, we can learn to eliminate some causal gaps over time, thus directly controlling the table.
Fixed depth - "In telepresence, the extent of our mutual sensory involvement is always fixed in advance."
Presence
If you visit the Virtual Artists' VA Robocam Site (http://www.robocam.va.con.au/) you can interact with a motorized camera mounted on a tall building, sweeping the area as you desire. Comparing the Robocam experience with an experience of purely passive viewing (e.g., the wonderful web camera that looks at the African landscape: www.africam.com) is instructive. The passive experience leaves the observer clearly at home; it is no more like telepresence than looking at the photos in National Geographic (though it is sometimes more exciting). Yet as soon as a distant camera responds to your controls, and especially if the mode of control is either natural (the helmet rig) or highly practical (a gamester with a joystick), you begin to feel relocated, as if you are in the distance scene. Our sense of personal location has more to do with this sense of an action-space than with anything else. (93-4)
Games provide action-spaces, and therefore have an edge in changing our sense of personal location.
The most important kind of disruption is temporal: if there is a noticeable time lag between issuing the command and receiving the sensory feedback, or (worse still) if the time like is variable due to the traffic on phone lines, for instance, the illusion is shattered. (105)
We may still enjoy interacting with the virtual world in spite of lag, but we are unlikely to feel as fully present there as we might.
And isn't there always a kind of "fixed depth" to our teledealings? in the daily world we can zoom in as much as we like. If we suddenly choose to order a pizza into the conference room we can all share the taste and smell of that very pizza. In telepresence, the extent of our mutual sensory involvement is always fixed in advance, by the specific channels and bandwidth available. (111)
Players logging into a virtual world from cell phones and PCs would likely have different "fixed depths" of sensory involvement. Everyone may feel on equal footing until the pizza arrives, figuratively. A guild may be chatting away via voice, including both cell phone and PC players, and then reach a consensus to engage in some activity that preferences PC players (player versus player combat, for instance). At that point, cell phone players may become newly aware of their differently-abledness.
In all the cases we have examined, what matters are the complex feedback loops that connect action-commands, bodily motions, environmental effects, and multisensory perceptual inputs. (114)
Again, interactivity enables presence.
It is when aspects of body or external tools become transparent in use that our intentions "flow-through" the tools to alter the world, that we feel as if we directly control the limbs, or tools, and question, that we begin to feel as if they are part of us. (123)
With virtual worlds on PCs, our initial experience is to consciously push various buttons on the mouse and keyboard to move ourselves through the world. After continued use, though, we think simply that we would like to walk along a virtual road and our avatars do so. A player can certainly tell an onlooker in the real world what keys he pushes to move his avatar, but that's not the way he thinks about it when immersed in the virtual world. He only becomes fully aware of the controls when consciously attempting to analyze them, as when explaining how to move to an onlooker, or when they get in the way. Of course, there are any number of ways that controls could get in the way. They could be less than perfectly responsive (slow, inaccurate). They could cause physical pain from overuse. But, when everything goes well, the controls fade away.
To move the table, I push it with my hands; but to move my hands, I don't need to push anything. This experience of direct responsiveness is a major factor in the creation of our sense of bodily presence. The notion of "direct control" is best meant to rule out a case where we must first control our own bodies and, using them as our instruments, affect something else. Stelarc's Third Hand [a mechanical hand attached to his right arm that he can manipulate with certain muscles], when attached and in use, is part of Stelarc himself in just this sense. The fact that Stelarc must control the hand by first contracting muscles in his legs and abdomen may seem to argue against this, but remember that after a while Stelarc does not experience the control structure that way. Instead, he simply wills the hand to move, and it moves. The fact that this involved a causal detour is unimportant. (130-1)
"Direct control" is important for a sense of presence, but even when the sense of direct control is not there at first, it may develop over time.
Self
Notice that what counts here is not always consciously knowing the time. None of us, I suppose, looks constantly at his or her watch! Rather, the crucial factor is the constant and easy availability of the time, should we desire to know it. Therefore, a prime characteristic of transparent technologies is their poise for easy use and deployment as and when required. (41)
We always "know" the time before looking at our watches because we can easily and quickly find at the time. This could be the same for some virtual world status on a phone, if the checking of the status became fast and easy enough.
Information appliances are transparent technologies, designed to be easy to use, and to fade into the background. They are poised to be taken for granted. (44)
Many of us already take cell phones for granted, even with all of their user interface flaws. This technology will become even more transparent. As it becomes transparent, it becomes part of how we see ourselves.
A recent Warwick University study showed that young people's thumbs have overtaken fingers as the most muscled and dexterous digits among the under-twenty-fives, simply as a result of their extensive use of handheld electronic game controllers and text messaging on cell phones. New generations of phones will be designed around this greater agility, leading to even further changes in manual dexterity and the like, in a golden loop. The same kind of user technology co-adaptation can occur at the deepest levels of neural processing. Such developmentally open brains are not just opportunistic, but explosively opportunistic. They are ready to change themselves to make the most of the structures, media, and opportunities encountered during learning. (86)
We physically adapt to the interface.
Easy access to specific bodies of information, as and when such access is normally required, is all it takes for us to begin to factor such knowledge in as part of the bundle of skills and abilities that we take for granted in our day to day life. It is this bundle of "taken-for-granted" skills, knowledge, and abilities that structures and informed our sense of who we are and what we know. (134)
We are our skills.
There is no self, if by self we mean some central cognitive essence that makes me who and what I am. In its place there is just the "soft self": a rough-and-tumble, control-sharing coalition of processes -- some neural, some bodily, some technological -- and an ongoing drive to tell a story, to paint a picture in which "I" am the central player. (138)
Our views of ourselves are changeable, as are our actual selves.
These [Alzheimer's patients] were a puzzle because although they still lived alone, successfully, in the city, they really should not have been able to do so. On standard psychological tests they performed rather dismally. They should have been unable to cope with the demands of daily life. What was going on?
A sequence of visits to their home environments provided the answer. These home environments, it transpired, were wonderfully calibrated to support and scaffold these biological brains. The homes were stuffed full of cognitive props, tools, and aids. Examples include message centers where they stored notes about what to do and when; photos of family and friends complete with indications of names and relationships; labels and pictures on doors; "memory books" to record new events, meetings, and plans; and "open-storage" strategies in which crucial items (pots, pans, checkbooks) are always kept in plain view, not locked away in drawers.
Taking soft selfhood seriously invites us to reconsider our views and prejudices concerning cognitive rehabilitation and the understanding and depiction of cognitive impairment. The forcible relocation of a home functioning Alzheimer's patient into a controlled hospital setting often constitutes a tragic turning point. Such relocation can be akin to the inflection of new brain damage upon an already compromised host. The moral is: certain harms to the environment are simultaneously harms to the person. Our worlds, ourselves. (140-1)
In some ways, we are our surroundings. If we like who we are, we may not want to leave. Conversely, if we want to change or experiment with who we are, we may want to surround ourselves with new environments like virtual worlds.
Our self-image as a species should not be that of ancient biological minds in colorful young technological clothes. Instead, ours are chameleon mines, factory-primed to merge with what they find and with what they themselves create. (141)
