Transportation Theory and gaming: semi-structured interviews to qualitatively describe the perceived narrative immersion of Durban gamers in 2018

Abstract

Gaming has become increasingly popular, specifically online gaming. This has led to a dependency on gaming and serious issues such as immersion, social isolation, interpersonal conflicts, withdrawal, preoccupation, and overuse (Demetrovics, Farkas, Felvinczi, Griffiths, Kokonyei, Nagygyorgy, Olah, Papay and Urban, 2012). With these issues hindering communication between individuals in society, it informs the rationale to research the narrative immersion of Durban gamers as communication at a crossroads. This is because the advancements in technology, in terms of graphics, have made hyper-realism possible. When specifically looking at characters in games, technology eliminates the gap between digital and real humans (Morris, 2018). This then makes transportation of an individual’s self into narratives easier by making narratives and the characters within narratives more believable and realistic. This research aimed to identify the qualitative reasoning of how and why individuals transport themselves into narratives in gaming within a developing country such as South Africa through semi-structured interviews. This topic needed to be studied qualitatively to describe how and why individuals subjectively experience immersion when interacting with narratives in games. This will aid in understanding of the reasons behind narrative immersion in games, both the positive and negative side effects of immersion, and how to successfully transport oneself between game narratives and their reality of origin. The key findings in this study found that narrative immersion occurs, however, how and why Durban gamers immerse into gaming narratives is dependent on the individual and their gaming preferences and experience, thus contributing a developing countries perspective.