In an intensely personal game like Papo & Yo, I think the connection between immersion and identification becomes more obvious than it is anywhere else. To play Papo & Yo is to identify with the game’s designer, Vander Caballero, because the player-character of the game, Quico, is a metaphor forContinue Reading
Our immersion in rulesets creates metaphors for our selves that have the power to transform us. I’ve been talking in my last few posts about how that works–about how we identify not only with characters like Odysseus (in the Odyssey) and Quico (in Papo & Yo) but also with otherContinue Reading
In this post I read the ruleset of Papo & Yo as an example of the same kind of creative manipulation of immersion I located in the Odyssey in my last post. My argument for better living through epic springs from a model of immersion that at its simplest levelContinue Reading