Some notes about the arguments in the book:

• Practices are not based on rules or agreements.
• Habitus is a system, which produces and organize practices and representations.
• Habitus is produced in interaction with environment.
• Habitus and institutions are two means to objectify history.
• Two habitus could theoretically be identical if two individual would have same body, same experiences, in the same order.
• People in same area interacting within a group of people are encountering same practices are likely to have much common in the habitus.
• “The relation to the body is fundamental dimension of the habitus that is inseparable from a relation to language and to time. It cannot be reduced to a ‘body image’ or even ‘body concept’ [...], a subjective representation largely based on the representation of one’s own body produced and returned by others” (p. 72).
• Habitus and a situation have interdependencies: habitus will produce acts only in relation to a situation. Extreme situation can reveal potentials that that one wasn’t aware of
• This interdependencies is exploited, for example in film “when they bring together habitus (chosen, intuitively, as a principle generating a particular style of words, gestures, etc.) and an artificial situation designed to trigger it off, thus creating the conditions for the production of practices (which may be completely improvised) complying with their expectations” (p. 295).

Some reflections:

• Role-playing and playing, in general, are practices.
• Certain (role-playing) game is based on rules and agreements.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1990). The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Translated by Richard Nice.

The Chain is much like Animamundi, but there are more decision-points. Decisions are pretty much illusion, as the if you make wrong choice you’ll get comment about that and then you are find yourself back to decision-point. This didn’t bother me as much as character and story design: The game tries to be hard-boiled detective story, with plenty of hard-core sex. Unfortunately, events are not always believable in terms of character design. Also, I have feeling that there are some inconsistencies in narration, but I didn’t bother to double check. However, I did find storytelling compelling enough to play it to the end.

Chain: The lost footprints and Animamundi: Dark Alchemist rely heavily on predefined functions (see my Building and reconstructing character) that my analysis model for computer games does not give much to literary or hypertext theory as telling is major mode of conveying information. While goals and choice have a role in both games, they have marginal function in the character recognition or in formation of experience.

I keep getting back to the thematic of of rules and game systems (see Rules and Character Engagement in Role-play, Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child (Vygotsky), Games and Philosophical Investigations).

I have started to read The logic of practice by Pierre Bourdieu, where he discusses difference of rules and practices. He sites Ziff who writes:

Consider the difference between saying “The trains is regularly two minutes late” and “As a rule, the train is two minutes late” … There is the suggestion in the latter case that that the train be two minutes late is as it were according with some policy or plan … Rules connect with plans and policies in a way that regularities do not … To argue that there must be rules in the natural language is like arguing that roads must be red if they correspond to red lines on a map[.] (p. 40.)

Bourdieu seem to be suggesting that practices are not rule governed (in a sense that
rules proceeds practices–one needs to build a theoretical model in order to construct an action). (I need to read the whole book before making more definitive judgment.)
Also, I have written in entry Games and Philosophical Investigations:

If the above premise is accepted, computer games do not have rules; mostly they implement systems that acts like the ‘natural laws’ (see also entry Are video games art). In this sense, there is qualitative difference between “rules” of, e.g., board and computer games[.]

These discussions makes me think that we need to think question about rules and their relatives more carefully. Especially, there might be different kinds of implications between categories of rules, implemented systems of computer games, and practices. E.g., Wittgenstein argues that rules are inseparable from possibility of breaking and following rules (1958).

Bourdieu, Pierre (1990). The logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Translated by Richard Nice.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958) Philosophical investigations. Basil Blackwell & Mott, Ltd., 2nd edition. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe.

Victor Gijsbers writes:

Immersion might be helped by not having too much rules stuff in play, but I actually don’t think this is very important. It is easy to drift in and out of immersion. You can immerse one moment, do some complicated rules stuff the next, talk about stakes the next, and immerse yourself back in. Please take care to notice that in my Polaris analysis, one fails to immerse not because one has to do things that don’t correspond with character actions; no, one fails to immerse because the character makes his/her important decisions and has his/her strongest feelings while the player is involved in something else entirely. If one’s important decisions all took place in the free play stage, immersion would not be hurt at all. (Of course, one should also stop playing Polaris in that case; it wouldn’t be helping you at all.) (http://gamingphilosopher.blogspot.com/2005/12/immersion-and-imagination.html)

To consider some issues presented above, I think that we need to consider imagination, rules, and the rule system of a game in more detail.

Vygotsky argues that “play involving an imaginary situation is, in fact, rule-based, play.” (1978, p. 94.) I tend to agree with this. Characters and a game world creates rules for role-playing. They are not that kind of explicitly formulated rules as the rules of a game system. Moreover, above-mentioned kind of tension between system driven play and imagination driven play is, I think, sometimes necessary for making decisions as if the character: the player’s values, habits, and goals sometimes tends to overdrive character simulation. The explicit rule systems (e.g., frenzy rules in Vampire) can push characters to do actions that are not obvious or natural to the player and thus be import part of character playing. While explicit use of resolution system brings the player apart character engagement or engrossment (I prefer these terms over immersion, see my post Role-playing and Immersion (and its alternatives)) they also give new grounds to character engagment after resolution.

While I disagrees with Gijsbers about his view of rules the blog entry contains otherwise insightful analysis of character engagment.

Vygotsky (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Merten writes, in his blog:

Lately, I’ve been trying to put my confusing notes in character immersive playing (aka. eläytyjivism) into single, easy introduction to the mentioned play style. I’ve ended up with a beginning of a long essay which is, essentially, loads of confusing notes lumped into one. The fact I’m trying to write in English does not help things a bit. I’m getting less and less suprised by the fact that there’s lack of basic introductory material of immersion available – it’s a bitch to write.

I am not surprised about this: immersion is a buzzword that is used in various ways–often without a definition or thought out meaning.

I think that the concepts of engrossment and framing could introduce more stable ground for discussion and descriptions of role-playing experiences than immersion.

The fictional world of a game and real world are contexts, frames of meaning, that are both present in the game. The awareness of each frame, the awareness of a player changing the frame, and ambiguities of the frame of reference are all important in constituting the playing experience. In a game players must choose whether playing their own selves disguised as character or play the the character in simulation mode (trying to reason what the character would do in the given situation). (see, Fine 1983, p. 4).

The character immersive playing could then be described as a kind of playing that focus on the game frame, tries to minimize changes between game frame and primary frame, and where a player tries to act and make judgments as as if she is the character.

Fine, G. A. (1983). Shared fantasy: Role-playing games as social worlds. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (paperback ed.).