[DC] "SHOW YOUR DEDICATION:" VR Games and Outmersion

Videogame scholarship has noted the unhelpful vagueness of ‘immersion’ as a descriptor, yet in the discourse surrounding VR entertainment, ‘immersion’ remains a central focus, and is lauded by users as the primary goal of VR experiences. Building on the legacy of games scholarship that complicates ‘immersion’ [5], [10] this study uses close-play to examine several emergent tropes in VR experiences that rely on outmersive design: VR suicide, bodily alteration of the avatar, and VR-within-VR. Ultimately, I advocate for increased attention to how VR’s technical capacity for user immersion differs from the reality of many VR experiences that use outmersive design.