Although immersion presents subtle structural differences from flow, it is believed that they allude to different mental phenomena ( Brown and Cairns, 2004 IJsselsteijn et al., 2007 Jennett et al., 2008b Nacke and Lindley, 2008, 2009 Brockmyer et al., 2009 Qin et al., 2009 Drachen et al., 2010 Teng, 2010 Kiili et al., 2012 Sweetser et al., 2012 Cairns et al., 2014 Denisova et al., 2017 Frochot et al., 2017). Literature, however, assimilates multiple terms that emulate flow’s richness of an experience – for instance, immersion. Video games offer highly positive experiences and it has been argued that the experience of flow alone may be responsible for the positive emotions during video game playing ( Hoffman and Novak, 1996 Quinn, 2005 Guo et al., 2012 Nah et al., 2014). We conclude that immersion and flow do not substantially differ in current studies and that more evidence is needed to justify their separation. We critically review the concepts separately and proceed with a comparison on their proposed differences. In this short review, we specifically focus on the terms of flow and immersion, as they are the most widely used and applied definitions in the video game literature, whilst their differences remain disputable. However, there appears to be a tentative conceptualization of what an immersive experience is.

One of the most pleasurable aspects of video games is their ability to induce immersive experiences. 5Bournemouth University, Department of Psychology, Bournemouth, United Kingdom.4Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience Heidelberg-Mannheim, Manheim, Germany.

3Bournemouth University, Department of Computing and Informatics, Bournemouth, United Kingdom.

2Sony Interactive Entertainment, London, United Kingdom.

1Bournemouth University, Centre for Digital Entertainment, Department of Media and Communication, Bournemouth, United Kingdom.

Lazaros Michailidis 1,2, Emili Balaguer-Ballester 3,4* and Xun He 5*

The challenge aftermath