ʻThis Is Not a Gameʼ: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play

The increasing convergence and mobility of digital network technologies have given rise to new, massively-scaled modes of social interaction where the physical and virtual worlds meet. This paper explores one product of these extreme networks, the emergent genre of immersive enter-tainment, as a potential tool for harnessing collective action. Through an analysis of the structure and rhetoric of immersive games, I explore how immersive aesthetics can generate a new sense of social agency in game players, and how collaborative play techniques can instruct real-world problem-solving. KEYWORDS massively-multiplayer gaming, virtual reality, collective intelligence, extreme network