Jan-Noël Thon Immersion Revisited: On the Value of a Contested Concept

In the last few years, academic interest in computer games has been rapidly increasing, leading to what Juul describes as “a state of productive chaos ” (Juul, 2006, n.p.). On the one hand, the fact that computer games are researched from a wide variety of different perspectives within various dis-ciplines leads to a somewhat ‘chaotic ’ situation with sometimes downright polemic discussions of methodological and epistemological questions. On the other hand, the chaos is productive, as not only the fact that computer game studies have become “an area with its own set of conferences, associations and journals ” (Juul, 2006, n.p.), but also the relatively large number of recently published essay collections and handbooks contributing to the academic study of computer games illustrate (e.g., Neitzel, Bopp, & Nohr, 2004; Raessen