Ludodiegetics offers an alternative approach to the analysis of in-game content, from a player-centric, cognitive, embodied, and integrated perspective. It deepens the relationship suggested by Juul between fictional worlds and real rules, by arguing that there is a relative degree of fiction – or, at the least, mediation and reduction – in all reality. Indeed, forming an understanding of reality as a dynamic process of relating distal attribution and schema leads us to the view that, without a lapse into either solipsism or “naive realism” (Loomis 1992), it is a mistake to see reality as an objective‘ out-there’ that we, as conscious organisms, engage with. Further, distal attribution and schema, alongside other findings from cognitive science and models of mind, lead us naturally to the conclusion that our experience of reality is fundamentally based upon a process of reduction and filtration, thus enabling significance to be effective attached to stimuli, and for patterns in this embodied perception of being-in-the-world to fit pre-existent, if dynamic, schema. Juul and Carr’s relationship between content and structure finds natural parallels in Turner’s conceptualisation of ritual, and these models add depth to the ludic reality model. In short, this model argues that immersive games, like liminoid phases, are systems by which reduced sets of expectation and affordance can be effectively managed to yield new rule-sets by which a subjective experiences can be formed according to pre-determined affective outcomes. In order for this to occur, a measure of which we can take to be presence, as either the “illusion of nonmediation” (Lombard & Ditton 1999) or the projection of the subjective sense of selflocation to within the presented environment, there must be a means of reducing the significance or visibility of the system – in other words, a relocation of the necessary epistemological devices for the effective tuition and support of system affordances to within the semantic world. Homodiegetic devices – devices that operate from within the content – thus become of paramount importance.

Therefore, ludodiegetics offers a model in which no distinction is made between rule and content. Both are aspects of a singular construct with a singular aim – to allow the player, consciously and unconsciously, to construct an effective ludic reality where the system can be relegated in significance and a subjective location of consciousness within the game world can be supported. Whilst it is important to recognise that this applies to a distinct type of game, of which first-person shooters are the primary example, and that, in others, content structures such as a character and narrative can be more or less written off as non-cardinal, ludic reality demonstrates that the impact of semantic content is not limited to the superficial – essentially contributing to the type of affect manipulation Freeman describes as “emotioneering” (2004). Rather, as we have seen, content is a powerful means of transmitting epistemological information to a player, manipulating the rules by which they engage. Drama is a device for managing attention, pace and expectation; it directs adjusts significance. The game world is not just a backdrop or stage for the action. It can be seen to affect a sense of time, persistence, establish a status relationship between player and system and create a sense of liminoid existence, occupying a space between the known and the unknown where the rule sets of affordance and expectation can be convincingly re-written. Agents offer virtual expansion of this affordance set, thus enabling a more detailed world to be inferred, with a greater scope for sophistication of action and goal. They also provide a means to offer persistency and an existence outside the immediate scope of play. Explicitly, they are used to exert direct control over goal; implicitly, they are frequently used to offer the player a chance of occupy a subservient position to the system, whereby the degree to which they literally think about what is happening is partially placed under the system’s control – interestingly, this relationship lies at the centre of Turner’s work on liminality. The avatar is more than a means to action, it presents a reduced psychological mould into which the user can project: where normal affordances are suspended and the avatar’s set, including expectation and likely action, is either predefined or, at the least, heavily inferred. Semantic devices, such as casting the avatar as cyborg, naturally extend the player’s relationship with the system into the inferred world, and provide a means for affordance expansion within the reality offered. In all cases, such homodiegetic devices enable activity to occur within the system, rather than at the system level, thus increasing the potential for presence to occur.

As a tool for analysis, therefore, ludodiegetics leads us to a new perspective on game content, bridges the gap between content and structure, or rule and world, and argues that what we study is a multifaceted system for affect and affordance integration. A recognition of the current understanding of our embodied realities leads us to the consideration of a dynamic relationship between inferred object and schematic rule, and we can approach immersive games in a similar way.

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