Immersion

[Statua]

Taken from TnB. All credit to Omar.

In this brief guide I hope to cover immersion and how to become better immersed as well as things that come as reprucussions from being well-immersed in your roleplay.

Immersion - The ability to feel and to be your character as if it were actually happening.

In my opinion, immersion is the most important aspect of serious roleplay. Its the make or break of you enjoying the game and wanting to come back for more. If you can immerse yourself, you will find yourself enjoying the game a LOT more then if you're just playing. It may sound stupid but if you can feel your character and have no intentions to, in-depth serious roleplay is not for you. If you do however wish to 'become your character' then continue reading to find out some ways which may help you, a lot.

Immersion and how to maintain it:
Glossary
I.OOC influence
II. Useful materials to promote immersion
III. Realism
IV. Chat
V. Ventrilo
VI. Fullscreen vs Windowed

I. Try to eliminate all OOC distractions and/or interuptions.
- You may not think it will create any kind of atmospheric difference but keeping all other programs closed while you roleplay and focusing completely on the task at hand can greatly affect how attuned you are with your character.
-Unless you absolutely need it, turn off all other monitors. Exceptions may incluse the use of them for IC things like typing a message into a computer or viewing a units data.
- If you have an OOC aid, for example will say a wallhack, not saying that any of you do; try deleting or turning it of becuase it removes the element of suprise that had reered itself up by random Combine attacks or zombies in ravenholm throughout the campaign and you'll notice a susbstantial amount of oppurtunities that you may have otherwise avoided.
- Turn off any background music unless it is beneficial to the situation, i.e. action music during a shootout, enhanced ambience, etc.

II. Although some add-ons put a hamper on immersion, add-ons like the following can actually improve the experiance.
-Realistic Blood Effects http://www.garrysmod.org/downloads/?a=view&id=47291
-Realistic and Better Optimized Water Effects( I haven't tried this mod yet) http://www.garrysmod.org/downloads/?a=view&id=117062
-The list can go on but I there are many addons like these that you can find through a few searches on garrysmod.org or the workshop.

III. Realism
-If you aren't doing something realistic or playing a character believable within the Half-life universe than you won't feel as if that's actually what you're doing. To remedy this try thinking how your character would think as if he were in the world of a post-alien invasion that swiftly repressed the human race; not how you would react to such a situation.
-Despite this guide not being about realistic characters it can have a deep impact on how you view the Half-life universe.

IV. Keep out-of-character chat to a minimum.
-Say everything you need in LOOC or OOC in a short and conscisive manner to avoid multiple interuptions of roleplay that should only happen on a few, scarce occasions.
-Try to avoid joking if you can control yourself, it isn't really necessary and generally doesn't help the task at hand AT ALL.

V. Teamspeak
-Overall, teamspeak is nothing but a detriment to roleplay and just ends up being a source of metagame and distraction; generally as a rule of thumb you should try to only use teamspeak before and after you go on the servers. Through personal experiance I also felt better immersed in the roleplay and more inclined to roleplay well when not in ts.
-Teamspeak usally turns out to become a fuel for OOC driven acts and you begin to act more as how you would IC rather than how your character would.

VI. Fullscreen opposed to windowed
-Often, when a player is playing in windowed mode they're more persuaded to browse through other things rather than keeping completely focused on the task at hand as well as giving the player a better view on what is going on in their surrondings as well as being more aware of who is talking to them and who said what and when.
-Running in fullscresn usually eliminates the tmeptation to tab out to do something OOC.
-Generally the game runs smoother in fullscreen which is a positive thing.

Overall, this guide was meant to be an informative set of suggestions on how you, the player, can keep your roleplay experiance authentic and immersive.