Emma Barnett

This project investigates immersive experiences within virtual environments. It focuses on gaming worlds and how designing disorientation and reorientation is able to create and enhance a player’s feeling of immersion. Causing someone to become disorientated and allowing them to then reorient themselves increases the importance of the world around them. This is a spatial design strategy the deepens the immersive experience. This practice has been informed by a series of case studies within the video game industry in order to understand how video game environments are developed and function. This balance of disorientation and reorientation is manipulated to put more importance on the design of the world forcing the player to navigate through experience. The outcome is the design of a game structure and a series of spatial environments as a proof of concept.