I do plow through Cognitive Dissonance. For clarity's sake, it is the actual state of internal tension brought about by conflicting attitudes and behavior. EDIT: I did send Gama a revised version of that paragraph.
@ Jason and Isaak Tolkien is absolutely talking about getting into the zone, and he's rather presupposing an automatic sort of visual immersion. But re: the zone, it's not just that readers reach a perfect balance of a Flow state's skill and challenge you'd necessarily need skill at reading, and ...
What's interesting about this perspective on gamer motivations is how similar it is to Bartle's original 4-pack. Bart, you bring them up: Achievers, Killers, Explorers, Socializers. Nick Yee, in his statistical research, actually extended these to include Escapism. These are useful for game design, or for beginning to wrap our ...
