My favorite memory from high school chess club was the time I played against a guy I’ll call Fred, the top player at a small-town high school about 20 miles west of us. I was normally our #2 player, but our #1 player wasn’t available that night, so this was my one and only chance to show what I could do against another school’s very best.

“Fred” and I had been in a college math class together the previous summer, although we sat on opposite sides of the room, so I knew who he was, and I was happy to see him again. He had a buddy with him, though, who was watching him play, and they kept making sarcastic comments to each other about how embarrassing it was that he had to play against… a girl.

I realized quickly that Fred was a better player than I was. I was certainly not a great player. I didn’t study the game, I just went on intuition. Fred was probably a lot more methodical. It was obvious to both Fred and his friend that he was going to win.

I decided to try something crazy and desperate. Ha! Fred dismissed it as irrational, I guess, and continued with his plan of attack. Whoops, checkmate – I had won.

I wasn’t the best sport – I remember running gleefully down a hallway to tell our coach, who was just arriving, that I had beaten Fred, and he scolded me for not being very polite about it. After the snide comments about my gender, though, I felt justified.

This incident came to mind today when I was thinking about what goes on in our heads when we’re playing games.

One of my big interests is “narrative transportation,” the way our imaginations create the world of the story we’re reading or watching. When we’re reading an engrossing book, we can lose track of what’s going on around us – our minds have been “transported” away into somewhere else entirely, a “secondary world” in our imagination that might work somewhat differently from our own.

In my book project #3, when I finish my meta-narratives book and find a home for the one about ways we use language to influence how we think about things, I’m looking forward to thinking about narrative transportation at work in the real world, not just with fiction, and not just for recreation.

Meanwhile, I’m writing a paper about games, which has been a great opportunity to get up to speed on the latest research on narrative transportation, and I’ve had some new ideas. Want to hear them?

When we’re talking about what goes on in our minds when we read, we refer to “narrative transportation,” as I’ve mentioned, but when we talk about playing a game, we use the term “immersion.” Immersion in a game can include narrative transportation, too, if it has a good storyline, but it also includes engagement with other aspects of the game – the aesthetics, the physical aspects, the social aspects, and so on.

If we think of “immersion” as happening whenever our attention is focused somewhere specific, then lots of things can be immersive – baking cookies, having a conversation, looking for wildflowers in the woods. Immersion can happen in our “primary” world – it can be what we’re doing right here and now, with our bodies and our immediate surroundings. When immersion happens in a “secondary world,” we call it “transportation.”

Secondary worlds are contexts we’re not in right now but that we can conjure up in our imaginations. Books and films create secondary worlds for us and invite us inside, usually giving us at least one point-of-view character so that we see things from their perspective. But there are many other secondary worlds. J.R.R. Tolkien invented the term to talk about the Christian idea of the afterlife, if I’m remembering correctly. Remembering back to your childhood, or speculating about the future, take us into secondary worlds, as does listening to a friend’s story about something that happened to them, or watching the news, or thinking about work when you’re at home, or vice versa.

This week I attended some talks and performances as part of our local Musicking conference, where scholars and students share what they’re learning in fascinating talks and unusual concerts. Often, the Musicking conference culminates in the performance of an oratorio, an early music piece that’s somewhat like an opera, with performers singing the role of characters, but it’s a religious work, and there aren’t costumes or sets. One year we had an extraordinarily memorable performance of an oratorio about the life of St Cecilia, known today as the patron saint of music. Another year the oratorio told the story of young St. Nicholas – basically, he went off to college and converted his roommate.

This year’s oratorio was a little different. As the conference organizer, Holly Roberts, told us in her pre-concert talk, the oratorio we were about to hear had no plot! It was “Il Trionfo per l’Assunzione della Santissima Vergine” by Nicola Ceva, a composer from Naples who is so obscure today that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, and it’s entirely possible that this week’s performance may have been the first since the work’s premiere in 1705. Instead of telling a story, the point of this oratorio was to put its audience in the frame of mind that would inspire them to become more like the Virgin Mary, who was taken into Heaven, an event known to Catholics as “the Assumption.” In other words, it was a beautiful yet practical tool for meditation.

(The medieval Roman Catholic Church had become morally and financially corrupt and often didn’t engage the hearts and minds of its members, many of whom deserted it during the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Counter-Reformation was a movement to make Catholicism personally relevant again, and oratorios like these were part of its strategy.)

Anyway, right before the concert I was talking about my current research project with a scholarly friend, which put me in the frame of mind to make some new connections, and as I was driving home afterwards I realized – not all “transportation” is narrative!* This oratorio had no plot, but its audience could become “transported” into a spiritual experience.

Any fan of orchestral music knows that a good performance can engage the imagination and carry us away… Or, as my friend noted, watching a nature show can put your imagination into the world you’re seeing, or at least a “world” where you’re temporarily aware of its features more than the world outside your window, and you’re not necessarily paying much attention to the facts the show is presenting, either.

This all brings me back to games, and Fred. When someone is playing a game skillfully, I think it’s reasonable to say that at least part of their attention is transported into a mental model of the game. Mental models of games could take many forms – if you’re playing League of Legends, you probably envision the game as a map, with opportunities, vulnerabilities, and threats. Some other games might lead to mental models that are like a recipe, a sequence of things you need to attend to. I am sure that there are games for which a useful mental model is a flowchart, or a decision tree – if this happens, then you have these options, otherwise wait to see if some other things happen, in which case you’ll have certain other options. And yet other games, especially physical sports, probably inspire three-dimensional models. I was just rereading The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang, in which students of martial arts learn to use ideas inspired by trigonometry, very quickly.

So… the mental model of a game is basically a secondary world that focuses on the state of play and its possibilities, and the player updates the model as needed, with real-world feedback. Transportation into such mental models would probably be intermittent when playing a game, but more extended for people who use such models professionally, like a mathematician, an engineer, an architect, or a military commander.

In chess, I’m now thinking, the player’s mental model might combine elements from both decision trees and maps. You’d have a lot of “if-this-then-that” awareness, and you also know which pieces are where, and the places they can reach. Fred was doing much better at this than I was, I’m sure. I gave up quickly on trying to keep track of very many things. His mistake was, because I was “just a girl,” he didn’t need to update his model when I did something unexpected. He could just dismiss it as irrelevant.

And I am still smiling about it today.

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* More specifically, I propose that just as we have “paradigmatic” and “experiential” alternatives to a “narrative concept of self” (which I wrote about here), we might have a “paradigmatic” transportation that involves mental models of systems, rules, roles, interactions, etc., and an “experiential” transportation into a meditative state, aesthetically inspired daydream, or non-narrative episodes of mind wandering.

Image source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-chess-piece-on-top-of-chess-board-814133/