Calleja · via Lüneburg / GAPPP (2018)
What it says
One of the dimensions of player involvement is not individual at all. It is produced by the presence and the actions of other players — you are involved because other people are in it with you, and the involvement is held between you rather than inside each of you.
Why its status changed
I filed this in August as conditional — relevant only if I went the multi-person route, which was undecided. v4 decided it. Multi-person co-presence is now the condition of the research question, so this moves to the centre.
It is currently the only concept in this whole collection that speaks directly to the between part of the question. Everything else here — embodied metaphors, tacit knowledge, meaningful play — explains one person’s relation to the system. This one explains people’s relation to each other.
What it does not give me
Calleja’s players are inside a shared game with shared rules and, usually, a shared goal. My audience are strangers in a room, some holding a controller and some holding nothing, with no agreement about what they are doing. Involvement shared between co-players is not obviously the same phenomenon as involvement shared between strangers who have not agreed to play.
That difference is not a detail to smooth over. It may be exactly where the thesis contributes.
Next
Read Calleja directly. This is the thinnest note here relative to how much weight the question now puts on it.