L'expérience communicationnelle immersive dans Wow: entre présence et engagement. Dynamiques d'équilibre entre espaces physique et numérique

This article aims to discuss the notion of “balance” in immersive environments. It tries to define one of the complex aspects of the experiences lived by the users of this type of environments in situations rather playful typical of the video games. The authors question this notion by articulating their reflection around theoretical aspects like commitment-distanciations and presenceattention (even hyper-attention). These are based on previous work that attempted to capture and conceptualize the complexity of these communicational experiences (Bonfils 2014 ; 2015), and at the same time to reread these questions in the test of a field, World of Warcraft, which is currently being investigated by one of the two authors. The initial observation states that using those digital worlds require to produce significant cognitive efforts to fully live these situations. Indeed, immersive environments designed today by designers and developers are increasingly visually rich and offer more and more sophisticated interactions that allow users to increasingly use their body or projection (in the occurrence its avatar) between physical and digital spaces. The idea then put forward by the authors consists in making the hypothesis that these users in search of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008) and of sensible pleasures are plagued by recurring conflicts between the activities of perception and the modes of possible actions related production activities. This results in a constant and often unconscious quest for the users of balance, commitment, distancing and self-regulation within several spheres between different spaces. Cet article a pour objectif de discuter d’un point de vue communicationnel la notion d’équilibre dans les environnements immersifs. Il s’agit de tenter de cerner un des aspects complexes des expériences vécues par les utilisateurs de ce type d’environnements dans des situations plutôt ludiques typiques des jeux vidéo. Les auteurs questionnent cette notion en articulant leur réflexion autour des couples théoriques engagement-distanciation et présence-attention (voire hyper-attention). Ils s’appuient pour cela sur des travaux antérieurs qui ont tenté de saisir et de conceptualiser la complexité de ces expériences communicationnelles particulières (Bonfils, 2014 ; 2015), et dans le même temps de relire ces questionnements à l’épreuve d’un terrain (World of Warcraft) investigué actuellement par l’un des deux auteurs. Le constat de départ porte sur le fait que les