ABSTRACT
Most popular media have become popular because they offer opportunities for entertainment. The majority of television programming worldwide serves entertainment purposes, radio’s favorite content is popular music, and the best-sold print media are novels such as Harry Potter. Clearly, there is a close connection between media popularity and entertainment content (see chapters 1 and 5, this volume). Most of these entertainment media have always tried to facilitate a sense of presence in their users, and their communicators either implicitly or explicitly regarded this kind of experience as condition for successful entertainment. Tele vision, for instance, has invented different form and content elements (e.g., reality-based programming; Nabi, Biely, Morgan, & Stitt, 2003) that are intended to bring the depicted events as close as possible to viewers. Successful authors such as J.K. Rowling have been applauded for their imagination-stimulating language and their ability to create a whole fi ctional world in readers’ inner eyes. So the connection between entertainment and Presence has been important to popular media for a long time, and advancements in media technology such as high defi nition television continue this history of conjunction (Bracken, 2005). The relationship between media enjoyment and a sense of Presence is probably even more pronounced in next generation entertainment media, especially video games (Vorderer & Bryant, 2006) which nicely mirror early visions of interactive, multimodal, three-dimensional virtual environments (e.g., Minski, 1980; Steuer, 1992).
