Video games offer highly positive experiences and it has been argued that the experience of flow alone may be responsible for the positive emotions during video game playing ( Hoffman and Novak, 1996 Quinn, 2005 Guo et al., 2012 Nah et al., 2014).

We conclude that immersion and flow do not substantially differ in current studies and that more evidence is needed to justify their separation.

We critically review the concepts separately and proceed with a comparison on their proposed differences. In this short review, we specifically focus on the terms of flow and immersion, as they are the most widely used and applied definitions in the video game literature, whilst their differences remain disputable. However, there appears to be a tentative conceptualization of what an immersive experience is. One of the most pleasurable aspects of video games is their ability to induce immersive experiences.

2Sony Interactive Entertainment, London, United Kingdom.1Bournemouth University, Centre for Digital Entertainment, Department of Media and Communication, Bournemouth, United Kingdom.Lazaros Michailidis 1,2, Emili Balaguer-Ballester 3,4* and Xun He 5*