Having been a GM for many years, it has always been a concern of mine to try and create a feeling of immersion in the games which I run: sometimes with success, sometimes with a distinct lack of it. For some games, creating an atmosphere is easy. In Vampire all you need to do is put on some emo music in the background, give everyone some downers in their drinks and light a candle or two. But that kind of atmosphere feels cheap and tawdry and lacks any real immersion. And what if you don't have a dedicated gaming space? What happens when your girlfriend is watching Iron Chef on TV in the same room? How do you build immersion then?

Many games come with a short section on how to run them – including a section on how to create the correct atmosphere. Usually, I find this to be complete bollocks. Sometimes the advice on GMing is useful, but most of the time it feels like it was written by the author, away in their happy little fantasy land with no knowledge of how gaming groups work in the real world.

They forget that gamers thrive on backstabbing and love to derail campaigns, that a baited hook to them is nothing more than something that flashes past them as they speed down a street in their stolen car. It gets worse when the campaign setting calls for some degree of immersion and suspension of disbelief, but you just can't manage to keep it going.

You can't trust gamers to be in character all the time – especially when you, like me, don't have the dedicated gaming space and the room is full of distractions. I can't count the number of times I've been trying to detail something important to the players, only to be interrupted by the obligatory "I'm heading outside for a cigarette," or "Any one want a Coke?” leaving the game stalled at a critical point and destroying any immersion which had been developed to that point. Short of giving everyone a camel-bak filled with a drink of their choice and putting them in adult incontinence wear, there is no way that you can keep a gaming group at a table for the whole night in order to hold the atmosphere.

So how do you develop the atmosphere and keep the players immersed in the world that you've created? I use a technique that I learnt from my first Amber Diceless GM: note passing. It's a great way of building intrigue and thus, immersion. I utilise this technique a lot during my Conspiracy X campaigns. It doesn't stop the game dead like taking someone outside for a chat does, and it means that the player who has received the "message" or "phone call" can then choose to share the information in an unadulterated form (pass the note on to someone else) or only give snippets of information, if any at all. Conspiracy X is a game that requires a high degree of immersion – and simply playing "Songs in the Key of X" in the background isn't going to cut it. Conspiracy X also led to me adopting my current GMing style which I encourage more GMs to use.

Minimalist GMing. It's my new favourite thing (aside from the Nintendo Dual-Screen, but that's just another horrible distraction that I don't need and not at all relevant to this column). In the past I've built up huge detailed campaigns, only to see players ignore them completely and sidetrack into unknown and undeveloped territory. I could have railroaded them, but that would have just built frustration in the players. Instead, I adopted minimalist GMing.

I craft an environment in which the players will operate. This usually involves detailing important areas of the setting, preparing a great many NPCs and putting together a basic series of missions which may or may not be undertaken. I then release the players into this world and give them a few basic details and maybe a simple task. They then learn about the world as they explore it.

The simple task may be anything, but it's something that the players will generally do. And usually the players will argue with each other for quite insane amounts of time about the best way to achieve their objectives. And remarkably enough, they almost uniformly do this in character. So, with the minimum effort on your part, they've already developed a group dynamic and are exploring the setting in the way that they want to, not the way that you've dragged them.

So, how does immersion enter into this? Well, I'll give you an example of a campaign of Objective Interim Modern Combat System (SPQR Studios' first game) which I am running. The players are a SWAT team in Miami, and the game is going to be taking some major twists later on as I test some new mechanics and rules which have been suggested by the community. But anyhow. The players are released into this world and are only given a basic idea of what is happening. They have a mission: a home invasion gone wrong. That's all they know. They load up the SWAT van and get ready to roll. I had a full layout of the house, with all the details, even down to which ways the doors open, but giving the players this straight away would break immersion. How would they know all these details? So, I had to think of a good way to release information to them.

I scrawled a very basic map on the back of an envelope and gave it to them to represent a sketch of the interior of the house by a neighbour. I then indicated to them the way the sniper system would work, with each side of the building being given a colour, then each floor and window being given a number reference.

Thus, as the situation developed, the players would be given details on what they could see and they marked it on their map. After a few hours “in game”, they had a detailed enough overview of the house, so I released the real map to them. Again, I continued to give them only the information they needed. Orders were drafted, considered, rejected, redrafted, argued over and then finalised. Then, as each new development emerged, the players had to reconsider their actions.

As a GM it was easy to keep a handle on the game as I controlled the flow of information. The players only knew what I had told them. I hadn't given them piles of documents or fluff, but they had a detailed knowledge of what was going on due to the information which they had been given and decided upon the relevance of themselves. The manner in which I released the information built immersion, rather than detracting from it as the usual GM sketch map would. All in all, it worked very well as a way to give the players the details of the world. And if someone was out of the room when details came in – the other players took it upon themselves to fill them in, rather than asking the GM for a re-cap.

Immersion is important to gaming, but as a games developer how do you make sure that your system is immersive? It's really simple. You can't. It's nearly all on the head of the GM. And what's left over is on the heads of the players to not be douchebags (never a guaranteed proposition).

You can certainly put a lot of effort into making sure that the universe is detailed, but that is a killer for me. I've played in countless World of Darkness games, but always feel that I'm lacking something, because I haven't read all the books, don't play the CCG and haven't played them all through all the editions and thus do not have a complete knowledge of all of the minutiae of the setting which many other obsessive World of Darkness players do.

By the same measure, I've played many games where there is no background. Which can be just as bad, if not worse, as a GM will often be totally lost, leaving the players who are reliant on the the GM for information about the world completely alone in a strange world of which they have no concept of at all due to the lack of GM interaction and the lack of fluff in the book to give them an indication of what the world which they find their characters in actually is. So, is there a middle ground? Probably, but I'm yet to find it.