You know, speaking of the desire for attention, something I appreciate about Disco Elysium is that constantly belittling the protagonist works because, even if negatively, the world responds to you and what you do authentically and with detail. The attention you get is fulfilling even when at your expense. So many games heap suffocating praise on the player to convince you that you are important and special, but getting praised all the time no matter what you do feels like placation, not attention. Maybe that's why so many enjoy even meaningless or annoying ways to get the game to respond to them, like choices that go nowhere or NPCs that scold you for acting weird, the same way a misbehaving child acts out for attention. Maybe we should think of "immersion" as something more like the illusion of the world responding to you, which is just "attention" by another name.
Yeah, this is something that we also think about with Fallen London – we group this under the set of players we term 'role-players' but there's really a specific thing there, the desire to just get your choices/aesthetics/character acknowledged.
In general, I tend to call story material that acknowledges or reacts to the player's choices, etc, 'reactivity'.
And really the way we think about that, it doesn't matter whether the acknowledgement is positive reinforcement at all. In fact, sometimes players are really excited to get acknowledgement that their character is some kind of loser or asshole.
