Continuation Desire as the Expected Value of Control

Engagement research fragments across a cluster of near-synonyms (attention, immersion, presence, flow, focus, concentration, engrossment) and tends to resolve the fragmentation by collapsing the cluster onto whichever member its instrument can measure: flow has a validated questionnaire, so engagement quietly becomes flow. Schoenau-Fog's grounded-theory work resisted this by defining engagement not as any of those experiences but as continuation desire, the desire to continue an activity in order to accomplish an objective while experiencing affect, with immersion, presence, and flow demoted to optional accompaniments. This paper argues that continuation desire is the phenomenal readout of the expected value of control remaining above a disengagement threshold, and that Schoenau-Fog's four empirical components map onto the inputs of the expected-value-of-control computation: objectives as the value term, activities as the cost and control-demand term, accomplishments as the reward-prediction signal, and affects as the gain modulator. The grounding supplies a mechanism to a deliberately atheoretical model and dissolves its sharpest anomaly, the production of continuation desire by deliberately unpleasant content, which on the proposed reading is a positive expected value of control sustained across negative valence. The paper further argues that the folk synonym-cluster is organised by an effort sign-flip, and that engagement occupies a three-axis state-space whose coordinates (continuation desire, herosproxy, and the hugput-occupancy of diegetic content) are mutually independent.