Narrative as virtual reality 2 : revisiting immersion and interactivity in literature and electronic media

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Bibliographic Information

Narrative as virtual reality 2 : revisiting immersion and interactivity in literature and electronic media

Marie-Laure Ryan

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015

Rev. ed.

  • : pbk

Other Title

Narrative as virtual reality two

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Note

Rev. ed. of: Narrative as virtual reality : immersion and interactivity in literature and electronic media. 2001

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Is there a significant difference between engagement with a game and engagement with a movie or novel? Can interactivity contribute to immersion, or is there a trade-off between the immersive "world" aspect of texts and their interactive "game" dimension? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, the questions raised by the new interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre-electronic literary and artistic traditions. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Ryan applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of narrative experience that encompasses reading, watching, and playing. The book weighs traditional literary narratives against the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past thirty years, including hypertext, electronic poetry, interactive drama, digital installation art, computer games, and multi-user online worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft. In this completely revised edition, Ryan reflects on the developments that have taken place over the past fifteen years in terms of both theory and practice and focuses on the increase of narrativity in video games and its corresponding loss in experimental digital literature. Following the cognitive approaches that have rehabilitated immersion as the product of fundamental processes of world-construction and mental simulation, she details the many forms that interactivity has taken-or hopes to take-in digital texts, from determining the presentation of signs to affecting the level of story.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables Preface Introduction Part I 1. The Two (and Thousand) Faces of the Virtual 2. Virtual Reality as Dream and as Technology Part II 3. The Text as World 4. Varieties of Immersion Part III 5. The Text as World versus the Text as Game 6. Texts without Worlds 7. The Many Forms of Interactivity 8. Hypertext Part IV 9. Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama 10. Chasing the Dream of the Immersive, Interactive Narrative Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index

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