Marie-Laure Ryan

Narrative as Virtual Reality II:

Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015

Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a

movie or novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging
technology of virtual reality, which has been promoted as an immersive-interactive experience?
As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality, 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, Narrative as
Virtual Reality applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology
of narrative experience that encompasses reading, watching and playing. Ryan’s analysis weighs
against each other traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the
electronic revolution of the past thirty years, such as hypertext, electronic poetry, interactive
drama, digital installation art, computer games and multi-user online worlds.

In this new, entirely revised edition, Ryan revisits immersion and interactivity in the light of the
developments that have taken place in the past fifteen years in the areas of both theory and
practice. She follows the cognitive approaches that have rehabilitated immersion as the product
of fundamental processes of world-construction and mental simulation, and 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. Far from taking the benefits of interactivity
from granted she asks questions such as: can interactivity contribute to immersion, or is there a
trade-off between the immersive “world” aspect of texts and their interactive “game” dimension?
How feasible Is the dynamic generation of stories through a real-time interaction between user
input and system response? What are the rewards of active participation in a life-like simulated
world ? What kinds of plots lend themselves to active user participation?

As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of
the central issues of modern literary theory—the opposition between a presumably passive
reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active reading that imaginatively
or physically participates in the text’s creation.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction

Part I Virtuality

1. The Two (and Thousand) Faces of the Virtual

2. VR Technology as Immersion and Interactivity

Part II The Poetics of Immersion

3. The Text as World: Theories of Immersion

4. Varieties of Immersion: Spatial, Temporal, Emotional

Part III The Poetics of Interactivity

5. The Text as World versus the Text as Game

6. Texts without Worlds: Dysfunctionality as a Form of Play

7. The Many Forms of Interactivity

8. Hypertext: The Functions and Effects of Exploratory, External Interactivity

Part IV Reconciling Immersion and Interactivity

9. Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama

10. Chasing the Dream of the Immersive, Interactive Narrative

Conclusion