Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media

by Marie-Laure Ryan

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? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality, the questions raised by new, interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre-electronic literary and artistic traditions. Formerly a culture of immersive ideals—getting lost in a good book, for example—we are becoming, Ryan claims, a culture more concerned with interactivity. 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 reading.

Ryan's analysis encompasses both traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past few years, such as hypertext, interactive movies and drama, digital installation art, and computer role-playing games. Interspersed among the book's chapters are several "interludes" that focus exclusively on either key literary texts that foreshadow what we now call "virtual reality," including those of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ignatius de Loyola, Calvino, and science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive art forms, like the hypertext "novel" Twelve Blue, by Michael Joyce, and I'm Your Man, an interactive movie. As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory—the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text's creation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Games, Writing, Virtual Reality, Literary Criticism, Criticism

416 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2000

Reviews

[Mattia Ravasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A video about this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tICiN...

Strikes a great balance between being informative and interesting and well written without losing its scientific approach. An immensely interesting study on the nature of immersion in narrative, as compared and contrasted to interactivity. Some of its claims could have been better supported, but taken as it is, it's a golden book.
It's main flaw, being a 2001 study, is that it talks a lot about avant-garde and cutting-edge narrative and technological tools that have since been oh so completely forgotten, but that's not the book' fault, not really.
I'd suggest it to scholars and curious alike.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent overview of the state of virtual reality up to the start of the 21st century, with the central problem to sort out between immersion in a possible world and interaction in a digital one. Her review of literature within her field and a wide array of fiction from the Brontë Sisters to William Gibson demonstrates a desire for a VR experience like the holodeck, yet I still found the study by Janet Murray more hopeful and related to the present state of the virtual technology that will give a new spin on reality.

[Isidora · Rating 5 out of 5]

So draining🥹

[Justin Lo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful diagrams, enlightening diagrams, but too much outdated jargon arguing what we take for granted nowadays in critical game studies.

[Michael Wolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inexhaustibly rich in narrative-based qualitative accounts of the process and importance of the notions of narrative immersion in terms of such notions as "games", "playing", terms that are, through understandings of narrative immersion, reunderstood through the collective knowledge of these accounts and Ryan's useful textual interpretations. It is very easy to get lost in the depth of literary certitude purported through the anecdotal style and content, but when constantly thought through the "lens" of narrative immersion, a pattern of reciprocity between reader responsibility and privilege begin to be understood through the inevitable workings of immersion in a narrative text.

[Matthew Smart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across this book by accident in the library and after reading the first chapter I ordered a copy for myself. It is the best book on the topic of immersive writing I have come across in months of research, explaining her theories and the concepts of virtual reality, then tying them neatly into narrative texts. A must for any writer who is serious about the user (reader) engagement of their work.

[Renata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marie-Laure Ryan é, para mim, A Grande Pesquisadora de narrativas em plataformas digitais. Tem rigor conceitual, repertório vastíssimo e uma compreensão semiótica do fenômeno narrativo que, claro, muito me agrada (diferenciando-se, assim, dos auto-intitulados 'ludologistas', que, em sua maioria, não parecem entender nada de signo, significação, semiose e correlatos.

[Rusi Marinov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent topic and book.

[Nelson Zagalo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profound humanistic applied reflection on the uses of VR to communicate stories.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astute parsing of the poetics of immersive reading. I have yet to read the parts on interactivity, but if it's half as good as the parts on immersion I'll be ecstatic.