Kyle’s Reviews > Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media > Status Update

Good to know there is another fictional world where virtual reality has a part to play, and much like Stephenson's Diamond Age, Vancouver has some part to play in making VR happen - add another book to my ever-growing list of resources! Ryan's conclusion seems like it will be a doubtful diamondless future for VR and we should be happy with what we have got, but she hasn't seen one qubit of a new virtual age.

Theories pile upon theories as Ryan reconciles how virtual reality can be both immersive and interactive experiences by examining a variety of other im & in examples: children's games and religious ritual leading up to the purpose of dramatic theatre. When the next chapter gets to the digital turn, including Multi User Dungeons and Artificial Intelligence (in the form of chatterbots), the holodeck seems farther away.

Cohesion is the chief concern of any storyteller, and the hypertextual stories (and print-based prototypes occasionally mentioned by Ryan) are a collection of nodes that can be linked in a variety of networks. The more closed the system is risks clarity for the reader yet dead ends and feedback loops sacrifice narrativity and become über-postmodern. Fortunately the action spoof I'm Your Man unites this knot.

Emerging from the virtual world of text and stepping into an interactive, game-like reading experience, Ryan and a host of French (re: postmodern) linguists explore text's ludic qualities, and surprisingly the results are not so fun. Even the serious game angle gets played out, but much of it seems like taking something enjoyable, like getting lost in a book, and If on a Winter's Nighting it into submission.

The remaining chapters in the immersion part of Ryan's text dip into the cool, familiar texts like The Hamlet's Yoknapatawpha County and The Magician's Nephew's Narnia, then gets deeper with barely described landscape of Wuthering Heights and suddenly fictional people haven't got their noses yet only brief mention of Gogol. Are we the readers concerned for Cortázar and Calvino's characters?

Offering steps towards immersion in virtual reality, Ryan mines the worlds of cognitive psychology, philosophy and phenomenology to make up for where poststructuralist literary theory dares not go: beyond language and I would argue into meaning. Her take on possible worlds (thanks to Eco et al.) would be greatly improved with a reading of any quantum theorist, so instead the quarks spun in favour of Jesuits.

Taking two examples from the fin de siècle, the classier version of Y2K, authors show a antedigital interest in artificial worlds, yet one spirals into hallucinations from bad drug trips and the other a sterile, natureless room. Why not Gogol's The Diary of a Madman to represent that century or Serafini's Seraphinianus Codex for the next one? Even Coover's virtual baseball team gets tied to reality.

Taking a pause before the first interlude to report on the first two chapters which are as amazing for Ryan's erudition as explicit about the often misunderstood applications of the words virtual and reality. Plenty of overlap with Time and Narrative, especially as she presents a history of thought as far back as Aristotle, and as cognitively present as the phenomenological studies I will have to read up on.

Most of the questions I have about virtual reality in its current emergent state and the connection to fiction were topics of discussion for a couple of decades, and now it is a chance to catch up with all the connections laid out in the writing of Marie-Laure Ryan. So far, she sets up an intriguing analysis of immersion and interactivity, and I am keen to see whether dramatic play gets included as literary formulae.