AA.VV
u003cpu003eIs 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 u003ciu003eNarrative as Virtual Reality 2u003c/iu003e, the questions raised by the new interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre-electronic literary and artistic traditions. u003c/pu003eu003cpu003eApproaching 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 u003ciu003eSecond Lifeu003c/iu003e and u003ciu003eWorld of Warcraft.u003c/pu003eu003cpu003eu003c/iu003eIn 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.u003c/pu003e