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

Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or a novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in this study, 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, the text applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading.