Melissa Berman

Key Authors/Texts I will be talking about:

• Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997)

• Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as VR (2001)

• Suzanne Keen, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative Fall 2006

Immersion, Enactment, and Transformation

Melissa Berman

4. J. Yellowlees Douglas and Andrew Hargadon, “The PleasuresOf Immersion and Interaction: Schemas, Scripts, and theFifth Business” (2004)

5. J. Yellowlees Douglas, “Where the Senses become a Stage and Reading is Direction: Performing the Texts of Virtual Reality and Interactive Fiction” TDR 37.4. (Winter 1993): 18-37.

Melissa Berman

Janet Murray on Immersion: (Pg. 98-100)“Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water.”

Computers are “liminal objects” (i.e., they are on the threshold between physical reality and our imagination)

Immersion

Melissa Berman

Marie Laure-Ryan on “The Poetics of Immersion”:

Ryan describes immersion as being “Lost in a Book,” transported somewhere.

Tendency to label pleasurable texts as “immersive” (pg. 95-96), and “the most immersive texts are the most familiar” ones because of their ability to build an immersive world through language.

Immersion

Melissa Berman

Ryan determines 4 degrees of absorption in the act of reading: (Pgs. 98-99)

1) Concentration- in nonimmersive works, the textual world is easily disrupted by external reality

2) Imaginative involvement- i.e., the reader is transported into the textual world while simultaneously contemplating or interpreting the texts with emotional detachment

3) Entrancement- so caught up in the textual world that the reader forgets anything externally related to the internal textual world

4) Addiction- the reader seeks to escape reality but consumes the text too quickly to find it pleasurable or the loss of ability to distinguish between the textual and actual worlds

Immersion

Melissa Berman

Likewise, Douglas and Harragon (The Pleasures of Immersion and Interaction: Schemas, Scripts, and the Fifth Business) state that “trance-like reading” often occurs in genre schemas that offer a certain type of predictability. (Pg. 195)

Common themes: trance-like feeling, predictability is better, going somewhere

Immersion

Melissa Berman

But what about interactivity?Murray questions, when participation is invited into the narrative,

how is the fragile immersive trance sustained?

Murray’s Answer:1. Locate the border between the real world and the representational

world.2. Structure Participation as a visit

Immersion Disrupted by Interactivity

3. Structure Participation as a mask

Melissa Berman

When the “wall” or screen becomes transparent, the user may become immersed.

The user or reader has moved beyond thinking, “this is the object,” and “I am my self interacting with the text.” (Douglas, “Where the Senses become a Stage and Reading is Direction: Performing the Texts of Virtual Reality and Interactive Fiction”)

User willingly and temporarily (involvement of time, like Murray’s structured visit) steps over the line.

Immersion Disrupted by Interactivity

Melissa Berman

Murray’s “The Active Creation of Belief”: (Pgs. 111-2)

More complex than suspending disbelief, we actively create belief.

Reader response- we assemble the story into the cognitive schemata that make up our own systems of knowledge and belief.

Digital environments foster new ways to utilize the active creation of belief

Themes to come up later- schemas, role-play,user adaptation based on personal experience

Immersion

Melissa Berman

Structuring Participation with a Mask: (Murray Pg. 113)

The mask, a.k.a the avatar:-Creates a boundary of immersive reality-Signals to the user that he or she is role-playing

-The mask is the doorway- it marks our entry into the virtual world and closes some parts of our real selves outside of the virtual world

Related to Douglas’s separation of Text and Self,stepping over the boundary of the screen.

Immersion

Melissa Berman

Ryan’s “Presence of the Textual World” and Empathy:

Ryan’s theory of Spatial Immersion: (Pgs. 121-2)The response to setting

Often a result of the “madeleine effect”

The spatial landscape of the text and those that the readers builds in his or her mind blend.

Immersion and Enactment

Melissa Berman

Ryan’s theory of Emotional Immersion (Pg. 153):The response to a character

Ryan’s paradox of emotional participation:

1. We have emotions concerning fictional situations2. To have an emotion concerning a situation, we must

believe the propositions that describe this situation3. We do not believe the propositions that describe the

situations represented in fiction

Immersion and Enactment

Melissa Berman

These three items are explored in conjunction with 2 observations. (pg. 154)

1. We experience emotions regarding fictional situations that can be intense enough to lead to physical symptoms.

2. These emotions do not have their normal consequences, and as long as they are not too violent, they do not inhibit pleasure.

Immersion and Enactment

Melissa Berman

Enactment as a Transformational Experience: (Murray)

Digital narratives give us the opportunity to enact our empathy emotions (rather than passively follow a story)

Enacted events are powerful- when we are immersed, we comprehend the enacted events as a personal experience, which then as the power to transform our real selves. (Personal Transformation)

Sherry Turkle’s research on adolescents and their relationships to computers revealed that the screen’s mask became a method to “construct their sense of identity” (Second Self 132).

Immersion and Enactment

Melissa Berman

What is Narrative Empathy?: (Suzanne Keen)

Empathy is measurable. (Pgs. 208-211)-scientifically measured by neuroscientists and developmental and social psychologists through various methods, such as data collection captured by EMG (electromyographic) and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Immersion and Enactment

Melissa Berman

Researchers have found cognitive and emotional functions to be linked.

The human capacity to experience empathy, feeling what someone else feels, is also partially fueled by social and cultural values:

“our personal histories and cultural contexts affect the way we understand automatically shared feelings (Keen 209).”

Sounds like schemas, right? And, the “madeleine effect”?

Immersion and Enactment

Melissa Berman

Schemas in narratives play on our bank of knowledge about human interactions, and how the world works (Douglas 194; Hargadon 194). (Remember Ryan’s statement that the most immersive texts are the most pleasurable?)

Immersion and Enactment

Melissa Berman

Summary of the connected theorists’ ideas of Immersion, Empathy, and Enactment:

Immersion is a state of being in a trance or mentally removed from the external world.

Narratives (i.e., story) are the most immersive when they utilize schemas to transport the user into the virtual world.

Immersion and Enactment

Melissa Berman

Schemas play off of our understandings about how the world works, help us to know what type of emotional response to have to certain situation, etc. Schemas create boundariesand context in the narrative, virtual reality space.

When put on a mask, we may enact empathy, allowing for personal transformation to take place.

Immersion and Enactment