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The Empathy of Immersion: An Exploration of Battlefield 1 Through the Lense of Empathetic Virtual Reality

From the Publisher: 
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, electronic poetry, 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. 
 
About the Author: 
Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar and former software consultant. She is the author of Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory and the editor of Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory.

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

In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to analyze particular videogames. Moreover, this approach can be applied beyond videogames: Bogost suggests that any medium -- from videogames to poetry, literature, cinema, or art -- can be read as a configurative system of discrete, interlocking units of meaning, and he illustrates this method of analysis with examples from all these fields. The marriage of literary theory and information technology, he argues, will help humanists take technology more seriously and hep technologists better understand software and videogames as cultural artifacts. This approach is especially useful for the comparative analysis of digital and nondigital artifacts and allows scholars from other fields who are interested in studying videogames to avoid the esoteric isolation of "game studies." The richness of Bogost's comparative approach can be seen in his discussions of works by such philosophers and theorists as Plato, Badiou, Zizek, and McLuhan, and in his analysis of numerous videogames including Pong, Half-Life, and Star Wars Galaxies. Bogost draws on object technology and complex adaptive systems theory for his method of unit analysis, underscoring the configurative aspects of a wide variety of human processes. His extended analysis of freedom in large virtual spaces examines Grand Theft Auto 3, The Legend of Zelda, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Joyce's Ulysses. In Unit Operations, Bogost not only offers a new methodology for videogame criticism but argues for the possibility of real collaboration between the humanities and information technology.

Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism

"The universe of possible worlds is constantly expanding and diversifying thanks to the incessant world-constructing activity of human minds and hands. Literary fiction is probably the most active experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise."-from the author's Preface The standard contrast between fiction and reality, notes Lubomir Dolezel, obscures an array of problems that have beset philosophers and literary critics for centuries. Commentators usually admit that fiction conveys some kind of truth-the truth of the story of Faust, for instance. They acknowledge that fiction usually bears some kind of relation to reality-for example, the London of Dickens. But both the status of the truth and the nature of the relationship have baffled, frustrated, or repelled a long line of thinkers. In Heterocosmica, Lubomir Dolezel offers nothing less than a complete theory of literary fiction based on the idea of possible worlds. Beginning with a discussion of the extant semantics and pragmatics of fictionality-by Leibniz, Russell, Frege, Searle, Auerbach, and others-he relates them to literature, literary theory, and narratology. He also investigates theories of action, intention, and literary communication to develop a system of concepts that allows him to offer perceptive reinterpretations of a host of classical, modern, and postmodern fictional narratives-from Defoe through Dickens, Dostoevsky, Huysmans, Bely, and Kafka to Hemingway, Kundera, Rhys, Plenzdorf, and Coetzee. By careful attention to philosophical inquiry into possible worlds, especially Saul Kripke's and Jaakko Hintikka's, and through long familiarity with literary theory, Dolezel brings us an unprecedented examination of the notion of fictional worlds.

Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds

A recent shift in computer game design involves a move away from 2-D
level design in games like Prince of Persia (1992), or from isometric design
in games like Warcraft, to 3-D design and a ﬁrst-person point of view. This
shift increases the senseof immersionby replicating the aesthetic approaches
of ﬁrst-person shooter games in other types of games, such as adventure
games, role-playing games, and even strategy games, which previously used
2-D levels or isometric views. The shift in design is indicative of an overall
trend tomakedesktopvideogames feelmore likevirtual reality.Myapproach
here is to reexamine our concept of immersion in video games and suggest
that immersion has become an excessively vague, all-inclusive concept. It
is necessary to break down the concept of immersion into its more speciﬁc
meanings and develop a more speciﬁc terminology. In this essay, I take the.

The Empathy of Immersion: An Exploration of Battlefield 1 Through the Lense of Empathetic Virtual Reality

References

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

Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism

Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds

Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games

Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds by Lubomír Dolezel

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