Narrative as virtual reality Marie-Laure Ryan

Two fundamentally different conceptions of narrativity:

1. Narrative is a form of representation that varies with period and culture (prose fiction
that refers to individual existents and relates mental or physical events is automatically
narrative)
2. Narrative is a timeless and universal cognitive model by which we make sense of
temporal existence and human action (narrativity requires a certain semantic form, and
its realization is a matter of degree)
George Landow & Ilana Snyder: The development of interactive mechanisms is both a new way
of telling stories and a generator of new narrative structures: broken up, open, without rise
and fall tension, unstable, multilinear, multiple, and so on.
Compared with the literary experimentalists, writers and designers who work for the
commercial sector are much more sceptical of the narrative potential of interactive media.
The compatibility of narrativity of interactivity and narrativity obviously depends on how
narrowly we define narrative. In its common usage, narrative can mean a discourse reporting
a story as well as the story itself. It can be conceived:
1. as a representation of physical or mental events involving common or related
participants and ordered in a temporal sequence (=sequential narrative)
2. as an interpretation of events invoking causality (=causal)
3. as a semantic structure meeting certain formal requirements, such as a salient theme,
a point, a development leading from equilibrium to crisis to a new form of equilibrium,
and a rise and fall in tension (=dramatic)
The structures of interactive narrativity
The complete graph:

Paths are bidirectional

Every node is linked to every other node, and the reader has total freedom of
navigation.

Practically impossible to guarantee narrative coherence.

The network:

Paths can be uni- or bidirectional

The standard structure of literary hypertext.

The readers movements are neither completely free nor limited to a single course.

The tree:

Paths are unidirectional (from top to bottom). Every traversal produces a well-formed
plot.

Control the readers itinerary from root node to leaf nodes and make it easy to
guarantee that choices will always result in a well-formed story.

The vector with side branches:

The text tells a determinate story in chronological order, but the structure of links
enables the reader to take short side trips to roadside attractions.

This structure is particularly popular in electronic texts designed for juvenile audiences
because of its cognitive simplicity.

This structure gives rise to an experience that may be compared with a guided tour.

The maze:

Characteristic of adventure games where the user tries to find a path from a starting
point to an end point.

There may be one or more ways to reach the goal; the graph may or may not allow the
user to run in circles, terminal nodes may be dead ends or allow backtracking.

Narrative coherence is guaranteed by the fact that all paths are attempts to reach a
certain goal.

The directed network, or flow chart

The negative experiences of running in circles and hitting a dead end are eliminated in
this network.

The user is granted some freedom in connecting the various stages of the journey.

The decisions made by the user in the past affect his choices in the future.

The hidden story:

The structure of those interactive mystery stories and computer games that implement
the idea of discovering the prehistory of the game-world.

This model consists of two narrative levels: at the bottom, the fixed, unilinear,
temporally directed story of the events to be reconstituted; on the top, the atemporal
network of choices that determines the reader-detectives investigation of the case;
between the two, dotted lines that link episodes of discovery in the top story to the
discovered facts of the bottom story.

The braided plot:

On the diagram, the horizontal axis stands for time and the vertical axis for space;
simultaneous events are vertically aligned, and events that take place in the same
location occupy the same horizontal coordinate. Each circle represents a physical event,
and the lines that connect them stand for the destinies of the participants. By selecting
one horizontal line rather than another, the reader enters the private world of a specific
character and experiences the story from a particular point of view.

Action space, epic wandering, and story-world:

Interactivity takes place on the macro level and dramatic plotting on the micro level.
2

The user is free to take any road, but when she reaches a site, the system takes control
of her fate and sends her into a self contained adventure.

This model abandons the idea of an overarching dramatic narrative in favour of an epic
structure of semiautonomous episodes in which the user plays a largely passive role.

=The potential of a network to generate well-formed stories for every traversal is inversely
proportional to its degree of connectivity.
Empirical studies have shown that when readers are motivated by the desire to know how it
ends the primordial narrative desire and when they can find out by hitting the return key,
they will experience the other links as a distracting nuisance.
Another way to overcome the fundamental incompatibility of narrativity and the interactivity
might be to stimulate interactive curiosity on a purely local level. The purpose of clicking
should not be to find out how it will end print texts are infinitely better at generating and
satisfying this long-term narrative desire but, as the multimedia, design author Bob Hughes
has suggested, to trigger microevents that provide blasts of pleasure and instant satisfaction.
Hypertext and immersion
Three types of immersion:
Temporal immersion

Interactivity conflicts with the creation of a sustained narrative development, and

consequently with the experience of temporal immersion.

Temporal immersion requires an accumulation of narrative information.

The special power of interactive texts to generate a plurality of possible worlds could be
regarded as a feature that facilitates the creation of an immersive plot.

One of the properties that contribute to the intrinsic tellability of a story another term
for narrative immersivity is the diversification of possible worlds in the narrative
universe.

Spatial Immersion

Of the three types of immersion, the spatial variety evidently has the most to gain from
the built-in spatiality of pictures.

I cannot think of a more efficient way to celebrate the spirit of a place than a welldesigned interactive network that combines images with music, poems, short prose
texts, maps, and historical documents.

Emotional Immersion

Emotional Immersion requires a sense of the inexorable character of fate, of the finality
of every event in the characters life.

The aesthetic ambition of hypertext is an awareness of the plurality of worlds contained

in the system.

The future of interactivty

The conception of hypertext as the super postmodern novel was detrimental to the nascent
medium for two reasons.
1. The traditional length of the genre motivated hypertext authors to start right away with
large compositions that made unreasonable demands on the readers concentration.
2. The model of novel created a pattern of expectations that subordinated local meaning
to a global narrative structure, and even though this structure hardly ever materialised,
its pursuit distracted readers from the poetic qualities of the individual lexias.
Abandoning the model of the novel would allow hypertext to explore two avenues:
1. Direct interest more strongly to the local level, by working with relatively self-contained
lexias such as poems, aphorisms, anecdotes, short narrative episodes, or provocative
thoughts.
2. Give up on the idea of an autonomous literary genre and take greater advantage of
the multimedia capability of the electronic environment.
In a multimedial environment, the instantaneous sense of presence that can be achieved
through visual documents or through the intensely personal modulations of a human voice
provides a way to compensate for the loss of immersivity that results from the fragmented
structure of the work as a whole.
By suggesting that electronic literature take the conceptual route I do not wish to say that
interactivity per se is one of those devices that should be used only once, but rather that the
electronic medium can be powerful tool kit for the production of one-of-a-kind textual forms
such as the projects listed below. Not all of them are literally interactive, but they are all
dynamic, and they all put the visual and kinetic properties of their medium in the service of a
precise ides, often the literalization of a well-known metaphor:

The text as antiobject, or the work that cannot be reread.

You bring as much to the text as you get from it.

Reading as incomplete process and random selection.

The text as palimpsest.

Literalizing the notion of textual space.

The instability of meaning.