Narrative as Virtual Reality 2 Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media

"When the first edition was written, the dominant form of electronic literature was hypertext fiction. The book devoted several chapters to hypertext theory, as well as to the difficulty of creating immersive hypertext narratives. Hypertextuality has lost none of its prominence as a principle of organization of the Web, but it is no longer considered avant-garde on the digital-literary scene. While the new forms that are currently being developed verify some of the recommendations made in NVR (shorter texts, greater reliance on multi-modality, self-referentiality and a tendency toward conceptual art), they generally avoid narrativity and its particular form of immersion, and even interactivity is no longer seen as indispensable. It is in the popular form of the video game that serious attempts are being made to reconcile immersion with interactivity. The second edition deals in greater detail with both the increase of narrativity in video games, and its loss in experimental digital literature. It also takes into consideration the creation of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, which implement the idea of virtual reality in a way not foreseen by VR theorists of the nineties" --