【交换机】《作为虚拟现实的叙事》（第二版）：文学与电子媒介中的沉浸和互动
沉浸于游戏和沉浸于电影、小说，这二者之间究竟有没有本质差异？互动(interactivity)究竟是有助于人们沉浸其中，还是说文本中令人感到身临其境的“此世”面向和游戏的互动性此消彼长？正如玛丽-劳尔·莱恩(Marie-Laure Ryan)在其著作《作为虚拟现实的叙事》中展现的那样，那些由新兴的互动科技所引出的问题，其实在电子时代以前的文学与艺术传统中已经可以找到先驱和回响。
在试图探讨“虚拟现实作为整体艺术之隐喻”这一观念时，莱恩实际借助了前述“沉浸”和“互动”的概念，发展出一套足以囊括阅读、观看和游戏等叙事经验的现象学。于是，我们看到作者在书中将传统文学叙事与过往三十余年来由电子化革命所催生的新文本类别——比如超文本、电子诗歌、互动剧场、数字装置艺术、电脑游戏和类似“第二人生”、“魔兽世界”这样的多人在线游戏——并置一堂，比对衡量。
在这本书的修订新版中，莱恩有针对性地加入了过去十五年来相关理论与实践层面上的发展；同时亦集中讨论了近年游戏中叙事性的提升，以及由此造成的数字实验文学的偏废。
考虑到 “沉浸”状态已被当下的认知研究判定为世界建构和心理模拟的产物，作者不惜花费大量笔墨，对数字文本语境下互动的各种潜在形式进行了梳理性——不论这些活动形式是仅仅决定了符号的呈现，还是从整体上对叙事产生影响的层次。
Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media
Is there a significant difference between engagement with a game and engagement with a movie or novel? Can interactivity contribute to immersion, or is there a trade-off between the immersive "world" aspect of texts and their interactive "game" dimension? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, the questions raised by the new interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre-electronic literary and artistic traditions.
Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Ryan applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of narrative experience that encompasses reading, watching, and playing. The book weighs traditional literary narratives against the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past thirty years, including hypertext, electronic poetry, interactive drama, digital installation art, computer games, and multi-user online worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft.
In this completely revised edition, Ryan reflects on the developments that have taken place over the past fifteen years in terms of both theory and practice and focuses on the increase of narrativity in video games and its corresponding loss in experimental digital literature.
Following the cognitive approaches that have rehabilitated immersion as the product of fundamental processes of world-construction and mental simulation, she details the many forms that interactivity has taken―or hopes to take―in digital texts, from determining the presentation of signs to affecting the level of story.
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记录数字媒介之日常
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