Studying Readers of WALLPAPER : Digital fiction and Immersion

1. Studying Readers of WALLPAPER: Digital fiction and Immersion Alice Bell (Sheffield Hallam University, UK), Astrid Ensslin (Alberta, Canada), Isabelle van der Bom, and Jen Smith (Hallam) @AliceBellTweets @ReadDigFic www.readingdigitalfction.com

6. Immersion • “We propose to conceptualise the computer game player’s experience of psychological immersion as resulting from a shift of attention to and the construction of situation models of certain parts of the game.” (Thon 2008: 33). • “fictional recentering” by which “consciousness relocates itself to another world … and reorganizes the entire universe of being around [it]” (Ryan 2015: 73).

7. Multimodal cognitive deixis Methodology Output Methodology Output Immersion as hybrid, dynamic, interactive

8. Part 1: Immersive Features • Deictic Shift Theory/Cognitive Deixis (Duchan et al 1995, Stockwell 2002) • places the notion of deictic projection as a cognitive process at the centre of the framework (Stockwell 2002: 46). • Deictic centre or ‘origo’. • ‘Push’ and ‘pop’. Media-specific additions: • Visual point of view: Thon (2009) • Audio: diegetic and extra diegetic sound (Stam 1992)

9. Deixis Dear Mr. Sanders, I am very sorry to hear about the loss of you mother. I appreciate that it is a difficult time and you will need to travel to the UK to settle matters on your family estate. [VISUAL OF FICTIONAL WORLD APPEARS NOW] Due to your long service record with Poppitech we will grant you one month compassionate paid leave. Your role with us over the past few months become questionable as we had been expecting to have a successful beta-demo of your product over six months ago. I do hope that a change of scene away from the drawing board may give you a bit of clarity and progression of the development of your prototype. Yours sincerely, Jane Richardson Smith, Director of Human Resources.

11. Visual Point of View Visual Point of View • the spatial and perceptual perspective of the player’s avatar’ (Thon 2009: 282). • Subjective point of action: ‘the action position of the player coincides with that of the player’s avatar’ (290). • ‘Subjective point of view: ‘the spatial and perceptual perspective of the player’s avatar’ (Thon 2009: 282). • Subjective point of action: ‘the action position of the player coincides with that of the player’s avatar’ (290).

12. Audible Point of View • Sound as immersive (e.g. Nacke et al 2010). • Non-diegetic sound: ‘represented as being outside the space of the narrative’ (Stam 1992: 62). • Diegetic sound: ‘emerging from a source within the story’ (Stam 1992: 62). • ‘Kinesonic congruence’ versus ‘kinesonic incongruence’ (Collins 2013).

13. Site-Specifity

14. Part II: Reader response method • Reading groups as focus group (1 pop-up; 3 established) • N = 14 (8 female, 6 male, 20-60 y.o.a.) • Nov 2015, Bank Street Arts • A semi-'naturalistic' (cf. Swann and Allington 2009) approach for collecting data on a specific topic and ‘generating hypotheses based on informants' insights’ (Flick 2009: 203). • Audio transcripts • nVivo analysis • Coding e.g. for immersion types • Explicature and implicature in participant utterances

15. Immersion types (coded) • Spatial immersion (Ryan 2015: 86; Thon 2008: 35) • Temporal immersion (Ryan 2015: 99) • Spatio-temporal immersion (Ryan 2015: 93) • Emotional immersion (Ryan 2015: 106) • Ludic immersion (Thon 2008: 36-37; cf. Ermi & Mäyrä 2005) • Perceptual-environmental immersion (Lombard & Ditton 1997) • Social immersion (Thon 2008: 39) • Collaborative immersion (Bell et al forthcoming) • Extratextual immersion (Bell at al forthcoming)

16. Pronominal usage: Spatio-temporal & ludic immersion Doubly-deictic ‘I’: • “I did wander round- round the garden and get told like- I think I should go in the house now, I was- clearly I’ve reached the limits” Doubly-deictic ‘you’: • “Someone was talking to you, you know, when you kept flicking the light switch and the power is off”

17. Ludic immersion taking over (cf. hyperattention, Hayles 2007) • vs. deep attention / reading: “You know, trotting up and down the same rooms over and over again, and I got completely like target-fixated on finding the key, and there was various words in the background and thoughts- I had no interest in them at all, ‘cause I was just trying to find- uh, after half an hour, I hadn’t found the key.” • vs. emotional immersion / character empathy “I really felt like I was being a bit naughty, because he was like oh, seriously, you’re going upstairs, and I was like, yeah I’m gonna go upstairs, he was like really, I was like yeah”

18. Sound and Immersion (1) Diegetic sound “If you- if this- if Sanders is essentially trying to be an avatar for the player, if I’m not breathing like that then it just seems a bit odd.” (2) Extradiegetic sound: • A: ..and the music built- you know, it was just really //decent • B: //Spooky • A: Yeah • I: Spooky • A: //Yeah, yeah • I: //Atmospheric (3) Extratextual sound = extratextual immersion (Bell et al forthcoming) “Oh yeah, I heard- I heard things on the ceiling and I thought it was in-game sound effects, that there were spooky things going on upstairs”

19. Concluding remarks: Immersion revisited • Media-specific analysis + Evidence from reader response data = • Immersion as , dynamic, multidimensional, convergent and divergent (or immersion as mixing desk?)

20. References • Bortolussi, Maria, and Dixon, Peter. (2003) Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. • Collins, Karen (2013) Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games. MIT Press. • Duchan, Judith F., Gail A. Bruder, and Lynne E. Hewitt. (1995) Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. • Ensslin, Astrid. (2014) Literary Gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. • Ermi, Laura., and Frans Mäyrä (2005) “Fundamental components of the gameplay experience: Analysing immersion.” Worlds in Play: International perspectives on Digital Games Research 37 (2). • Flick, Uwe. (2009) An Introduction to Qualitative Research (fourth edition). London: Sage. • Hayles, N. K. (2007) "Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes." Profession 2007: 187-99. • Lombard, Matthew., & Theresa Ditton. (1997). “At the heart of it all: The concept of presence.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3 (2). • Nacke, Lennart E., Mark N. Grimshaw, and Craig A. Lindley. (2010) ‘More Than a Feeling: Measurement of Sonic User Experience and Psychophysiology in a First-Person Shooter Game.’ Interacting with Computers 22: 336–343. • Ryan, Marie-Laure. (2015) Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, ML: John Hopkins University Press. • Stam, Robert. (Ed.) (1992) New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Beyond. London: Routledge. • Stockwell, Peter. (2002) Cognitive Poetics. London: Routledge. • Swann, Joan. and Daniel Allington. (2009) 'Reading Groups and the Language of Literary Texts: A Case Study in Social Reading.' Language and Literature 18 (3): 247–64. • Thon, Jan-Noël (2008) ‘Immersion Revisited. On the Value of a Contested Concept.’ In: Amyris Fernandez, Olli Leino, and Hanna Wirman (Eds): Extending Experiences: Structure, Analysis, and Design of Computer Game Player Experience. Rovaniemi: Lapland University Press, pp. 29-43. • Thon, Jan-Noël (2009). ‘Perspective in Contemporary Computer Games.’ In: Peter Hühn/Wolf Schmid/Jörg Schönert (Eds): Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization. Modeling Mediation in Narrative. Berlin, New York/NY: de Gruyter, pp. 279-299.