From Immersion to Interactivity: The Text as World versus the Text as Game

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Chapter 6 – From Immersion to Interactivity: The Text as World versus the Text as Game

Consider this short passage

“There’s glory for you! [said Humpty Dumpty.]
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” – Lewis Carroll

Ryan writes about the game of text. I like this quote in particular: “The idea of linguistic relativism is a seductive plaything for a thought that conceives itself as play. In the paradigm that currently dominates literary studies, if literature is a game, it is because language itself is one; and if language is a game, it is because its rules form a self-enclosed system that determines, rather than reflects, our experience of reality” (187).

I think that this is an important lesson for anyone in academia. Compare this to my previous rant about the Game of Academia…

Another takeaway from this chapter is the way in which the notion of authorship has evolved. Foucault writes in “What Is an Author?”: “Referring only to itself, but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game (jeu) that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits (120)” (190). Once writing became a game, it needed new creative ways of playing; e.g. Cubism. “According to Roland Barthes, reading is a ‘cubist’ exercise in which ‘the meanings are cubes, piled up, altered, juxtaposed, yet feeding on each other’” (191). And ultimately, the game has evolved to encourage participation: “The writerly, by contrast, is seen as promoting an active and playful participation of the reader in the act of writing: ‘Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text’ [Barthes]” (195-6). We can clearly see a path from here to hypertext…

So what is the point of this seeming tangent. I suppose I see it as yet another example of the ways in which our aesthetic and cultural values have led to and been incorporated in the Internet as it is now: a participatory space in which everyone is a creator.