unnatural narrative

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis offers the first comprehensive and systematic theoretical, methodological, and analytical examination of unnatural narratology as a medium-specific and transmedial phenomenon. It applies and adapts key concepts of narrative theory and analysis to digital-born fictions ranging from hypertext and interactive fiction to 3D-narrative video games, app fiction, and virtual reality. The book addresses the unique affordances of digital fiction by focusing on multilinearity and narrative contradiction, interactional metalepsis, impossible time and space, “extreme” digital narration, and medium-specific forms of textual “you.” In so doing, the book refines, critiques, and expands unnatural, cognitive, and transmedial narratology by placing the form of these new narratives front and center.

Digital fiction typically puts the reader/player in a cybernetic dialogue with various narrative functions, such as characters, narrative voices, or prompts emanating from the storytelling environment. Readers enact their responses either verbally, through typed keyboard input, or haptically, through various types of physical interactions with the interface (mouseclick; controller moves; touch). The sense of agency evoked through these dialogic interactions has been fully conventionalized as part of digital narrativity. Yet there are instances of enacted dialogicity in digital fiction that merit more in-depth investigation under the broad labels of anti-mimeticism and intrinsic unnaturalness (Richardson, 2016), such as when readers enact pre-scripted narratees without, however, being able to take agency over the (canonical) narrative as a whole (Dave Morris’s Frankenstein), or when they hear or read a “protean,” “disembodied questioning voice” (Richardson, 2006: 79) that oscillates between system feedback, interior character monologue and supernatural interaction (Dreaming Methods’ WALLPAPER). This articles explores various intrinsically unnatural examples of the media-specific interlocutor in print and digital fiction and evaluate the extent to which unconventional interlocutors in digital fiction may have anti-mimetic, or defamiliarizing effects.

This paper re-evaluates existing theories of immersion and related concepts in the medium-specific context of digital-born fiction. In the context of our AHRC-funded ‘Reading Digital Fiction’ project (2014-17) (Ref: AH/K004174/1), we carried out an empirical reader response study of One to One Development Trust’s immersive three-dimensional (3D) digital fiction installation, WALLPAPER (2015). Working with reading groups in the Sheffield area (UK), we used methods of discourse analysis to examine readers’ verbal responses to experiencing the installation, paying particular attention to how participants described experiences pertaining to different types of immersion explicitly and implicitly. We explain our findings by proposing the idea of a switchboard metaphor for immersive experiences, comprising layers and dynamic elements of convergence and divergence. Resulting from our analysis, we describe immersion as a complex, hybrid, and dynamic phenomenon. We flag the need for a more discriminating treatment of specific types of immersion in medium-specific contexts, including a distinction between literary and narrative immersion, and collaborative and social immersion (Thon 2008). We argue that literary immersion is needed as a separate immersive category because it differs from narrative immersion, and is far more linked to the activity of cognitive word processing. Similarly, we introduce collaborative immersion as an additional immersive category to reflect attention shifts towards site-specific, human interactions. Finally, our data shows the importance of site-, situation-, and person-specific constraints influencing reader-players’ ongoing ability to establish and retain immersion in the storyworld.