Abstract
Making you cry is the folk wisdom test for strong narrative involvement, and has long been proposed as a reachable but distant goal for digital games. Immersion is a related phenomenon which has been difficult to achieve in Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality research projects, but reliably achieved in theme park rides by integrating interactivity with strong narrative elements. For Virtual and Mixed Reality environments to achieve narrative power and strong immersion we can adopt the strategies of theme park rides, with special attention to the creation of threshold objects that take the interactor into the virtual space. Spatial presentation of the world, interactions with characters, and differentiating real from virtual events are design challenges without clear genre conventions. Design choices that locate the interactor in a coherent point of view, limit natural language expectations, and conventionalize the boundaries of the virtual world will reinforce immersion and dramatic agency.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Breznican, A.: Spielberg, Zemekis say video games, film could become one. Associated Press, San Diego (2004)
Brown, E., Cairns, P.: A grounded investigation of game immersion. In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vienna, Austria. ACM Press, New York (2004)
Breazeal, C., Gray, J., Hoffman, G., Kidd, C., Lee, H., Lieberman, J., Lockerd, A., Chlongo, D.: Tutelage and Collaboration for Humanoid Robots. International Journal of Humanoid Robotics I(2), 314–348 (2004)
McCauley, D.: Majestic Invades your World. Wired News (2001)
Mine, M.: Towards virtual reality for the masses: 10 years of research at Disney’s VR studio. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Virtual Environments 2003, Zurich, Switzerland (2003)
Moreno, E., MacIntyre, B., et al.: Alice’s Adventures in New Media: An Exploration of Interactive Narratives in Augmented Reality, CAST, Bonn, Germany (2001)
Murray, J.H.: Lessons Learned from the Athena Language Learning Project: Using Natural Language Processing, Graphics, Speech Processing, an Interactive Video for Communication- based Language Learning. In: Holland, M. (ed.) Intelligent Language Tutors: Balancing Theory and Technology. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah (1995)
Murray, J.H.: Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Simon & Schuster/Free Press, New York (1997)
Reid, J., Geelhoed, E., et al.: Parallel worlds: immersion in location-based experiences. In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Portland, Oregon (2005)
Ryan, M.-L.: Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory. Post Modern Culture 5(1) (1994)
Ryan, M.-L.: Narrative as Virtual Reality, Baltimore. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore (2001)
Tomasello, M.: The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard UP, Cambridge (2001)
Weizenbaum, J.: Eliza– A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9(1), 36–45 (1966)
Weizenbaum, J.: Computer Power and Human reason. Freeman, New York (1976)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Murray, J. (2005). Did It Make You Cry? Creating Dramatic Agency in Immersive Environments. In: Subsol, G. (eds) Virtual Storytelling. Using Virtual Reality Technologies for Storytelling. ICVS 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3805. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11590361_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11590361_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-30511-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32285-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)