ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way in which “you” is used in digital fiction and offers a new transmedial method for gathering reader responses to individual uses of “you”. It begins by showing the ubiquity of “you” in digital narratives before outlining various typologies that have been devised to categorise “you” in print and digital fiction. The innovative methodology that we offer in this chapter utilises a tool that is usually associated with quantitative research – a Likert scale – but which we use to elicit qualitative data about the use of the second person. We offer the results of an experimental study on Deena Larsen and geniwate’s (2003) ludic, web-based hypermedia fiction The Princess Murderer which utilises the second person to blend the identities of a fictional villain and the doubly embodied reader. We show ways in which readers accept, reject, and reluctantly role-play the characteristics associated with “you” and develop a new cognitive model of reader self-positioning – comprising authentics, rejecters, and reluctant role-players – to account for these positions. Developing the medium-conscious reader response methodology offered in Chapter 1, we also add the new category of “automimetic response” to capture the audience’s interest in and response to the way in which a text’s representation of them as “you-as-reader” corresponds to them and/or is believable.
