ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways that readers experience immersion in digital fiction, including their awareness of how their actions in a 3D space affect that storyworld. It begins by engaging with existing theoretical and empirical research on immersion across digital media, including critiques of the concept. It then offers a new framework for coding immersion in reader-response data, and provides a new systematic approach to analysing immersive features in texts across media by utilising deictic shift theory. The study reported in this chapter examines reading group discourse to show how readers individually and jointly negotiate their responses to a 3D literary game installation, WALLPAPER by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston. Throughout the analyses, we show how participants’ responses to WALLPAPER relate to and are stimulated by immersion. We add three new forms of immersion to existing typologies – literary immersion, aesthetic immersion, and collaborative immersion – to account for the multimodal and interactional nature of digital fiction, as well as for its conceptual status as verbal art. We also show how the environment in which a digital fiction is experienced affects immersion and propose two new concepts – paratextual environmental propping and incidental environmental propping – to account for that. Analysing the way that different forms of immersion work with or against each other, we demonstrate that while current theories of immersion imply that immersion is a completely absorbing experience, our data show immersion to be an intermittent, dynamic, and multidimensional process, stimulated by multiple immersive features which interact – a process we define in terms of a mixing console metaphor.
