ABSTRACT
This chapter examines reader orientation and empathy in VR fiction. We critically engage with empathy as a fraught and multidimensional concept. We demonstrate the benefits of a qualitative approach to VR and develop a theory of medium-specific reading in VR as an environment that is known for its immersive, experiential qualities yet less so for its affordances for literary fiction and verbal art. We consider what participants’ discursive responses to reading Randall Okita’s allofictional VR memoir, The Book of Distance, reveal about the experiential and cognitive qualities of state empathy as well as the mediality of reading in VR. Our data suggest that, in the context of VR fiction, the empathy spectrum concept needs to be expanded by adding a key reflexive, metacognitive, and metafictional component. We thus propose a new Narrative Empathy Spectrum. We further demonstrate that existing theories of character empathy across media need to be refined with respect to the choice of target character(s) and the qualitative difference between cognitive and affective salience (memory and care). We derive the concept of ambimediality from data that show the blending of multi-, inter- and transmedial processing on the one hand, and the ambivalent and ambient contingencies of medium-specific reading in VR on the other. We examine the implications of spatial design in VR for various narrative roles and the ways in which readers orient themselves as intradiegetic or diegetic entities in-world, as shifting between ontological roles and spaces, or indeed as “present in absence”. We introduce the concept of medium-specific spatial double-deixis to explain these partly paradoxical effects and how they are evoked. Our research shows that theories of the narrator and narratee need to be adjusted to medium-specific spatiality in VR. We analyse how the simulated co-presence with the narrating, fictionalised author in TBoD cause readers to conflate narrator and author, as well as narratee and reader, in a process that we refer to as metafictional embodied metalepsis, which we argue is an autofictional, medium-specific device.
