Speaker
Description
Virtual reality (VR) is a peculiar, participatory-oriented narrative medium. Bringing together narrative elements, virtual affordances, and participants’ embodied interactions, VR movies instantiate new narrative techniques by offering an postdigital immersive experience. What is unique about this narrative medium is the ways in which participants take part in the narration event itself by using hardware devices such as a ‘head-mounted device’ (henceforth HMD), rifts and/or haptic feedback controllers. These devices then give participants access to the narrative world through an avatarian embodiment. This study examines virtual narrative beyond mere interactional engagement and extends the phenomenon to include worlding, metaleptic embodiment and instantiated possible selves. It aims at exploring VR narrative as idiosyncratic cognitive processes, with a special focus on the notions of empathy and emotional involvement as significant elements contributing to this peculiar interactional and cognitive experience. A cognitive stylistic approach is adopted to explain the functional ability of VR technology in transporting participants to alternate worlds and in making them experience a kind of self-transformation. To this end, the study approaches VR avatars as belonging to the poetics of experiential transformation. Participants tell a story of their modified self-schema through their avatar self. That is, the self in the peculiar context of the study functions as both a participant and an avatar. The immersively metaleptic discourse of Baba Yaga is examined as engaging participants in a quest of how to act as morally and socially empathetic and responsible citizen – a global citizen. Findings are in the connection between virtual affordances,postdigitality and participants’ interaction and global citizenship.
