• Toward an Immersive Fiction
• A Practicuum in Hyperspace
• Works Cited

Toward an Immersive Fiction (some readings)

A Practicuum in Hyperspace

Annunciation Icon, fourteenth century (National Museum, Ohrid)

Fra Angelico, Annunciation, 1438-45 (fresco, Museum of San Marco, Florence)

Domenico Veneziano, Annunciation, c. 1445 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK)0

Frank Gehry House, Santa Monica — Images: A B C D E

Rem Koolhaas, City of the Captive Globe, from Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978)

Bryan Maycock, "Screen Dependency Syndrome: Attention & Perception"

Brief excerpts from interview with creators of Riven. Rick Barba, Riven: The Sequel to Myst: The Official Strategy Guide (Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1997), pp. 193, -95:

Q. The images in both Myst and Riven are gorgeous, but more importantly, the pictures themselves tell a story—a story with remarkable depth. One could argue that topography and architecture actually tell the bulk of the story in Riven. Is your focus on such visual storytelling by design?

A. Richard Vander Wende: Yes, one of the inherent strengths of this type of non-linear experience is that the participant's relationship with the environment can be much more intimate than it can with traditional linear media. One of our conscious goals with Riven was to imbue the environment with as much story as we could: we were curious as to what the possible cumulative effects of this would be. Would it be possible to communicate enough material that the participant might conceivably begin to feel emotions? It was an intriguing idea, and we only scratched the surface of it.

Q. Do you play many computer games? If so, do you have any favorite games?

A. Richard Vander Wende: Not really. Robyn and I are not really into games of any kind. We're more interested in building worlds. To us, Myst and now Riven are not 'games' at all, we certainly didn't think of them as such as we were working on Riven. They're more like virtual theme parks or something . . . I wish there was a better term for these things because I think the word 'game' is kind of misleading, especially to those non-gamers who are looking at these things from the outside, trying to figure out if it's something that they might enjoy or not.

Q. [ . . . ] If you could write an authoritative strategy guide to Riven (or Myst), how would you approach it? What would you include?

A. Rand Miller: Any kind of guide to Riven or Myst would be based on one person's experience. That's what I would want to follow. It would give me insight into what someone else did that might help me with my journey. But it's just what they did, what they thought, what they saw, it doesn't imply that it's the right way, just one person's journey through the world. But of course the best way is to avoid using the guide at all. Just ake your time and enjoy the journey. [ . . . ]

Janet H. Murray, "Immersion," in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)

Jonathan Steur, "Defining Virtual Reality," Journal of Communication 42 (1992): 79-90

Slavoj Zizek, "From Virtual Reality to the Virtualization of Reality" (1996), in Timothy Druckrey, ed., Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (Aperture, 1996)

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999)

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)

Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989)