Did it make you cry? Creating dramatic agency in immersive environments

Abstract

Making you cry is the folk wisdom test for strong narrative involvement, and has long been proposed as a reachable but distant goal for digital games. Immersion is a related phenomenon which has been difficult to achieve in Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality research projects, but reliably achieved in theme park rides by integrating interactivity with strong narrative elements. For Virtual and Mixed Reality environments to achieve narrative power and strong immersion we can adopt the strategies of theme park rides, with special attention to the creation of threshold objects that take the interactor into the virtual space. Spatial presentation of the world, interactions with characters, and differentiating real from virtual events are design challenges without clear genre conventions. Design choices that locate the interactor in a coherent point of view, limit natural language expectations, and conventionalize the boundaries of the virtual world will reinforce immersion and dramatic agency. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.