Affect, responsibility, and how modes of engagement shape the experience of videogames

Abstract

When considering the elements that shape our experience of fiction, the line distinguishing the text itself from the processes we go through in negotiating that text is easy to miss. Even something as simple as knowing roughly how far through a book we are as we read will influence our experience of the story. If the same story is moved into a hypertext context that eliminates that physical awareness from the experience, then that changes our mode of engagement. Understanding how different modes of engagement shape our experiences of fiction will be helpful not just for the analysis of new media storytelling, but for understanding how we have already been telling stories for a very long time. What sets the experience of videogames apart from other forms of mediated storytelling is that the person playing the game can come to feel responsible for events and characters within a fictional world.