Making Room for the Story: Storytelling and Interaction in Virtual Environments

How is Virtual Reality “narratopological”? How can VR impact the intersection between space construction and narrative strategies? These issues must be tackled by comparing VR to non-VR media such as video games and cinema. In the first section, we will reconstruct the debate between narratologists and ludologists, which gave birth to the Game Studies discipline. In the second, we will consider the transition from non-VR to VR video games, trying to define a narratopological specificity of the latter. Subsequently, we will examine the role of the user as a “situated” subject in relation both to space and to the story. We will address interactivity by considering the user’s agencies in VR environments according to different degrees of freedom. In the last section, a comparative analysis of point of view in cinema, video games and VR will clarify a narratopological specificity of VR itself in relation to the “situated” viewer’s gaze