Call for Participation: The Enaction of Thought in Interactive Storytelling

In literary fiction, the representation of consciousness has often been understood through what might be called the thought of looking: the ways narrative cognition renders a work into a perceptive, embodied, and self-reflexive experience through language. In cinema, by contrast, cognition typically becomes the look of thought: a mental interiority suggested through framing, editing, gesture, movement, and performance. Interactive stories told in videogames complicate this distinction through their intermedial nature. Games must not only represent what characters think, but also translate the audience’s intentions into feedback, movement, and action. Thus, while interfaces and gameplay serve obvious ludic functions, they also represent cognition. Put simply, they represent the enaction of thought.

But what changes when narrative cognition is enacted by players rather than merely represented before them? From the player's perspective, one both wills about an avatar and watches how their intentions are translated in real time, an experience Danny Steur calls "cinesthetic empathy," adapting Vivian Sobchack's phenomenology of film. Similar aesthetic questions have been asked of theatrical performance, where the actor's dual consciousness emerges from the tension between performed role and lived subjectivity. Games likewise produce this sort of dual consciousness between the player's situated and virtual embodiment. This situatedness is further complicated when contemporary videogames experiment with symbiotic and nonhuman character design, eye-tracking technologies in works ranging from Microsoft Flight Simulator to Before Your Eyes, featuring a terminally ill protagonist, and increasingly sophisticated RPGs such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where the player's character may learn to read by studying with a monk.

In line with these questionings and observations, this seminar invites contributions that examine literary, cinematic, and ludic articulations of cognition. Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following thematic areas:

• Focalization and its relationship to interaction.
• Narrative uses of surveillance technology (e.g., Before Your Eyes).
• The cybernetics of participation.
• Puzzles as articulations of the procedures of thought (i.e., deduction, induction, and detection).
• Agency in multiplayer or synchronous gameworlds.
• Phenomenological approaches to narrative cognition across media.
• Inner monologues in interactive storytelling.
• Nonhuman/technological embodiment.
• Controller input, jank, and narrative glitches in interactive storytelling.
• Representations of cognitive dissonance in storytelling.
• Representations of intersubjectivity and empathy.
• Asymmetrical knowledge in the author/audience relationship.
• Hybrid and symbiotic character design (e.g., Banjo-Kazooie).
• Literary and filmic cognition (literacy, fluency, etc.) in videogames and vice-versa.