Where the Senses Become a Stage and Reading Is Direction: Performing the Texts of Virtual Reality and Interactive Fiction

Abstract

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), audiences flock to the feelies, a hybrid of cinema and Sensorama that communicates the kisses and couplings onscreen to the individual viewers, hunched in their seats clutching onto decidedly phallic knobs. Where audiences attending a performance of Pygmalion or King Lear might feel fear, anger, empathy, or pity, the feelies presumably supplant the audience's emotional interaction with the performance with a passive reception of the physical sensations experienced by the characters before them. In the future-world of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) trilogy, these real-but-vicarious sensations are interiorized as audiences turn to an entertainment implant called that completely immerses its users in a role they have chosen as part of an adventure. They become the characters instead of simply watching them. The sensations they experience are neither empathetic nor vicarious but real-although, if a simstim protagonist were to end up in the jaws of a hungry Bengal tiger during a jungle adventure, the user would presumably come out of the game with viscera intact. By 1992, at the Trocadero in London's Piccadilly Circus, teenagers were willingly surrendering fivepound notes in exchange for head-mounted displays and a crack at playing with Virtual Reality. When they move their heads, the scene before their eyes changes accordingly. When they are jostled in their cars or tanks or

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