Exploring Stories, Reading Environments: Flow, Immersion, and Presence as Processes of Becoming

Abstract

The article aims to deal with flow, immersion, and presence and their relation with storytelling and the exploration of space. In sections 2 and 3, we introduce the three concepts both from a psychological and from a neurocognitive approach. In section 4, we analyse a particular video game genre, the “walking simulator,” which focuses on immersion in a narrative and a space rather than in the mechanics of the game and which generates a profound user experience. In paragraph 5, we examine virtual reality artworks based on both storytelling and presence within a space, discussing their immersive nature. We hypothesise that the very concept of experience can be adopted as a key term to describe media engagement, since immersion is an essential requirement for an experience to take place. Finally, in section 6 we introduce and discuss the transformative character of experience, which is the mutual and co-constitutive cognitive becoming triggered by audiovisual media engagements.