VR as a metaleptic possible world of global citizenship embodiment: a cognitive stylistic approach

Abstract

Abstract Bringing together narrative elements, virtual affordances, and participants’ embodied interactions, virtual reality (VR) movies instantiate new narrative techniques by offering an immersive experience. This study examines virtual narrative beyond mere interactional engagement and extends the phenomenon to include worlding, metaleptic embodiment, and instantiated possible selves. It aims at exploring VR narrative as idiosyncratic cognitive processes, with a special focus on the notions of empathy and emotional involvement as significant elements contributing to this peculiar interactional and cognitive experience. A cognitive stylistic approach is adopted to explain the functional ability of VR technology in transporting participants to alternate worlds and in making them experience a kind of self-transformation. The immersively metaleptic discourse of Baba Yaga is examined as engaging participants in a quest of how to act as morally and socially empathetic and responsible citizens—global citizens. Baba Yaga narrative deploys the narrative discourses of flashbacks, facework, doubly deictic ‘you’, performatives, and imperatives along with material processes to situate participants in a virtual space of actions and doings and hence encourage them to configure their desired self(ves) across different immersive interactions. The global citizen is embodied in the interactive narrative of Baba Yaga, through invoking various storyworld possible selves (SPSs): the feeling self, the responsible self, and the moral self, which encompasses climate activist self and interculturally aware self who manages to get rid of its own cultural biases as the narrative proceeds. Embodied in these selves, participants transform the virtual world into possible worlds of their own passion, agency, choices, hopes, and desires.