how to tell if you are in a story world

I left myself a note that this has some very nice writing for the final (I thought.)

how to tell if you are in a story world

Rather than embodiment, em-mind-enment - do you see yourself as part of the narrative? Are you having a felt experience? Are you embodying a character? Is that character yourself, as you are, or are you genuinely experiencing events as a character that has been assigned to you? Can your body get up and walk away? Do you exist in the possible world - have you gone inside of it (such as being immersed ina book for flow state in a mechanic), or has it come out to meet you? (As in an arg)? I feel like the easiest sign to catch in yourself or others is crying - empathizing with the sadness of an experience to the point that is moves you, or having felt those experiences to the point that you went on the journey yourself and it changed you, made you sad. But there is more to feel than merely sadness. You can love, you can feel ecstatic or powerful, you can feel awe or mania or vengeance. You can connect these things to your own, real, outside the media life - but in the media, how important is it that you are not distracted by the nouns of your specific experience - your are not reminded of loosing your real grandfather, in the text, you are devastated by losing this fictional grandfather - and it's the sense-lizard-memory of the real that makes this fiction effective. But the double frame means it does not have to be a grandfather to draw on that loss. It can be a horse, an alien, an abstract shale, an instrumental melody that follows the shape and tempo of loss. The heroic wheat.

Can a game mechanic be an avatar for a real movement, physical, emotional. Can we use shapes of inputs to metaphorize and ping emotional muscle memory of the familiar and impactful? Does drawing a focal point across a page invest the audience in the journey more than simple passively showing them a linear sequence? Their brain solving those puzzles, even subconsciously, brings them into the work on a more immediate level. A murder mystery is more engaging when the player must hunt for clues themselves that reading a Wikipedia article, even when the article lays out the facts in the same order with the same information available at each Stage - searching, looking with eyes moving, is a form of engagement and agency. Even in a television show, trying to look at guess at information the actors conceal is a form of mental interactivity.

Our brains organize information using the same pipes we use for spacial reasoning - a literal mindmap. Using the pipes for fiction creates a mental memory that engages and makes vulnerability the players ability to internalize and interiorize.