You may complete a narrative through imagination, but the narrative acts back upon you sociologist Margaret Somers argues that Iser is concerned with the constructive progression of a reader within a single text, but the reader persists after she's finished reading that moving perspective moves across texts, consumes infinite narratives. That background is also formed in a particular temporal context: as reading occurs over time, it "always involves viewing the text through a perspective that is continually on the move, linking up the different phrases, and so constructing what we have called the virtual dimension" (Iser 286). We are once more approaching the territory of constructivism: you construct literature by reading it because you filter it through the imaginative repertoire available to you and only you the "background" against which we make sense of any textual situation is that of our own lived experiences. Within any text, you are guided to varying degrees towards certain interpretations of what's going on-I think it's fair to say that, for example, the actual events that comprise the plot of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier are far more ambiguous and subject to personal interpretation than, say, those of Euripides's Medea, but we may still walk away from Euripides's text dubious of Medea's portrayal as a heroine and of the ethical implications thereof. As Iser notes, the written text imposes certain limits on its unwritten implications in order to prevent these from becoming too blurred and hazy, but at the same time these implications, worked out by the reader's imagination, set the given situation against a background which endows it with far greater significance than it might have seemed to possess on its own." (281) Regardless of the medium in which it takes place, reading thus conforms to Zimmerman's definition of play: it is the free space of intellectual and interpretive movement within the white spaces that the author leaves between the black ink-or the pixels-comprising the narrative that she has constructed. A literary work is not complete until you read it a text is only interesting if incomplete, if there is room for you to impose your own imagination on the written words, to make sense of it for yourself. Keeping that definition of play in mind, let's turn to the more comfortable realm of literary theory-specifically to reader-response literary critic Wolfgang Iser and his essay "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach." Iser asserts that "in considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text" (279). Play exists both because of and also despite the more rigid structures of a system" (159). ![]() For our purposes, I'll borrow my definition of "play" from game designer and academic Eric Zimmerman's essay "Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games": "Play is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure. In fact, I'll go so far as to suggest that reading can be understood as a mode of play. It might sound a strange proposition, particularly if you are not an avid gamer, but if you've ever read a novel, you're accustomed to inhabiting a surprisingly similar position. ![]() ![]() To put it simply, you, as player of the game, as reader of its texts, participant in its dialogues, and explorer of its world, become the story's teller and creator in collaboration with the game's designers. When it comes to your relation to the others in Talos and the various narrative forms through which you encounter them and build up an intersubjective understanding of the world, a key thing to recognize is that you aren't just constructing concepts of these others, or of the game-world-you're constructing the game's narrative.
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