Protagonists, Antagonists, main and sub characters lead to a personification of story contents and further of representative social behaviors. Most importantly they are all the authors' creatures. The viewer is taking in this the role of a voyeur, witness or emotional judge. He or she is immersing in the story by emotional means of identification as there is sympathy or antipathy with the film characters or parallels to the viewers subjective reality. Up to now I was talking about closed systems that offer the reinvention of a content and storyboard or the sensorial discovery of a framed narrative room.
Immersion is reflected in an interactive metaphorical gate from the real to the virtual scenery.
The next step is formed by the open network offering the viewer a direct interaction with each other in a virtual coexistence. First good examples are the text based narrative surroundings in the internet, the so called Multi User Dungeons or Moos. The participants create their own textual fantasy world, in which they build rooms to hide, meet, talk and discuss with each other, describing the space in all imaginary details, decorating and personifying themselves with avatars, chosen identities, beasties and other kinds of virtual representation. In a second example the users meet in a televirtual space, their live video images are keyed together from remote places to establish a virtual space and they have to deal with each other spontaneously in the same field of action. Similar to the earlier quoted version of the expanded cinema, where the familiar object made the virtual more transparent, the people in here are even overwhelmed by rediscovering themselves in a total analogy to their idea of a real space.