Mankind, probably throughout all its history, has tried to understand the world. In these attempts, the concept of the world itself has often changed. For thousands of years there had been countless descriptions—driven by religious, philosophical, nationalistic, artistic, even personal, beliefs—about its origins, features, structure, fate.
A major trend in contemporary narrative production is the rejection of an aesthetics that proclaims the inseparability of text, world and narrative. The traditional formula “one text, one world, one story” is challenged on one side by the phenomenon of transmedia storytelling, and on the other by texts that that contain many worlds and
What are the connotations of the model of world building as a metaphor for our current engagement with media? What are the consequences for our relationship to fiction?
While much has been written about “immersion”, it is only the first step in the experiencing of an imaginary world. This paper explores the experience by going further into the process, with the additional liquid metaphors of absorption, saturation, and overflow, and examines not only the effects that each of these processes or stages has on the world’s