When 'you' takes on its more traditional deictic function of address, the author-reader channel can be opened in different ways, which is explored in examples taken from Fielding, Brontë, Orwell, Kincaid, Grimsley, Royle, Adichie, Bartlett, Auster, and even Spacey's 'creepy' 2018 YouTube video, ultimately foregrounding continuities and contrasts in the positioning of the audience. Drawing on recent research into intersubjectivity in neuropsychology and socio-cognition, it delves into the relational and ethical processing at work in the reading of a second-person pronoun narrative. It offers a model of the various pragmatic functions and effects of 'you' according to different variables and linguistic parameters, cutting across a wide range of genres (ads, political slogans, tweets, news presentation, literary genres etc.), and bringing together print and digital texts under the same theoretical banner. This book takes 'you', the reader, on board an interdisciplinary journey across genre, time and medium with the second-person pronoun. In thinking about alternative understanding of the conceptual spaces in which to conceive story, we also contemplate the richness and potential of contemporary interactive storytelling for meaning-making, affective conditions and experiential evocation. We illustrate such encounters for story through close readings of audiovisual engagement with virtual environments in two interactive media tutor texts, Ruins (2011) and Sacramento (2016). This article considers how story arises out of exploratory virtual environments, specifically in the context of so-called “wandering games,” or more popularly known as “walking simulators.” Inspired by scholarship on environmental storytelling (Jenkins 2004) and “ambient literature,” (Dovey 2016a Dovey 2016b Abba, Dovey and Pullinger 2021) we present a conceptualisation of story out of what we call “environmental encounters.” In the case of walking simulators, we argue that these encounters are engagements with the works’ virtual environments as perceived by the user through a trinomial framework of perspective, movement and environmental design. This study provides a foundation for future researchers to build upon and continue the linguistic evaluation of walking simulators. These results indicate that compelling and complex writing can be found in any genre and is likely not a function of any individual genre, contrary to popular opinion. Randomly sampling dialogue from 30 video games, a one-way ANOVA (analysis of variance) revealed no statistically significant linguistic differences between the genres. It uses integrative complexity, a linguistic variable with an established research history, to compare the complexity of the writing in walking simulators to the writing in five mainstream video game genres (RPGs, shooters, action/adventure games, fighting games, and strategy games). In order to more fully understand why this genre is so closely associated with storytelling and to provide insight into the underlying psychology of genre in video games, this article linguistically evaluates the narratives of walking simulators. As Gohardani (2017) explains, walking simulators are "about dropping the player into an experience packed with … a compelling narrative" (para. Proponents of the walking simulator genre laud it for its complex storytelling.
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