Janet H. Murray’s “Hamlet on the Holodeck”

I think chapter four of this book is great. I think Murray knows what she is talking about and that she expresses her points clearly.

One of the most beneficial insights here is, I think, Murray’s refutation of the idea that active participation in immersion entertainment is based in a “willing suspension of disbelief.” What she describes is the case is closer to my experience: “we do not merely ‘suspend’ a critical faculty,” she writes, “we also exercise a creative faculty. We do not suspend disbelief so much as we actively create belief” (Murray 110).

I have felt this way in the past. Growing up on Dungeons and Dragons, I easily learned that when it comes to intellectual, artistic, or entertaining stimulation you receive as much reward as you are willing to put in. Video games through adolescence worked the same way; my favorite videogames — mostly strategy- or simulation-based games — were fascinating to me because I imagined them either as taking place in a world of their own or being applicable to our own. Microsoft’s “Flight Simulator” is an immensely popular game, for example, despite the fact that there is no plot or storyline beyond learning to take off, operate, fly, and land a number of different aircraft. Some might argue that this is fairly boring (and at this point in my life, I would agree with them), but that clearly is not the case to the gamers who vest value in these games. If you’re willing to help yourself believe, to “authentically pretend” that this is a real commercial airliner, you’re more likely to draw entertainment from the game.

College, for me, came with the monumental resolution to put videogames behind me. I managed that, but to think of immersion entertainment as the exercise of creating belief, I simply refocused my lens. I do the same now with books that I did with videogames. I posit an importance in the story I am reading; even with fiction, I assume — I believe, while I am reading — that the story, characters, conflict, and action are all real in the world being described. I don’t “suspend disbelief” because it isn’t a passive thing. I create belief, I make the characters come alive, I make the story meaningful.

Lately, I’m refocusing once again. Or, since I’m keeping up with reading, I’m considering another scope altogether: Writing. I’ve been writing as long as I’ve been conscious of being conscious, but only lately (progressing from somewhere in my sophomore year as an undergraduate) have I been treating the act of writing as an act of creation. Expression is no longer enough, expression must come through a holistic and self-sustaining medium whose parts are all equally real. Flannery O’Connor and a developing sense of what “art” is has done this to me. It makes writing anything much more difficult, since I am and must hold myself accountable for the world I create.

Murray talks about a lot, but I think this is key enough to her chapter (and possibly book) to consider it strongly. Immersion is not the suspension of disbelief, it is the manifestation of belief. And because that is the case, because that creation must come from within the individual, the medium through which entertainment is provided is not responsible for providing a fuller sense of immersion. I’ll grant that some narrative forms lend themselves more generously to the possibility of being believed (and, needless to say, there are some stories we just don’t want to believe), but it remains the case that belief must come from the individual and cannot be forced through either form or content.

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