1 The Digital According to Ryan: Immersion – Interactivity – Ludonarrativity Astrid Ensslin, University of Alberta Paper delivered as contribution to the Booth Prize Panel, Narrative 2017 conference, Lexington (Kentucky), March 23, 2017 Let me start by stressing how honored I am to be part of this panel, in the company of some of my greatest role models, including and specifically the one scholar whose work has probably shaped my own like no other. Marie-Laure Ryan’s wisdom and comprehensive insight s into digital narrativity have guided and inspired me – in the virtual-scholastic sense mentioned in her book Narrative as Virtual Reality – from the days of my doctoral research into literary hypertext and canon theory, through my ludonarratological investigations into analyzing digital fiction and literary videogames, to my recent work (with Alice Bell) on empirical reader response and immersion in 3D digital fiction. Much of Marie-Laure’s work has featured on my teaching syllabi in transmedial narratology, digital media, videogame and digital fiction studies, and my students have unfailingly shared my delight in discussing and debating her substantial, extensive and enlightening theories and taxonomies as well as her occasional, refreshingly eccentric views. Marie-Laure was there right from the beginnings of digital, networked textuality, documenting and systematising, with her characteristic analytical meticulousness and verbal lucidity, then- innovative phenomena like multi-user dungeons (MUDs and MOOs), chatbots, interactive and hypertext fiction, interactive drama, CD-ROM based multimedia narratives, poetry machines and generative writing, as well as early narrative game genres like multi-user and single-user RPGs, real-time simulations, and point-and-click adventures. In the introduction to her 1999 edited collection, Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory , she pioneeringly argues that: The term ‘cyberspace’ captures the growing sense that beyond – or perhaps on – the computer screen lies a ‘New Frontier’ both enticing and forbidding, a frontier awaiting exploration, promising discovery, threatening humanistic values, hatching new genres of discourse, altering our relation to the written word, and questioning our sense of self and of embodiment (1) Incidentally, we find a significantly developed and updated theory of digital spatiality in her most recent book (co-authored with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu), Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative.