1 Plenary paper presented at 'Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy', Sussex, 8-9 December 2011 Diegetic Exposure and Cybernetic Performance: Towards Interactional Metalepsis Astrid Ensslin, Bangor University Introduction This paper is concerned with the ways in which narratives across media 'stage' illusion, both in the sense of creating illusion as an immersive strategy, and in the subversive sense of exposing and debunking it. My recent research into digital fiction and literary gaming (Ensslin 2007, 2009, 2011a/b, 2012a/b, 2014; Bell and Ensslin 2011; Ensslin and Bell 2012) has revolved around various concepts of so-called unnatural narratology (e.g. Alber and Heinze 2011), which studies narrative structures that break the illusion of a coherent storyworld, for instance through unreliability, multilinearity and second person narration. In this context, it struck me that it may be worth exploring one particularly powerful narratological concept that can be used both in an illusionist and anti-illusionist way. This concept is called ‗metalepsis‘. It‘s recently seen a surge of interest in media narratology because it doesn‘t just happen in print or narrative fiction but indeed across narrative media, such as TV and film, fine art and comics, digital fiction, computer games and non-ludic virtual worlds. This paper aligns with this trend by embarking on a transmedia journey through metaleptic techniques used in short fiction, comics, comedy film, participatory media, digital fiction, computer games and virtual worlds. I‘ll start with some definitions and theory and will then move to some specific examples illustrating the two paradoxical sides of metaleptic aesthetics, which I shall refer to as diegetic exposure and cybernetic performance. A few months ago I visited the Magritte (1898–1967) exhibition at the Tate Liverpool, titled ‗The Pleasure Principle‘, and I saw a range of pictures that made me think about reality and