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Zykhovskaya N.L., Dedova I.A. Visual novel: Immersive strategies for reader interaction with text (based on the short story " Tiny Bunny"). ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2026. Issue 3 (49). P. 32-52

The article identifies and systematizes the immersive strategies through which the user, the reader-player, interacts with the text of a visual novel within the space of convergent culture. The visual novel is treated as a hybrid post-digital format that combines several semiotic modes of perception with elements of transmedia storytelling, which extend the narrative frame of the text and carry the user beyond the boundaries of the game itself. The methodology rests on two principles: the discursive interpretation of visual images, which reveals the meanings the audience assigns to the messages it perceives, and multimodal analysis, understood as the integrated study of “semiotic resources.” The material of the study is the visual novel “Tiny Bunny,” a media work that occupies an intermediate position between literary text and interactive gameplay. Within the study, the novel functions as a paradigmatic, purposively selected case, consistent with the principles of qualitative case study methodology and scalable to more general models of interpretation. The article examines the means by which the game reveals its characters and prompts the player to take particular actions that affect the final outcome of events. The textual and the ludic components of the novel form a single space of experience, holding the player within an experiential scenario of identification with the protagonist. The article foregrounds questions of interactive art, emphasizing the role of such interactions in the player’s sensory experience and in the process of initiation that, through the blending of the visual novel and interactive-cinema genres, enables players not merely to play but to participate in shaping the character, to identify with it, and to influence the plot. It is concluded that post-narrative communication opens up a space of participatory, or convergent, culture.

Keywords: visual novel, “Tiny Bunny”, post-narrative communication, immersive strategies, transmedia, interactive art