Kept in the Loop: Narrative Play and Epistemic Emotions

Abstract Narrative time loops can challenge key dimensions of story comprehension, including causality, chronology, agency, and continuity. But how can such temporally puzzling experiences contribute to narrative engagement? This essay argues that many contemporary loop narratives in fiction film and television seek a distinct kind of audience engagement, one that can be characterized as narrative play, a ludic invitation to actively engage with and decode the chrono-logic underlying these stories. To explore this ludic engagement, this essay investigates the role of viewers’ epistemic emotions: affective states that regulate the processing of information, such as interest and confusion. Reflecting on earlier findings from a pilot experiment in which sixty viewers continuously reported on their feelings of interest and confusion during a short time loop film (Mouse-X by Justin Tagg, 2014), the author explores how temporal narrative puzzles may work as “cognitive playgrounds,” allowing moments of temporal confusion to generate feelings of interest. Hereby, the essay aims to provide insight into how a dynamic of epistemic emotions shapes ludic engagement with cognitively challenging time-loop fiction.