Giving the participant a clearer role in the VR experience involves introducing more interactivity and designing the experience to focus on facilitating a meaningful user journey.

I visited the 2019 IDFA festival in Amsterdam at this time and attended a lecture by Sophia Al-Maria. She presented Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag’ theory of fiction:

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again – if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.” (Guin 1986, 5)

She describes narrative as finding items and gathering pieces instead of a linear narrative belonging to a culture that “was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing”. This inspired me greatly. She describes narration as an act of gathering – as an active user journey where the narrative process is motivated by the participant’s curiosity and eagerness. 

This inspired me to replace the tableau with a landscape. I wanted the participant to have a place to explore – to be curious. I chose a forest, where objects can be hidden behind trees, and where winding paths can motivate exploration. 

Responsive

Another way of increasing the participant’s immersion in the experience is to make the environment more responsive to the participant’s presence. I decided to explore the use of audio, colours, and biometrics to enable the participant to feel that their choices mattered and could influence the world they were exploring.

The need to make the experience less focused on single individuals also made me think about presenting the topic by using more generalised characters involved in the stories of CBOW. These can be summed up as the mother, the father, the child, the local community, and the enemy. These all have different perspectives on the story which can be incorporated in the forest.

Companion

Many VR experiences are formed like museums – where you can walk around freely and study objects or information. However, I wished to motivate more reflection. As I had in the mobile game, I wanted to poke and challenge the user to reflect on the information and impressions they received. This gave me the idea of introducing a companion – a creature that could both guide the participant towards content and motivate reflection.