This shift fundamentally changes the challenge of motivation. There is no need to guide the participant when the space is designed to direct them from post to post. Instead, I need to construct a sequence of challenges that will build an aggregated emotional experience. Although the production avoids storytelling, the user journey will still be linear, governed by time.

Having less need to guide also meant that that the role of the companion could change. It would still be a useful element that could poke the participant to reflect on choices made, but it could also be used to introduce the element of a relationship. In “My Child Lebensborn”, giving the child a personality to relate to made the game much more emotional for the players.

As part of exploring the topic of othering and the potential triggering of biases by physical details, I had also been thinking about objectification – how a person is judged by external characteristics.

Personally, I have always been keenly aware of the difference between the person that others see when they meet me and the person I feel like inside. I will call these latter perspective my inner ‘Self space’. For me, the Self space is the home of our personality and soul. It lives inside my body, gazing out at the world through my eyes. This is the space that I wish to engage in the participant – the bared but also open self, not reduced or hindered by the relationship with the outer world. It is our private space where we can think what we like without being observed or judged. I think that VR can be an excellent choice when it comes to visualising this space, as the VR experience in itself is private and intimate. I am fascinated by the use of VR for small spaces – using it to focus and reduce, instead of providing large vistas.

I also thought it would be interesting to play with the dualism and to explore objectification by shifting between one environment for the personal Self space and one for the visible, outer representation – the ‘Objective space’.

The association with the inner body and inspiration from a haunted house made me think of a kind of tunnel landscape, which also resembled a kind of aorta inside the body, with velvety, red walls. The challenges resembling obstacles in an obstacle course could belong to the Objective space, being placed as posts throughout the tunnel.

In the Objective space, the participant could be asked to objectify themselves – being asked to describe themselves in terms of predefined categories. The companion would be part of the-private Self landscape. After the participant had finishing the challenge, they would be returned to the Self space and the companion could ask how it felt to complete the challenge and what it meant to the participant.

At the end, the participant would exit into an airy space, providing a contrast to the previous claustrophobic environments and signalling openness and freedom. In this epilogue, the participant would learn more about the effects of objectification and the situation for CBOW. By explaining the context at the end, I would avoid that details about the context would interfere with the main part of the user journey.

When the user journey becomes the focus of the experience instead of the content/story, I notice a change in my role as creator. I’m no longer a storyteller aiming to present a topic, but actually working more like an interviewer or journalist, planning a string of meaningful interactions to create a discourse that will end with the participant achieving new insights.

Study the description of

Concept 3 “The Tunnel” under the cloche

on the kitchen table.