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ambient

Ambient music

“An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.” (Brian Eno, 1978)

Ambient gameplay

Gameplay that feeds into an atmosphere, similarly to ambient music.

Ambient narration

Perhaps that would be Beckett’s streams of thoughts layer noise, which create an atmosphere not through description, but through materiality - what he describes as “an unnecessary stain on silence”.

atmosphere

Creating atmospheres: relying on evocation, by layering sensorial and narrative content, endogenous and exogenous meanings, as opposed to fully defining a world.

Atmosphere as a means for emergence or play, of poetry of expression. 

An atmospheric environment nurtures the ability to feel ideas and perhaps - but not necessarily - transmute them into something more concrete.

“This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.” Lorde, Audre. Poetry is not a luxury, 1985. Available on Sen’s Anarchist Audio Library, last accessed October 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWDhui6UqmE) 

mask

Masque de réalité virtuelle (VR headset in French)

Theater masks, sock and buskin, Noh, Commedia dell’Arte, classic Greece, ritualistic masks to embody spirits in various cultures. What allows us to keep a character or an entity’s face but changing the performer.

The screen behind which we hide, the digital anonymity, the hindering of facial expressions.

Social masking, racial masking; how one performs one’s self differently according to different contexts. (Goffman, 1956) (Fanon, 1957)

promethean shame

“Gunther Anders concept that points at the inferiority complex  we experience when we face the intricacy and performance of the technologies we have created; a shame we escape by avoiding any comparison to them - which includes our attempts at understanding them. Helplessly, we get used to machines thinking and executing for us, to the point we also lose track of our pragmatism and our faculty to foresee their impact on our lives. Our human abilities, both cognitive and emotional, cannot conceive the scale in which the things we create can operate.” (Lipsyc, 2024)

adventure

The journey, the wonder.

The disruption with everyday life.

The ephemeral and constricted.

“Adventure”, ce qui advient. (what unravels/happens) An adventure is always an exaltation of the subject. There might be a moment in life where we do not perceive the adventure anymore, where we do not perceive that exaltation can occur, where we feel condemned to repetition. We see our future (avenir) as a repetition. (Barthes, 1978) This can be depression, stagnation, boredom, and this is why we might need to be taken into an adventure - like the characters in Stalker & Lone Wolves Stick Together.

adaptation

From a book (The Strugatski Brothers, Roadside Picnic, London: Macmillan, 1972) to a film (Tarkovsky, Andrei, Stalker, Moscow Film, 1979)

to a roleplaying experience (Lone Wolves Stick Together)

to lighter formats (LWST swim, LWST float)

This research however started from Tarkovsky’s films, which like Henry Miller writes describing the books of his life: “they were alive and they spoke to me!” (Miller, 1952)

Is it a fanfic? Is it legal?

Entering an art through another one.

milieu / environment / paysage état d’âme

In French, the word “milieu” refers to environment, setting, social environment, medium as understood in physics.

Paysage état d’âme translates to “state of mind” (state of soul, literally) landscape. A romantic theme in painting and literature: when the character’s emotions are so powerful that they manifest as weather, when there is no delimitation between the inner scape and nature.

absence

the absent characters 

How to give weight and substance to characters that are not in play? How to keep their absence in mind?

the absent reality

Can we compose with the reality that we cannot perceive, while in VR? 

Can we create while in real life for a reality we do not have technical access to and can only intuit?

How to encourage participants to engage with/interact with a sometimes unperceivable reality?

the absent facilitator

To appeal to media funds and industrial partners, experiences generally must carry the potential of being lucrative; mass produced. This is a very different setup from human-facilitated participatory play. How to design and create a play culture taking into consideration that human facilitation might not remain? How to be in the skin of this nearly-obsolete facilitator?

the absent participants

While there is always a part of speculation on participants, and while each play is a unique experience with individuals, iterative design and participatory work is very much a work with participants  — with their sensibilities and bodies, their feedback and inspirations. This is a rupture with how Derrida considers writing, as needing to “be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general" bringing importance to the writer’s “signature”, as the manifestation of their past presence - and therefore, effective absence. ( Derrida, Jacques. Signature, événément, contexte. Montréal: Communication au Congrès international des Sociétés de philosophie de langue française, 1971). Participatory play and larp in particular is, on the contrary, only capable of functioning in the radical presence of its participants.

the absent functionalities

Designing and prototyping while speculating on what a technology is likely to become within a few years reach.
Designing and prototyping to represent what could be executed with a full production budget.

Playing while pretending to use non-implemented functionalities.

the absent collaborators

The specter of all the artists, technicians, supports, reviewers, playtesters,  helpers that have contributed to each strata of the work.

action

What are participants or players able to do? (Action in game design)

How can they impact the system, with which consequences? (Action as interaction)

What are the participants allowed to do, when it is their turn to play? (Action in roleplaying games)

What happens once we enter the fiction or once we get the camera rolling? (Action in film and narrative forms)

improvisation (collective)

Building up on each other’s imagination, muscle memory, experience, references, which gradually evolves as we play. Like Laurie Anderson says in her Norton lectures “it’s like we’re building a giant ship in the air and it appears out of nowhere, made of notes and you can turn it around and move it and just make it disappear” 

acts

In participatory play, just like in any other dramatic form, acts allow emotional contrasts. Because acts are announced, we can breathe and renew ourselves - as writers, performers, players.  The larp Just a Little Lovin’ by Tor Kjetil Edland & Hanne Grasmo stages the gay community in the USA in the early 80s and the arrival of aids. It is built in three acts, the names of which are sufficient to grasp the emotional curving of the 60 players during the full 3 days of play:  “Desire”, “Fear of Death” , “Friendship”.

The five acts of Lone Wolves Stick Together repeatedly announced to the players are meant to trigger more variations in the characters’ questioning and positioning, going from Doubts, to Nostalgia, to Disillusion, Despair and finally, Truth. Popular psychology heavily leans on categorizing phases, such as the famous Kübler-Ross model also known as the “five stages of grief”, the Erikson’s phases of psychosocial development, expected phases of love etc. Those are certainly appealing because they simplify complex situations, but also perhaps because they are a statement in favor of our impermanence: we aren’t defined by a singular state of being or a singular state of mind, but by evolutions. Projecting ourselves in phases allows us to shift and decide for ourselves the coherences and incoherences of our characters, their evolving proximity or remoteness from us as players, overall, it facilitates our ability to change our mind on our character’s trajectory.

tangibilia

As Barthes uses it: sensual objects which appear in literature with romanticism (oranges, orange trees, gloves). To me, this sensual layer is crucial to the well-rounded sensation of immersion. The evocation of an object, the opportunity to seize it, gives more significance to our body.  (Barthes, 1979)

transparency / secrecy

Definitions from the glossary of Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences,  for the Knudepunkt conference 2019. 

Last accessed on Nordiclarp.org, october 2023. 

https://nordiclarp.org/2019/09/03/larp-design-glossary/

“The use of transparency in larp design is to purposefully let participants know things their characters would not know. Common ways to add transparency are to let participants read more pre-written characters than just their own, to divide the larp into acts with announced themes, or to tell participants what is going to happen during the larp before it starts.”

“The use of secrecy in larp design is to purposefully prevent participants from knowing things their characters would not know. Common ways to add secrecy are to give participants secret character goals and motivations, and to include surprise happenings during runtime.”

industry

The main avenue to fund new media projects and to lead a career in film and/or technology. Being part of the industry means having a business model that aligns with its expectations of profitability and innovation. “The industry” is also a network, a doxa and a sociolect. 

magic

Magical world as Thibault Schiemann puts it “magic is the assumption that there is more to this world than what is possibly conceivable (...) Magic is not a coherent system of knowledge but the acknowledgement that all systems will remain incomplete and faulty. (...) Magic means to playfully surrender to the Infinite Mystery.” (Schiemann, 2021)

Magic circle: the social contract that separates the play space from the mundane space, it answers its own rules and provides a sensation of togetherness and safety.

Some want to bomb it to invite play and resistance in everyday life (Brown, 2021).

Chaos magic: Slipping on the side of our common beliefs to accept a different reality. A voluntary stepping into the magical world.

 affordances

What we can do 

What our limbs and sensory interface can do and experience.

What we can do in VR
Because it is a virtual space, we can interact with otherwise non-interactable things - due to scale, danger, laws (both criminal and physical)

Because it is a virtual body, we can interact in different ways than what our real body allows us to do - due to shape, validity,  strength, what folds, bends, squishes, flies, transmutes, etc.

What we can do using VR controllers
VR controllers are ambidextrous and recognize fingers positioning. This allows to represent some human gestures that do not translate as intuitively to screen and mouse or pad: spreading, molding, compressing.

What we will be able to do - speculative affordances

When we are not limited by controllers, what will we be able to do in VR? 

archetype

Archetypes are commonly used when writing or designing characters, throughout all forms of fiction. Relying on Jung, tarot cards, keywords, or other forms of canons or clichés allows for participants to quickly get a mental representation of their character and to start connecting them with references.

The more evocative the title, the more inspiring it can become for a participant, who can connect it to characters they know, practices or representations. For instance, Jungian archetypes such as “the Jester” and  “the Tyrant” or tarot arcanas such as “the Magician” and “the Crone” carry mysterious meanings. When projecting oneself into our character, the archetypes become loaded with self-description: what would you think of yourself to call yourself a Tyrant or a Magician? 

Lone Wolves Stick Together uses both archetypes to inspire players and honorific titles in place of character names: Guide, Scout, Artist, Author, Scholar, Scientist. The latter are intended to reveal the social structure and pressure that is part of the universe of the larp. As described by Elin McCready in The Semantics and Pragmatics of Honorification when referring to the title “sensei”, “(...) it seems as if the existence of a specific hierarchy is what licenses the use of this title, despite its lack of substantial power or prestige: this suggests that what is at issue in determining whether an expression can be used as a title is whether or not it is associated with a social role which is in turn associated with a well-defined level of power and prestige, ie. a hierarchy.” (McReady, 2019)