Lone Wolves Stick Together: Research as a Journey to an Aesthetic Understanding of Immersion and Participation through VR and roleplaying (LARP)

Nadja Lipsyc

This research explores the artistic and critical potentials of using tools from live action roleplaying (larp) to create narrative VR experiences. In particular, it unfolds the conception, physical play and VR play and production of the live action roleplaying (larp) Lone Wolves Stick Together. Inspired by the film Stalker (1979) by Tarkovsky, Lone Wolves Stick Together stages the immersive environment as an omniscient Sphynx-like character that pushes the players to question one another and to introspect. By using larp and video game design knowledge conjugated to cinematic aesthetics, this research project seeks to honor the creative and narrative potentials of immersion and participation. As such, between 2018 and 2023, this research took the form of classic chamber larps, immersive theater experiences, scenography installation, VR larps (including two other projects: The Space Between Us and Ancient Hours) and a final multimedia installation. The artistic methods rely on principles of environmental design, explored physically through production design and ambisonics, and virtually through a highly reactive virtual environment. The research method is based on a constructivist approach where we experiment to find an answer, not the truth. Here, experimentation is not conceptual but aesthetic: knowledge is lived and felt through artistic experience. Centred around VR and within a film and new media context, this research also develops a reflection on the industrial and technological influences on the creative process and their friction with artistic-research.

act 0 - pre-play

This map is the LiDAR scan of parts of the sets of Lone Wolves Stick Together in Lillehammer, 2019.

research journey

/map

There is an objective order in which things have happened, following it has allowed me to remember and to reconstitute (and then this happens, and this is why that happened), when so much of the process is lost in flux.

To keep the creative work close to the research chronology, the journey documents retrace simultaneously the research and the acts of the main piece which is a larp called Lone Wolves Stick Together: 1. Doubts, 2. Nostalgia, 3. Disillusion, 4. Despair, 5. Truth.

This research accounts the design, playtests and iteration of Live Action Roleplaying experiences (larp) both physically, in Virtual Reality and as hybrid forms. There will be mentions of two other main works: The Space Between Us (VR experience with roleplaying elements) and Ancient Hours (Hybrid VR and physical larp).

Each act ends with a short synthesis that allows me to keep a track of how the research preoccupations and convictions evolved.

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