Act 1 - DOUBTS

The first space for the first act of Lone Wolves Stick Together, Doubts, is an in-between; uncanny, but not completely reality-wrecking. High bar tables are half eaten up by nature, abandoned glasses and plates seem to be waiting for the characters but they could also just be some coincidental remains. Entering the fictional world as a roleplayer, we are seeking the mindset of our character while navigating our own - often vulnerable and confused, waiting for some sort of inner or outer manifestation. We are navigating a new social context, which norms are still uncertain, worse, which norms we have been instructed to actively define.

For the first couple of years of my research, I had no budget or equipment to work on VR. As absurd as it sounds to be pursuing a VR PhD without having access to VR development, it did nevertheless allow me to explore an important research angle: how digital and physical 360 experiences can be a model for one another. 

Digital designers and researchers have been using larp or roleplaying for decades in user experience research: in system design, in service design, interaction design, etc. By creating fictional settings and by giving characters with specific agendas and attributes to participants, the idea is we can better understand users' profiles, affordances and behavior. While these methods are generally used to simulate situations that are too complex, or rely on “human factors,” VR creators can use them as means to troubleshoot their digital designs without engaging development costs and without using resources.

For instance, I can prototype a narrative experience meant for VR by combining roleplaying with “brownboxing” (creating prototypes with cardboard or other simple material). Although the specific affordances of the technology and its feel or flavor are of course not entirely replicable, I can playtest the design, storyline, pacing, character playability and main interactions. The inverse is also true: for large-scale physical immersive experiences, creators can use a simple digital prototype to anticipate space, scale and pacing before building settings. 

This type of speculative prototyping resembles what designer Julian Bleeker calls “Design Fiction”, which is often described as the crossroad between design and science fiction (Bleeker, 2009). The notable difference though, is that brownboxing is a speculation on what we could develop now — with our current means of production and within the realm of what is technically and realistically (or even reasonably) achievable. While Design Fiction explores fully speculative futures, sometimes with the intention to free one’s imagination from pragmatic concerns. We thus build our projects assuming we could hypothetically access the resources we need, thanks to grants, sponsors or avenues that do not seem entirely inaccessible to us. More than that: we build our prototypes to make a case for how affordable and realistic the experience would be to produce.

However, there is no “right to technology” nor is there any “right to high production,” and, depending on where a project is located and who carries it, the probabilities of its completion might be science-fiction. As such, the effective difference between Design Fiction and prototyping/brownboxing is internal: a hope, an intuition or a delusion regarding the fundability and feasibility of the project.

For months, I worked on a prospective design, constantly projecting what could happen (realistically, affordably) in VR and write the first draft of Lone Wolves Stick Together, as a physical larp.

2018, London

To playtest this physical prototype, I travel to London and to the Immersivists, a group of brilliant larp designers and players that comprises Karolina Soltys, Mo Holkar, Laura Wood, David Owen, Willoh Smith, Warren Merrifield and Patrick Balint. In fact, we’ve played together so many times, playtested each other's concepts in such various states of vulnerability, talked and shifted so often around each other that our dynamic feels very much like that of a troupe. I cherish the generosity of the feedback, the kindness and the trust that the Immersivists foster and would not have wanted to bring this first attempt to any other bunch.

The core of narrative part of the Lone Wolves Stick Together design is entirely developed during this stage: the workshops, acts and progression, characters sheets,characters steam of thoughts and events (flashbacks, flashforwards, etc).

As it is canonical to Nordic Larp, the pre-play includes a briefing and workshops  — which are “tools for informing players, developing ingame relations, working with meta-techniques or just building gear and talking about the upcoming larp” (Nordic Larp Wiki, n.d.). Other than the general discussions on emotional and personal safety that became so crucial to the larp community, the briefing is meant to clarify the experience — sufficiently to alleviate player anxiety and give them the means to steer their own experience. As such, the facilitator explains the structure of the larp and clarifies the lore: who are the Guides, what authority do they have, what happens if someone goes inside the Chamber, etc. 

For Lone Wolves Stick Together, I designed the preparation workshops using a mix of common theater and larp exercises, and new tailored ones for this experience:

• The hot seat exercise: players define their character by answering questions asked to them by the whole group as their character. The facilitator  can contribute to the questions, in particular if they feel like a register of play is lacking. I liked to ask for example: what are you the most afraid of? or how do you physically express nervousness?
• Discussions and calibration in each group, then pair discussion with their mirroring archetype.
• The great TV debate: an exercise to practice roleplaying back and forth between two groups, and getting a sense of narrative agency.
• The mirror, a guided meditation mixed to a mirroring exercise (two people are each other’s reflection and attune their body languages to follow one another) played in front of the mirror archetype and leading to the characters writing a farewell letter.

• Experienced players, or players who are used to playing together might skip straight to deeper interactions and performers might act out the discomfort away, but most of us will feel awkward and partly paralyzed. As such, the first act, Doubts, embraces this awkwardness and slowness to better exorcize it. The characters, like the players, are entering a new social space, trying to define dynamics with strangers, in a place they are unfamiliar with.

The playspace for this first playtest is Karolina’s living room, which opens onto a promenade of red stones by the river Thames. I flew there with a suitcase bursting with props: travel-size full immersion.

The ”Woods”, inspired by the surreal Sphynx-like “Zone” from Stalker, was to be a changing configuration of white sheets, various small lights and metallic junk. My solution to mimic a change of scenery that could easily  happen in VR, was to have the players walk along the Thames for 3 minutes while I swap around sets and props in the living room from one act to the next. During their walk, they enter a more introspective space, listening to an individual narration on a discman, and, when they reenter the playspace, it seems as though they progressed in “the Woods”.

The term “steering” is used in the larp community to define the “process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons” (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta, 2015); for instance, pretending their character has to go on a mission to be able to take a nap or inducing a sudden mental breakdown to create more drama in a stagnating play. This first act is meant to alleviate that dual consciousness (the characters and the players alike are feeling uncomfortable and doubtful), while setting the tonality of the whole experience: despite being given a starting point and clear directions, the characters will be pushed to question their motives and change their mind. If players find a way to sit in these doubts and find a way to connect to the identity of their character or to their own, then I would deem this experience useful.

Among the six characters, only Guide and Scout are supposed to know their bearings in the Woods, which is a challenge in this early physical experience. In a fully developed VR experience, I would be able to tweak each player’s interface to match the cognition and skills of their characters. In that case, the players of Guide and Scout would be the only ones to see specific clues that would draw a path in the Woods, having the rest of the group entirely rely on them for navigation. But in this physical version, all the participants see the same simple, predictable, linear and paved London promenade. While everybody can pretend to feel lost and roleplay having to follow Guide and Scout, I wanted to enhance the player’s sensation of helplessness: to oil their suspension of disbelief and also to grant more credibility and power to the leader characters. Guide and Scout are not written as power-thirsty leaders that get a kick out of disciplining their expeditions; much like Stalker in the film. Instead, they feel the privilege of being let in the Woods, and their guiding is much more of a hopeful sharing than a feat of charisma. In parallel, the other characters are likely to doubt their expertise, to be unruly and rebellious. Without the design demonstrating their legitimacy, the group dynamics rely entirely on the players’ willingness and ability to play the subtleties of power exchange. While this is achievable, it needs assistance to happen.

To do this, I give every player except Guide and Scout,  a pair of obstructed swimming goggles to wear during the walking phase of the larp. The group therefore becomes dependent on the two leaders’ clear sight. Ironically, in my later prototypes, both VR and physical, I couldn’t manage to recreate that group dynamic, even though I think it strengthens the mythopoeia of the Woods.

The players have little understanding or knowledge of what awaits them in this journey ~ and to some extent, their characters are also expecting to be surprised by the Woods reshuffling their own geography. However, Guide and Scout’s connection to the Woods and experience of the place provides them with a sense of ease and homeliness. As such, in the physical version of the larp, they are given a backpack with food and beverages: a means to show care and preparedness to the rest of the group. Eating and drinking is an activity that one can focus on instead of facing the weight of early roleplay; and Guide and Scout become figures that can relieve a bit of the awkwardness of the group. 

This first playtesting setup was quite cheap. In my notebook at the time, I wrote: “if I count the few props, the 6 discmen and the food, the whole production is below 1500kr (roughly €150). It would cost €50 000 to develop all the basic interactions, avatars and environments of the same experience in VR, while it’s working just fine physically. What justifies it?” As in, what justifies a VR experience?

My malaise around the disparity between those two budgets is manifold: it blends thoughts on the supposed free nature of imagination; the portability and sustainability of free play; and the eerie suspicion that our elaborate and expensive media aren’t cultivating participants' ability to imagine, but instead locking it in compelling already thought-through closed universes and systems. Our compelling, exciting, and easy-to-access media and technologies feed a crisis of imagination, as it has been observed by many voices in literature, citizenship, politics, music, and pretty much every field of human expression. 

These are questions that I have not resolved: Are we truly less capable of envisioning and creating different futures? Is the massification and pervasive evolution of arts, storytelling, political discourse, etc, painting our psyche with simplistic colors that prevent us from seeing other shades and shapes than what is being constantly laid in front of us? 

My doubts were and remain tied to navigating an ethical approach to creation, the industrial conditions of creating in the artform I have chosen for myself (digital, audiovisual, interactive), and the implications of working with emergent technologies (should it be VR, AR, or now A.I.). So far, I have found two trails to investigate in order to bring alertness and life to our imagination.

Firstly, we can favour experiences that specifically aim to nurture imagination, in a lasting manner. Such potentially transformative experiences take into consideration not only the time spent enjoying (as in “jouir” in French, living) the experience, but how that experience can radiate afterwards. Artist and musician Áron Birtalan explores a practice of participation, mysticism, and guided play where mythopoeia happens through the experience and after it — what they call the Afterneath (Birtalan, 2023). You might think this is an easy claim that could be applicable to any artform or event; we constantly change and are changed by what we undergo. However practices that are centered around “cultivating relationships” between people, between beings and unbeings like in some of Áron’s work, and between people and curiosity have a particularly hopeful and lively Afterneath. “We can not deny that something has happened. Someone is with us” (Birtalan, 2023).

Secondly, there might not be any perfect solution to answer the dilemma of creating for an industry which is ultimately destructive to the environment and relying on exploitative systems. However, rather than subtracting ourselves from it entirely — which would subtract us from its opportunities but would not reduce anything from its problematic continuations — we can hold ourselves to a certain quota. For each innovative industrial project in the making, one could aim to put out free, accessible, DIY (or close to using no new resources) experiences, which could even be a DIY version of their industrial work. We could call such practice “de-digitalization,” going from the digital to the brownboxing rather than the other way around. By investing some time creating without production costs and technology, or by translating our digital formats into physical play (pervasive games, larps etc), our efforts become more sustainable and more accessible to both designers and players alike.

It is partly to further play with this idea of bisociation, that larp and VR seem like such a fertile artistic encounter: what emotions and epiphanies lay in these ambiguous layers of understanding; between illusion, absorption, character, ungraspable gusts of lucidity and complete, free, exploration? 

In Karolina’s living room, during the final act “Truth”, a throbbing blue flashlight shines on the faces  of the participants as they are about to make their final decision.

• Guide, played by Willoh Osmond, did not enter the Chamber and did not renounce his vocation. This has been the main epilogue for Guide, as all but one of the 17 different Guide players kept their distance with the Chamber. Author, played by Mo Holkar, did what most players will end up doing: he was first to step inside, determined to have it all.
• Scholar lost their purpose during the journey, and Karolina Soltys let her wander for eternity in the Woods, a unique player decision this far.
• Scout, whose life story I always found so grueling, was played with a lot of softness by David Owen, who sought a final redemption by entering the Chamber.
• Artist, as uncoiled by Laura Wood, took her destructive tendencies to a final bang and rested forever at the threshold of the Chamber.
• Scientist remained dutiful to the last hour and Warren Merrifield fulfilled his character’s initial plan by blowing up the Chamber, like a vast majority of Scientist players will after this.

This first Lone WolvesStick Together playtest goes almost flawlessly. Spending close to a year working only on a concept gave me all the time to anticipate most potential pitfalls of the design, and it turned out to be well-rounded when first presented to players. However, the central question of my research at this point has not progressed: can this work (be engaging, emotional, challenging, coherent) in VR?

Quotes from Act 1’s players, session 4, Lillehammer.

After an awkward minute where players look around, glance hesitantly at each other, and make small throat noises, Author breaks the silence.

Author

So we stopped here. Why?

Guide (opening her bag)

To eat, I have sandwiches for all of us.

Scholar (with nervosity)

I agree, we should be on the move, I didn’t come here to picnic.

after another awkward silence

Author

Tell us Scholar, what did you even come here for?

Scholar (hesitantly)

To find the Chamber.

Author

And what?

Scholar (more assertive)

Can you just eat your sandwich?

Guide 

We stopped because the Woods wanted us to, we’ll find the Chamber when it’s the right time.

Later in the year, I playtested the larp once more. This time in French nature, with a loser structure and a couple of non-larper friends. This playtest was mostly to get a sense of the movement, and how to find the right stops within a forest. A picnic table, a radio I left by a tree with a weeping canopy, a muddy path, a burned stump, a sudden open clearing. In a sense, this is the most faithful this experience got to the film Stalker: a vaguely organized narrative detour in the forest.

Of these two playtests, I have no photographs. Only lists of props and poorly sketched maps of the participants’ journey with basic scenography notes. Early in this process, I am still adamantly refusing to bring in the lens that will turn players into performers.

The cognitive experience of our presence in time and space cannot be captured by the camera; much like the aura of a work of art, as described by Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, 1935). In particular, what larp composes with can be so personal and interpersonal that it further escapes visual crystallization: our sense of agency – and the gossamer of all the dilemmas and internal negotiations that come with it – as well as the authenticity of the interaction between players.

An expressive gaze caught on camera might seize a glimpse of a player’s truthful emotion, some larper-photographers might reach a “bisociative” creative state like Stefano Kewan Lee (2021) describes in his article on taking pictures in character as they immortalize a scene. Alternatively, atmospheric shots like those taken by Kjell Vassdal in 2019 of the sets of Lone Wolves Stick Together might invite the viewer to contemplate how they would interact with the environment or feel about it should they be there, but none of these approaches represent the experience of being on site, following a facilitation, defining your character’s will to power and bonding with the other playing bodies.

“A book read by a thousand people is a thousand different books” 

We can discuss and debate the content of books, attempt to summarize them, but how would we represent that reading experience, for each reader?

There is a level of abstraction in larp that is similar to a reader’s experience: we start by receiving verbal instructions, and in formats like Lone Wolves Stick Together, full character sheets. We make sense of those words knowing we’ll temporarily merge with our characters, therefore generally bonding with the parts of ourselves that are the most receptive to the verbal proposition. As we act out our characters, we prolongate the literary experience as an embodied experience. Perhaps the art piece of larp is situated there: in the subjective experience of the storyworld, which is shaped by our agency to mold it?

Other interactive and/or participatory forms suffer from the same resistance to documentation. This is problematic when it comes to evaluating the legitimacy of the practice or the practitioner (to convince an audience to attempt the experience or potential stakeholders). Although, the question of dissemination is perhaps more interesting. How do we share our experience with peers? How can we give the account of a public research to a greater audience? Susan Sontag argued that commentaries on art should beware of undervaluing the sensorial experience of the work and remain alert on our ability to feel more, hear more, see more. (Sontag,1966) In her words, commenting art, and by extension representing it, should be erotic rather than hermeneutic. 

Larp pictures and film cannot convey the subjective embodiment and agency of each player. Often, they are an attempt at squeezing more from the larp — another representation, a sentimental value, a marketing purpose. As such, the images and videos you see of this research too, with the exception of the VR extracts, are all staged recreations of the larp’s ambience. They are meant to give you an idea, a scale, a bit of a support for projection.

I’d like to mention a couple of interesting larp-film experiments I came across during my fellowship.

“Remember that time” (2023) a short film based on the eponym larp by Martine Svanevik and directed by Sophia Seymour for her final masters project at the UK National Film and TV school, which I participated to as a player alongside Fredrik Hatlestrand, Anna Emilie Groth and Simon Brind. When Sophia and Martine approached me to play the larp and be in the documentary, I understood the intention was to create a multilayered artistic documentary piece. One layer would be an aesthetic rendition of the larp’s runtime, another one would be the designer’s explanations on the larp structure, another one would be player’s interviews and probably a final one would be the director’s process. 

I do have a soft-spot for the dreamlike aesthetics of film, and the hazy feelings that come from stratifications of reality seem truer to life than a clearly set representation of a unique reality. I have yet to see the film, and I certainly hope to be proven wrong, but while shooting, it felt to all of us players that what was happening between us couldn’t be caught by camera. Despite the efforts and ingenuity employed by the director and the film crew to make us feel safe and to conceal the cameras, the experience was decidedly impacted - more muffled, more self-aware - by the lens. From the numerous discussions with the group, we all seemed to agree that a larp would need to be specifically designed to be filmed in order to even attempt at being shown on camera. 

Such a larp, such a film exists: the excellent piece “The Group Crit” (2022) by Sille Storihle and students from Nordland School of Arts and Film. The larp was specifically created as a pedagogic and cinematographic experiment. From a spectator point of view, larp appears to be a creative device rather than the subject of the film: it is a premise that makes the content of the film more raw, and it is a method that makes the filming process more educational to its participants (they are film students which makes this choice all the more meaningful). The Group Crit is a film on discourse, and a film on film, using larp as a fantastic discourse machine. The film doesn’t document the larp, as the latter belongs in the larper’s experience rather than in the eye of an audience. However, it does admirably document a pedagogical method and process, and most importantly, it is a filmic creation of its own.

As you can see, there are elements of documentation of the experiences I organized, but my dilemma remains: is the legitimacy to document artistic research prevalent over the scopic intrusion in the players’ experience?

End of Act 1: early design process preoccupations

Why 

Roleplaying for knowing ourselves better

In the Hermeneutics of the Subject (Foucault, 1982), French sociologist Michel Foucault recalls the teachings of Aristotle to the young prince Alcibiades. The core learning that the master aims to pass on to their student (and desired lover) was to learn the care of the self (soin de soi). For it is by catering to your own shortcomings and sufferings, that you will be strong and wise enough to be responsible for the fate of others. We often learn to lock our identities into norms and compartments as it appears to be the singular way to function in the world. Roleplaying is a precious tool to challenge these constructions, see how it feels, what it’s like, to act differently and be perceived differently within a fictional frame.

VR experiences for defamiliarisation, otherness

Virtual lifeworlds make us other-bodied — whether our avatars represent humans, other species, abstractions, different genders or shapes, they are for us a new, different body. In some cases, being other-bodied brings us impossible perspectives: an entire new array of artistic emotions and affordances based on the impression of having a different cognition and body and/or of being in impossible spaces. We can discover a storyworld that has its own aesthetic coherence, laws, and multisensory explorations. What happens when we can trigger that level of defamiliarisation? When we can go towards deconstructing our sense of body and space?

VR larp for engagement

Engagement is a clear motivator for players of larp, tabletop roleplay, digital roleplaying games and other immersive experiences alike. A story is supposedly the most engaging when it is lived — experienced as intimately as possible —  by its receiver. Such engagement is arguably the most layered in an immersive roleplaying experience: we are engaged in our character’s psyche/cognition/story, in the interpersonal interaction that creates another level of story, in the narrative events, in the immersive environment or synthetic sensorium and in the potential actions and activities (character skills, minigames, puzzles etc).

How 

A character-based narration

Each player starts by reading several pages of character background, then further discusses their character and makes them their own during the workshops before the play. The characters are constructed around conflicted desires and wants. One group is centered around regrets (not having been present enough, having missed the opportunity to reach success, having betrayed a loved one), and the other around hope (finding inspiration or love, healing, getting reparation). 

These characters are written in a somewhat neutral way: gender neutral, with clues regarding social class but no mention of ethnicity or age. This neutrality is meant to let the players’ project the context and presentation they prefer onto their character. 

Although, for a while, the character sheets were written using the pronouns “she/her” instead of “they/them” as they are now. This was to counter the tendency to read every unspecified character as white and male. A  tendency that is reinforced when the original inspiration (Stalker) stages specifically white men. However, the character sheets seemed too confusing for the various players that got a hold of them, and I switched to the neutral “they/them”.

A sound-heavy experience

Sound is immersive on its own. Being in a dark room with a surround system would be sufficient to conjure the feeling of being in a jungle or a bunker. In the early stages of this research, I dreamt of fully reactive immersive ambisonic soundscapes, that would enhance or tone down different tracks as a player moves through space. Those soundscapes would contrast with the intimate binaural murmurs that players would hear individually; voices and sounds to prompt them to shift their character’s moods and perspectives and give them some more help to act. During those first playtests, I used pre-existing music tracks for each roleplaying act. In between each act, the players walk in the Woods — which in the first playtest was the promenade along the Thames, but became a different environment in the later versions) — listening to the classic meditation track from Stalker as background music. I layered this with individual character tapes that I stitched together using fragments of music (both my own and others’) and my own voice.

Through a constructivist approach

The physical playtests of the larp allowed me a constructivist research approach,  where the design and reflection is refined iteration after iteration. Knowledge and creation are developed based on experience, without aiming for any absolute truth but to bring a solution that works within a context, as very early stated by Vico: verum ipsum factum, “what is true is what is done” (Nicolini, 1953; Le Moigne, 1995; Mucchielli, 2004).

For whom 

An audience bigger than larpers/participatory arts attendees

The audience I had in mind for Lone Wolves Stick Together which I perceived as a VR project, has always been “a bigger audience”: being so implanted in a film context, I did hope to tickle the interest of those generally more interested in audiovisual arts than in the compact sphere of larp and participatory theater. 

What

Writing, reading & physical prototypes

My main approach in this first phase of research was to work on a design that would allow the players to fully explore the psychology of their characters and groups. I was therefore dedicated to writing the larp and journaling my reflections on the process of larp writing and VR speculation. However due to what Henry Miller calls “some perverse instinct” (1952), the moment I start a writing task, I develop a great urge to read. And so, I started reading on immersion. At that time, my readings span game studies, larp theory, museology and philosophy. They include the works of Oliver Grau on virtual art (Grau, 2002), Raymond Montpetit on museology (Montpetit, 1996), Sarah Lynne Bowman on larp (Bowman, 2017), Gordon Calleja on digital game involvement (Calleja, 2007), Paul Valéry on modernity (Valéry, 1931), Gilles Deleuze on moving images (Deleuze, 1983-85)

Through working on the design, I thus also become dedicated to deconstructing my understanding of “immersion” and “fun” as to find a more refined approach to engagement and multi-sensoriality in this project. In particular, I make the narrative tools of the whistle and the flashbacks very conspicuous, which directly interferes with a full 360 immersion. When realizing that I indeed wanted to open this experience to non-experienced larpers or theater makers, I however decided to remove that level of participants agency and to crystallize a handful of pre-written flashbacks.