Act 2 - NOSTALGIA

Nostalgia is one of our favorite dramatic leverages and personal hideouts. Our subjective experience of the past, romanticised, ghostly, haunts us with a more or less tight grip. Some of us remember precisely, others reflect on a blur. Emotions connect us to our old selves, to places where other branchings would have been possible, to deep senses of comfort and carelessness, to times ultimately ripped off their angst and complexity can be very intoxicating. We often tint those in pink and peach and entire music genres conjure that bittersweet longing for our past impressions. From dreampop to hauntology, while one fosters the fantasy, the other one piles up the paradoxical sounds from layers of existence, leaving us more alert than we would be, should we have remained wrapped and motionless in the soft fabric of nostalgia. 

October 2018

A serendipitous reorganising of  the bachelor studies at the Film School in Lillehammer opens the opportunity for me to use my teaching hours on an experimental project. Along with Production Design lead Siri Langdalen and Sound Design lead Carl Svensson, I designed and ran large-scale worldbuilding exercise based on Lone Wolves Stick Together. For that, I collaborated with teams of production design and sound design students to create narrative immersive environments around the 5 acts of the larp: Doubts, Nostalgia, Disillusion, Despair and Truth. This collaboration sedimented the narrative and aesthetic universe of the project, and was documented in an article I wrote for the international conference ISEA called “Storydiving: techniques for engaging 360 narratives” (Lipsyc, 2018).

At this nod, my research takes on a practical tangent: rather than the VR space, I’m exploring the identity and construction of physical audiovisual settings and in collaboration with people trained to work for a film frame. 

This project is controversial: in traditional film, we expect production designers and sound designers to always follow the directors’ vision. Similarly, no exercise should break the creative pair of the (director of photography (DOP) and the director. We therefore face resistance for reshuffling the hierarchy, and giving extensive creative leadership of an expensive exercise to production designers and sound designers. 

When working with games, I generally do not encounter that sort of verticality: we create emotional and narrative environments for players. Which only works when giving a lot of freedom to sound designers and environment artists. It is a different culture than traditional film where all details get reviewed and approved by the Director-DOP reigning couple. 

This friction of traditions pushed me to formalise more clearly for myself what sort of collaborative endeavor the development of Lone Wolves Stick Together (and probably most VR or high production value immersive plays) aims to be: 

a collaboration that fosters personal creativity for the team members
that leads to a piece with coherent aesthetics
and emergence of both play and story for the participants

As this is my first time part of a pedagogical team, a new seed is planted: what sort of school, programme, strategy, can lead to critical projects where individuals are challenged and fulfilled in their own interests, while also developing the ability to collaborate and reach a common goal?

Often a trick to forcefully pull an audience into their most vulnerable sensations of self-love, nostalgia is an ultimate escapism for it can never be proven wrong. Thwarted, the fantasies of our own past are locked in a sense of eternity. This act is built to connect characters and players to those feelings. With memorabilia scattered around the space and through flashbacks, this act call the characters back to the hopes and regrets that are the only drives they can still feed upon: feeling needed and loved by a family member, feeling for the first time a sense of belonging within a creative group, feeling a connection so strong to another person that it changes one’s entire paradigm.

A year spent in Lillehammer working on this teaching project, altered the original design and vision behind Lone Wolves Stick Together: the Stalker-like zone is now closer to Norwegian mystical “trolsk” woods, the characters are also one step further away from the film archetypes, and the narrative techniques in the hands of the players have been simplified. 

My London advanced playtesters were free to trigger any flashback they could think of and orient their own play: keen to explore the dark spots of each other’s background, they used the flashbacks as a tool to reveal one another’s most emotional and tensed scenes, or to deepen their inter-character relationships. The wider audience is now only offered 5 curated flashbacks, necessary to get specific scenes and information into the play. Other than shortening the play time (from roughly 8 hours to 5-6), limiting the flashbacks to 5 mandatory ones also reinforces the player’s alibi, which is generally useful for newcomers: it is not their embarrassing idea to play this cringe emotional scene, it’s been predetermined and imposed by an external force.

The sets are built in November-December, as a result of a back and forth dialogue between scenography, soundscaping and game design, and turned into a 500m2 immersive gritty and dreamlike environment. 

This self-reflexive environment led about 100 participants into those unfamiliar Woods, and the 5 acts and sets of the malleable story: Doubts, Nostalgia, Disillusion, Despair and Truth.

I spend the full month of January living in that zone, organizing my larp in different formats about 15 times. This was primarily to give life to the project: have the environment live, try to open the experience to a wider audience, make sure that people who had expressed an interest would get a chance to take the trip to Lillehammer, and to explore that ephemeral physical virtual reality. One month is the time the studios can remain dedicated to the vast and beautiful environment we co-created. 

To allow a wider variety of participants to experience the 360 narration, I write three different formats: Dive, Swim and Float.

Dive [diving into the story] the full larp that lasts about 6 hours including workshops for which the 6 participants fully embody a character and shape the story, which is the version that comprises the workshops. These are the player experiences that take the most space in my documents, through the words scattered, the dialogue excerpts, the feedback notes, the farewell letters.

Swim [staying head over the story and looking under water], an opt-in and opt-out scripted immersive theater-like softer experience of 1h30 for those who are very reluctant to roleplaying or spending that much time in a fiction. 

To design for these players, I thought about how to invite people to interact with the sets and with the actor. How do I motivate them to attempt playing? How do I create a space that feels safe enough to dare to speak up? To address these, I integrated a “ferryman” to the design. In this case, a ferryman is what old-school larpers have called a “hidden NPC”: someone in confidence who is pretending to be a participant. That ferryman poses as a slightly bolder participant: They interact with the sets and with the Actor and they step into the optional roleplaying scenes to show the rest of the group that they are allowed to do the same.

Another issue I considered was influenced from my participation in immersive theater players. I always found myself confused about “who am I, here?” I could see actors engaging with me, but I did not belong to their diegesis. Was I supposed to play a displaced version of myself merging with the storyworld? This always felt quite artificial and uninspiring to me, which is why the participants of Swim are given their own player-character. They do not read about their character in advance, like they do in the Dive format. But they get to recover/generate their memory and identity as the experience progresses, as an invitation to get more and more involved in the play.

What happened? Most people roleplayed, others didn’t, and the awkwardness certainly lingered on.

Float [staying above the surface], a guided narrative visit of half an hour for those who would rather avoid roleplaying entirely. Instead of roleplaying, I let them pick the headset of a character and take them as a non-diegetic guide through the sets. At each act, I recount stories of what the characters could say or do, what some players have said or done. I explain the intentions behind the general design of the sets, then I let them scatter around and listen to a character tape again, until we have visited everything.

These different levels of experience were initially an answer to the realization that most of my students and colleagues did not want to partake in a full larp. The main reasons were the duration, the vulnerability and unfamiliarity of roleplaying/acting, and the unfamiliarity of the theme and universe. While I wouldn’t alter the latter, I wanted to find ways for everybody to still get a taste of the narration, an idea of the project, and a life-size experience of the fantastic work by the students in scenography and immersive sound.

I eventually grew quite fond of the idea of developing several levels of experience for any given storyworld: some being more accessible (in terms of physical or executive functions, or in terms of ability, much like having different levels of difficulty in video games), some being closer to the desired artistic vision of the team, and perhaps, some being more viable economically. The first appeal is to allow the fruits of one production to truly reach a wider audience — I draw a distinction here with the aspiration to always cast a wider net: this isn’t to lure passerbys into something that they won’t necessarily connect with, but to effectively offer a meaningful experience based on different needs — it would allow us to work more sustainably. Such an approach to designing several experiences per storyworld is what Christy Dena refers to as “tiering”, as “tiers provide separate content to different audiences and in doing so facilitate a different experience of a work or world.“ (Dena, 2008)

Part of being a creative, in any given field, is probably tied to an urge to work on a new idea and a new concept. This urge to create, combined with the easy access to publication and outreach that social media and mass media offers us, plunges us into a bottomless well of content — numbing us. In industrial arts, such as film and videogames, that content is constantly reinvented, started from scratch, seldom reusing any of the material produced before (should it be work pipelines, 3D assets, film sets, costumes, etc). If we could consider our storyworlds as environments, we could treat worldbuilding as a sustainable pursuit rather than a redundant one. As such, we could work on a range of experiences that use the same resources and assets, reshuffling them around to fit different narrations or audiences. Instead of starting from scratch, we could use the same environmental budget and further explore the potential of the worlds we create; a sort of circular economy of audiovisual development. What has been produced once for a project must be able to find other lives in other iterations, other forms, other projects.

This part of my research, I have only explored the formats physically, but I would love to integrate Swim and Float in the VR version.

Compared to the VR version, these physical play experiences take up the most space in my documents: through the words scattered, the dialogue excerpts, the feedback notes, and the farewell letters.

As I haunt the sets day and night, cleaning after each visit, replacing the props in between the runs, as we would in between shots, queuing all sounds and light changes, training expeditions after expeditions to the rules of this temporary storyworld, I feel often exhausted and lonely. But I also anticipate nostalgia will visit me when I contemplate these extraordinary times in the future. The sounds, the emptiness, the silence, the awkwardness and rush, the incomprehension and yearning, I do feel today a longing for that palette of emotions that came with running this play almost on my own for a month, in those magnificent and gigantic cinematic sets. I too felt immersed, in this position of exiled reality maker and undertaker. Organizing this same storyworld so many times, seeing its iterations so close by, is a rare experience for a larp designer and worthy of its own research. The characters I wrote took so many different faces and paths that they morphed in my mind into forces and impulses, part of the dynamic of the experience, as opposed to fictional people I created.

Guide - soft

Scout - eager

Artist - bursting

Author - leadening

Scholar - resisting

Scientist - shadowing

From these forces and impulses, I could observe that some characters were more challenging and some relations perhaps weaker. However, after witnessing the many stories birthed of their imperfect planned connections, I decided to let them exist and evolve on their own.

Regarding nostalgia, a potential remedy to the numbing softness was to supplement it with a call to action. Jules de Gaultier recounts Goethe saying: “La vraie nostalgie doit toujours être productrice et créer une nouvelle chose qui soit meilleure” (de Gaultier in Miller, 1952, 13). While film and other non-interactive artforms do not require direct action, games and interactive media dictate how much action is required by the players. As such, nostalgia can be anchored in a call to action, tied to players building on these positive memories of past times to take stances and make decisions. What this means is, we can develop our awareness around the nostalgic longing: what can we learn from that lost time we’re yearning for? Is there any part of it that we should aim to recover? How?

In Understanding and Politics, Hanna Arendt states that fascism isn’t born from the radicalisation of masses, but from losing our ability to take stances and action (Arendt, 1954, 307-309). Between depression, burn out, and a thousand other mental health concerns, the overwhelming nature of our complex socio-professional systems, family life, the constant noise of contradictory voices in media and the Internet; we can slip into the fullest passivity in the blink of an eye. We welcome nostalgic hideouts and other colorful lulling or stimulating escapes. Interactive media, games and other designs that react to participants feedback, on the other hand, allow a dialogue with the audience. This can of course be used to turn the public into prosumers, or to instrumentalise absorption and dopaminergic tricks to create even more closed-off virtual foxholes and social tranquilizers. But, I believe that it can also be an invitation to train participants to take the reins of their lives and form opinions. 

This can happen by recreating relations and systems of belonging, setting up believable dilemmas, rewarding attempts to find creative solutions to the game problems, etc. Of course, this requires a degree of trust from the player: trust that they can engage with the game (or play, or app) and that it won’t be turned against them. Roleplaying can be a vulnerable exercise that one might dread, and a videogame can be approached cynically when the audience knows of the studio's bad ethical reputation for instance. As such, ensuring the genuine and positive engagement of a player in a task —which is arguably needed when working with transformative design — comes with ensuring a positive game development and play culture.

Another addition to the larp in this Lillehammer project, is the apparition of creatures of the woods: guides and light interaction NPCs who are other people from the staff. Ingrid Nordby who was the line producer of this big experience also happens to be a brilliant actress, and her act as a wolf guiding the players through the sets was so compelling that we couldn’t do without it afterwards.

That same year, I finally got to explore VR more thoroughly by attending workshops.

My colleague Cecilie Levy and I join the XR Creator’s lab in Munich, where we team up to experiment with photogrammetry and sound-lead spatial design around the idea of creating Beethoven’s memory palace. There, I discovered the incredible richness of native VR design softwares: Masterpiece, Google blocks, Gravity sketch, Quill. Building on these learnings, I then attend a Quill workshop organized by Goro Fujira, and I create a short dynamic environment inspired by Japanese painter Kayama Matazo, as a sketch for the atmosphere of the Woods of Lone Wolves Stick Together.

Despite my lack of animation or sketching proficiency, the result from within VR feels thrilling. The land collapses into a black-hole like pit, crows are flying all around the floating forest and precipitate themselves into the darkness, and, as we approach, we see the entire place pulsating on the rhythms of the music by Evigt Mörker.

With the relative lightness of Oculus (Rift and Quest alike) ambidextrous controllers allowing intuitive body movements, we can spread our hands to scale up an object, pivot it like we would in real life, instead of dragging awkward axes with a computer mouse. The affordances of VR are much closer to that of real life: I grab with my hands, I bend my knees to get under an obstacle or an object I just created, I can throw a tool to another user and they can catch it.

The most sentimental act of the larp, Nostalgia introduces flashbacks in the design; one for each archetype duo (Guide-Scout, Scientist-Scholar, Artist-Author). Those flashbacks are meant to allow play across the two groups and to expose the vulnerability of the characters: what memory of love is haunting them? what tint of warmth, softness, vulnerability, did they get a taste of before life took it back? Those memories of childhood, youth, or first genuine connections are revealed to all players in the safe and small frame of a flashback, while their characters can keep their masks high during the rest of the play.

Later that year, I finally receive my equipment, install the HTC Vive Pro in my living-room, and I dive in. I try several social VR spaces, places where people create instances (personalized virtual worlds) to socialize, and discover the VRChat creative community. Much like the larp community, it is a group of people who bond through playing and being dedicated to pushing the creative boundaries. Those hangouts are strange, voices do not fit bodies in familiar ways and social rules are different. Some people interact entirely non-verbally, some seek deep connection, others seem to treat it like an embodied extension of an internet forum. There are references to cartoons, anime, karaoke rooms, blossoming trees, calm and cozy purple neon houses under the rain. VRChat feels locked in the comforting imagination of a young crowd.

In a karaoke room where 20 people with accents from all over the world sing on top of each other, I notice that someone is trying to get my attention. Their avatar is small and doll-like, and they jump around me. I open wide my wings and cover them entirely. 

As experienced in “The furry karaoke room”, world on VRChat developed by Duustu.

Although there is a tide of sexualised Japanese lolita avatars that recreate a dominant normative body, there is a clear sensation that what our real, fleshy body is like doesn’t matter anymore. If we push the thought experiment far enough, we land in a potential future where what our bodies are in the lifeworld does not matter socially anymore, as long as our avatars conform. Let’s stay with that scenario a bit longer: all of us get to access the dominant aesthetic that is more or less available to us in the real world - body type, skin color, hair, fashion - , all of us get to access valid-presenting bodies, mediatically celebrated bodies, or even a gender representation that might alleviate some personal pain. Dissociated from our own body, our mind fully identifies and appropriates these virtual bodies. Is that the body equality that we crave?

This question will linger throughout the process of designing a VR larp: which avatars are available to the players? What normativity do they shape? How can design and facilitation frame our relation to these digital bodies? Sometimes of course, budget or technical limitations will restrict design choices, as it was the case for mine. For me, only one avatar model could be developed for all 6 players: a half body, vaguely female, vaguely dark, and masked. In this case, the larp is very verbal and players’ voice coats those basic avatars with more embodiment and personality. Voice recognition and voice alteration are still marginal in VR and in online spaces. As such, voice remains the one close-to-intact physical impression of the other — a particularly vulnerable shadow that lets our mind speculate on what body could withhold it. This is quite mysterious to me and I wonder: is our ease to record and transmit live sound (comparatively to record and transmit 3D bodies) the reason why we do not disguise our voices in digital spaces? Would we default to avatars of ourselves if such recording was easier? Has our cultural obsession for visuals has simply taken all our workforce? Or, perhaps, is there is a particular attachment to sending our own naked voice out there?

Nostalgia is tied to belonging. The sentimentality associated with nostalgia is akin to a force that juices and condenses that feeling of belonging, however fleeting it might have been, and uses it to transform our memories into inner homes. In Lone Wolves Stick Together, Nostalgia is the only shelter before disillusion; a necessary renouncement to build a real and durable sense of belonging.

Flashback n.3 - Session 6
Muse is played by Author and Painter is played by Scientist.

Painter (faking a strong French accent): Come in, come in, forgive the mess, I have been partying for a week straight.

Muse: A whole week and you only invite me now?

Artist remains a bit shy.

Painter: Don’t stay there Artist, I need your great brain.

Artist: I don’t know that it’s so great.

Muse: I intimidate you, don’t I?

Artist: Well… yes I suppose you do.

Painter (seizing an imaginary pencil): Perfect, I want to capture some of that. Artist, describe Muse to me, will you? 

End of Act 2 : preoccupations of this next stage of the design process

Why

Developing our creative agency

Working with so many creative students develop when given freedom and tools, and observing so many different participants playing Lone Wolves Stick Together highlighted how crucial it is to focus on our creative agency; both during co-design and during participatory experiences. As co-creators in a collective field, as students and mentors, as participants, we all collaborate to bring the storyworld to life: this requires tools, practice, failure and gratification. As such, developing our creative agency is a form of critical pedagogy, as described by bell hooks: “Critical pedagogy seeks to transform consciousness, to provide students with ways of knowing that enable them to know themselves better and live in the world more fully” (hooks, 1994).

How

Reshuffling the traditional film hierarchy

By giving autonomy to the teams of environment artists (here production designers and sound designers), we can create richer sensorial spaces that can be enriched by narrative elements and that can enrich the narration alike. They do this by integrating elements initiated in scenographic, or sound inspiration, and vice versa, by layering the environment with the tangibilia and evocations that are necessary for the narration to unfold. I have further described this dialogue between narration, production design, and sound design in the case study of Nostalgia’s set in the article ‘Storydiving: techniques for engaging 360 narratives’ for the ISEA conference (Lipsyc, 2019).

For whom

Norwegian audience, larpers, film/arts people

With such high-production value sets came the urgency to open the project to as many people as possible: my colleagues at DNF (staff, teachers, students), locals in Lillehammer, and larpers and artists willing to take the trip for a 6 hours long experience. While 6 hours seem very long to non-larpers (which is one of the reasons why I wrote shorter tiers of experience), for larpers, used to playing for days, it seems too short of an experience to justify traveling to another city. In this particular situation, we find ourselves in an example of the problem of producing expensive art forms that have not yet found their large audience. It thus becomes necessary to attract a new audience to onboard through moderate and educational situations that unfortunately discourage the niche audience.

What

Exploring VR

Discovering the VR native softwares, I was blown away by how intuitive and much potential there is. They’ve inspired my projects ever since: there are so many creative tools to create and use, beyond the design of a singular experience. Like any bidding artform, it takes practitioners to refine the device and to invent tools and processes to create . This was also the beginning of a long exploration of Social VR, which opened me the doors of rapid prototyping using pre-existing spaces and avatars.

Departing from the readings to treat aesthetics as a form of knowledge

The 19th century art theorist Konrad Fiedler developed a vision of art as a "form of knowledge".For Fiedler, to make art is to develop knowledge in ways other than through science or language. It means integrating an understanding of the world through the body and aesthetics. For him, art is not about pleasure: it's about knowledge. (Collet, 2015)

This is in line with my ideal approach to artistic research: questioning concepts through art. As such, I did take a shift from philosophical or epistemological explorations of "reality" or of "immersion" or "interaction" that are intertwined with the state of the art, in favor of the understanding that comes from making art, playing with it, and sharing it. I became increasingly more preoccupied with relating what could be revealed by an aesthetic experience than about working out a theory in the midst of academic controversy.