Act 4 - DESPAIR

2020

I spent more than a year and a half without leaving Lillehammer, and the quaint city feels like it won’t provide me with the encounters I need to thrive in Norway, both professionally and personally. Regretfully, I leave the forest that grows thickly around the river Mesna, a place where I felt a rare sense of belonging, and I move in with a friend in Oslo. 

At that time, I wonder: if cultural funding is unreachable to me, how can I get closer to VR creation? How can I approach effectively seeing sets, story and interaction from within VR and let them reshape my understanding of the medium instead of speculating forever about its potentials?

There is no software that I can use on my own to set up the scenes and interactions that I need, but I can certainly conceptualize what such a tool would be. I thus briefly investigate a more industrial road and develop the idea of a tool for non-programmers to create VR participatory experiences: a VR Blackbox.

This time coincides with VRChat releasing a new programming language, and I feel that my craft lays more on the side of concepts than that of technical development. More truthfully, I convince myself that I would run out of breath very fast if I were to dive into learning how to maneuver a game engine. Such resistance to developing technical proficiency is something I am always inviting my students to dispute. Children manage to pull off some elaborate level design out of similar programs, but somehow I am still resisting it for myself. 

Nostalgia replayed the constitutive aspirational memories of love, comfort and glory that fed the characters’ desire to cheat their fate. Then, Disillusion violently broke the spell to state through its morbid revelation that the future cannot be a reenactment of the past. The characters themselves are not who they used to be, and they only remember the outer layer of their past identity. Following the classic time-travel paradox, if they were to go back in time and replay their own story, it would never be identical, for they have changed with each additional hour of life, each question, thought or interaction. 

Stripped of their misled quest for a miracle fueled in a fantasized past, having invested their last purse of energy in a cold, wet and threatening adventure, realizing they are surrounded with people they do not identify with and certainly do not admire, our characters enter Despair.

In 2022-23, my last year of fellowship, A.I. projects and discussions arrived like an all-encompassing gust, seizing completely the digital world. I reconsider the impact of tools — VR Blackbox and creative A.I. alike — that are constantly aiming at simplifying technical creation. Technology and design are often an answer to the desire of making our life and pursuits more comfortable and more accessible, but we rarely ask: should every activity truly be as easy as possible?

By automating creation based on ideas or “prompts”, we certainly allow more people to put artistic content out, and for more artistic content to be produced altogether.

I wonder then: must we all be constantly producing without even taking notice of the technology we are engaging with? Must we choose between realizing our artistic visions (liberated from technical imperatives) and opposing mass-production?

Arendt warns us against disconnecting ourselves from forming opinions, Anders points at the gap between our involvement in technology and our understanding of it, and Benjamin urges us to see that unreflected streams of self-expression are a machine for fascism. Rather than being defeated by the fear of future technological dystopias and times of crowd passivity, we can hear it as a call to stay active and involved when dealing with technology, with arts and with politics. 

“Rather than distancing ourselves from how things work and rather than constructing inconspicuous technologies, we can learn to keep discomfort, emotions and difficulties part of human-computer interactions. In fact, our human limitations and anxiety must remain part of the future if we want the future to have room for humans.” (Lipsyc, “Comments on VR and larp”)

This Act is set in the darkest setting of the journey. Words from the characters' very own farewell notes are scattered around, either as returned letters from the players, old recordings from players of previous runs, or graffiti inspired by the later. As a transitional space, Despair is meant to allow the players to uncover the darkest side of their aspirations in order to enter the next act, Truth. The dark and droning soundtrack is meant to push the characters into a painful, arduous place. There is no shortcut in one’s personal journey towards Truth and the route that takes us away from denial often involves unprecedented amounts of suffering.

2021

For a long time, a time that seems interminable, all I find myself capable of doing is trying to explain, better, more thoroughly, more literally, what that VR larp would be like if it ever came to life. It becomes some sort of purely speculative design, or design fiction, with the exception that someone could actually come across the project and be able to help its realization.

For this purpose, I wrote a fictionalized and simplified walkthrough of the experience that you can read here (Annexe V). The dialogue is only inspired by some previous runs of the larp; it is not a direct transcription, as opposed to the players quotes scattered throughout this text. It isn’t a voice over nor a script, but a representation of how the VR larp could play out. As such, the words are not finely laced together nor are they wishful outcomes for the larp; they are purely indicative of what could occur.

These many documents that I have accumulated: pages and pages of speculation, prediction, fictional budgets, timelines, provisional teams, have been a research on its own. A difficult exercise of definition, explanation, seduction, strategizing, vulgarization, that is common to any “innovative” project and that ended up feeling like an alienating chimera. 

After the phone call, after all the discussions that were held, can the characters find a way back to the fantasy? 

Is that inward route truly the preferable alternative to Despair? 

The phone call reassesses the way out that the Chamber is supposed to offer, and the players are back to questioning whether they indeed want that exit - and what this abruptly formed new life would be like. Should they get immensely rich, would they know how to act and exist in that wealth? Should they get the validation they seek, would they know how to renew their drives? Hannah Arendt in her essays on Revolution marks the difference between liberation and freedom; the drive to be liberated informs very little about what desires are shaped once one is free, and very often, we find ourselves stuck in action paralysis or reverting to enslavement. This question is true for those who seek a miracle: what would they do once that miracle has been accomplished, with their life lifted from the one struggle they had their entire focus on? 

In 2021, the pandemic lifestyle eases up, marking my return to participatory play and community practices. I join the organizing team of the yearly Nordic Larp conference Knutpunkt, organize its digital branch and join the editorial team along with Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Together, we edit the companion book to the conference called “Book of Magic, vibrant fragments of larp practices”, which comprises 400 pages of articles around the vast theme of “magic”. Magic as game mechanics, as community practice, as power-from-within, as technology, as rituals, as transformation, etc… (Kvittingen Djukastein, Irgens, Lipsyc and Løveng Sunde, 2021).

The text that stayed with me the most is Thibault Schiemann’s manifesto “Magic in Infinite Mystery,” which interestingly does not use the word “larp” nor refer to the practice whatsoever. It does, however, summarize what participatory art practices can do to relate to the world through playfulness, deep listening, presence and engagement.

“Imagine magic as a relationship towards the world. Imagine it as a way to relate to the world in every situation with the secret vow on your lips: I allow magic to emerge. That relationship is tied to an experience of how it feels to be in this world: an experience of wonder, of curiosity, of openness, of humbleness — because we are small and the world is vast.” (Schiemann, 2021, 24-25). 

At this time, many artists are shyly returning to their medium, making sense of how to socialise and how to deal with world events. The Nordic larp community in particular comprises groups from Belarus and Ukraine, and for the first time in its history, people around me see many of their friends and collaborators having to flee their countries, being imprisoned, suffering tragic losses and dealing with the aftermaths of a dictatorial repression of liberty. I contemplate “community”, seeing the efforts deployed in supporting its members beyond borders and beyond what’s comfortable. 

Through this contemplation comes a realization — something perhaps obvious that however struck me with a newfound clarity: larp is a community,  not simply a form. The sort of participation, willingness to engage generously in play, to lift (Vejdemo, 2018) one another’s journey, to debrief (Fatland, 2013), and integrate (Bowman and Hugaas, 2019) together the experience, to connect and create by steering (Montola, Stenros and Saitta, 2015) and strengthening an alibi (Nordic larp wiki, n.d.), is a community practice. As such, it cannot be simply transposed to other groups. To larp as larpers do requires steps towards the creation of community, education, and some level of kinship.

Quotes from Act 4’s players, session 5, Lillehammer.

The players have entered Despair and struggle to speak over the loud sound. A flashback announcement interrupts them.

Narrator

Flashback scene: Scout’s nightmare. Scholar plays the Judge, the other players are the dead family of Scout. They all have testified against Scout, telling the (false) stories of how they have murdered them.

Judge/Scholar

You now have a chance to speak for yourself, Scout.

Scout

I have nothing to say… nothing I could say matters.

Judge/Scholar

Very well, I will thus call upon your sentence. Spouse, children, come around Scout.

Theher players leave their podium and stand in a circle around Scout.

Judge/Scholar

I now want you to turn your back to Scout. For eternity.

One by one, all the players turn their back to Scout. Scout crumbles and falls on the floor.

That same year, I participated in the workshop “Decolonizing Artistic Research,” hosted online by John-Paul Zaccharini from Uniarts (Zaccharini, 2021). The readings and discussions are enriching and confrontational: they do not let me hide behind my taste for Russian existentialism and Japanese aesthetic discourse. Through discussing concretely how artistic practices can be more auspicious towards decolonial creation, I find that some themes are correlated to larp: horizontality, co-creation, and creating spaces of deep listening. These qualities are indebted to feminists and queer activists that have been a part of  larp culture. Larp, however, used these tools to mostly reenact Western and white canons.

I wrote a summary of my thoughts (Annexe XIV) in the form of an action plan after the week of exchange. A plan that I am still far from being able to fully apply in all my projects. It did, however, motivate me enough to keep working on it, and to fight for prioritizing certain aspects of development (for instance, what sort of avatars players have access to).

End of Act 4: Preoccupations of this stage of the design

Why

To find a sense of belonging

International community practices allow us to rekindle a sense of belonging in a globalized society. If not in the real community, participatory storyworlds are the stage of temporary autonomous communities in which we can experience belonging through a functional, well integrated character — in a society where belonging is more accessible. 

How

Creating tools for non-developers

Easing up the technical proficiency needed to develop VR experiences seems to me like the best way to free the creativity of the many content-creators that cannot access industrial fundings. I later revised this view, advocating for tools that retain technological transparency and entail a progressive learning curve, in order to allow users to educate themselves on the technologies they are using.

Speculative design

Without substituting the importance of creating with the material, the thought experiment of full speculation is an important creative step, and an exercise in communication. “Speculative projects occupies a space between reality and the impossible, a space of dreams, hopes, and fears. It is an important space, a place where the future can be debated and discussed before it happens so that, at least in theory, the most desirable futures can be aimed for and the least desirable avoided” (Dune &Raby, 2013). How far can we dream our projects, and what ingenious solutions can we build to represent what those creations would be like?

For whom, what

At this point of the research, I do not know.