Act 5 - TRUTH

2022: The year of VR

In 2022 and out of the blue, after having limited access to VR, I organized two different VR larps and participated in a VR TV-series, both as a producer and as an actor/avatar pilot.

Until then, each act was introduced by an inner monologue whispering conflicting thoughts to the characters. Truth, however, has no other introduction than music, leaving the players alone with where they want to lead their characters. Every document, every briefing is meant to prepare the players to think of their character’s final decision, which takes place in this last act of roleplaying. The characters of Scout and Guide are also instructed to remind the other characters throughout the journey that they are approaching the Chamber, which one can only enter through Truth.

Miraculously, changes at the film school unlock funding for the PhD students, allowing me to hire help for another prototyping attempt, which marks the return to the development of Lone Wolves Stick Together VR. I team up with Breach VR, a company in Trondheim that developed its own multiplayer platform and comprises roleplaying enthusiasts, VR pioneers, and great sparring partners. Our back and forth leads to a new storyboard for the prototype, sketched by artist Ólöf Eyjólfsdóttir (Annexe X). 

As always with games and new technology, only a fraction of what’s intended can come to fruition. As an example, I recently took a group of students to visit the game studio Funcom, and our guide summed up pretty efficiently the life of game developers as “coming back in the morning to find that everything is broken, again”. 

Carl Svensson joins the team. We first test the soundscapes and spatial impressions from the cinema of The Norwegian Film School in Lillehammer, which is equipped with a surround sound system. We then position the sound sources on the game engine maps of each VR level for Breach to implement them. As ambisonics fold down to stereo, we retrieve a sense of spatiality when going from the surround setup to headphones. These few days of collaboration, exploring various approaches to mixing, further developed a research angle that I have been wanting to explore for a long time: how does one create a dense multilayered sound experience that will guide, inspire and challenge audience participation? 

Such a pursuit would require working with the anticipation of participants’ behavior by creating clues and trails, lacing-in elements of character identity and narrative themes, and working from the embodied impressions of being in a 360 synthetic environment. Future research could experiment with endogenous and exogenous sound,as well as with the overlap between spatial mixing and musical emergence — the narration being conceived both as an environmental story and as a character introspection. Such sound exploration would question the different levels of awareness and meta-awareness experiences of the players. What comes from the designer's anticipation? What is meant to paint a necessary state of mind for the narration to unfold? Can we juggle these questions while treating the soundscape (indissociable from “the Woods”) as a living character of its own?

Overview of the sound work in all the sets of the prototype:

• The bar has an ambient soundtrack, as well as more distant sound sources, localized behind both exits - perhaps a train, perhaps a cattle. This stretches the space and reinforces the contrast between inside the bar and outside.
• The soundscape in Doubts soundscape translates this sensation of getting a bit more remote from civilization: the players can still hear similar sounds as in the bar, but with darker tones and more intrusions of natural elements (birds, branches, etc).
• Nostalgia shifts into clearer music, coming from inside the building, with some piano notes. Just like it did in the physical sets of Nostalgia during the film studios larp in 2019, the ambiguity remains: is the piano playing itself, is it an invitation to play the piano or merely a sound illustration of the set? The fashbacks also come with their own variations in soundscapes and occasional sound design (champagne pop), which has proven to be the simplest and most efficient way to change the tone of the scene.
• From Disillusion onwards, an added sound theme starts being audible: the lancinating vibration of the Chamber, which we are getting closer to.
• Disillusion and Despair also have their sound events (the phone call, audible by all, the nightmare scene and a final flashback) as well as a couple of variations of the main soundscape. These variations allow the facilitator or GM (Game mMaster) to tweak the play’s atmosphere between heavier/lounder/more uncomfortable both for the character and for the player, and a clearer, lower atmosphere more conducive to discussion.
• Truth, finally, fully embraces the theme of the Chamber, piled up to the continuous sound of the fountain. The whole set is an homage to the iconic threshold of the Room in the film Stalker: despite being covered in dunes of sand, the space sounds watery and wet.

For the current versions of this experience, the final tape that the players listen to is a dark droning melody, supported by a repetitive sequence of 4 harpsichord notes. During this 5 minute soundtrack, the main variation is the volume of the different elements, creating no anticipation whatsoever for a breakthrough or a sudden musical revelation. The track is meant to be a support for the players to feel into their character’s journey and state. It is a bit too long to force a potential golden moment (the moment where something must come out of the lack of inspiration) and a bit too dark to thwart the common player's desire to opt for an easy resolution.

Visually, the sets take inspiration from all the previous iterations of Lone Wolves Stick Together. It also draws from the film Stalker by Tarkovsky, the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R by Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, a previous version of Lone Wolves Stick Together organized in a living-room,  Lone Wolves Stick Together organized in film sets, as well as the unique outlook of Breach VR’s team. Despite their simplicity, the sets combine the inspiration of all the artists that worked on it.

Lead developer Are Akselsen and I spent a lot of time discussing the interaction potentials. As always, most of what we wanted to implement didn’t make the cut: the diverse tools for the characters, the interaction with props, etc. However, the prototype has a functioning GM tool that allows me to teleport the whole group to the next set and to trigger sounds and soundscapes. In a future version, there would be an option to make players visible or not, and to change the lights in the same way that we can trigger sounds. Moreover, we could change the settings and the avatars within an act as to fit the flashback scenes.

On a couple of occasions, Martin Sivertsen (the creative director of Breach VR) and I talk about the possibility of mixing VR roleplaying with the emerging text-prediction A.I. He makes a quick test to recreate the discursive dynamic between the three characters of one expedition, and without much refinement, their interaction was quite convincing. It became immediately apparent to us that data-driven NPCs were soon to be the norm in digital roleplaying experiences. The emergence of such A.I. precipitated my reflections on  the possibility of an immersive mass media, which I further elaborate in the article Comments on VR and larp for the Solmuhbook 2024 (Lipsyc, forthcoming).

In autumn 2022, we finally playtest the larp, with a team of players from Breach VR: Ólöf Eyjólfsdóttir, Killian Garrus, Martin Sivertsen, Are Akselsen, Louai Al-bitar, and Killian Garrus.

The VR workshops are similar to those used in the physical larp (see Act 1), but shortened and simplified to keep the full experience under 2 hours. They go as follow:

• Players describe the outfit of their character (as their avatars are quite rudimentary)
• They discuss in groups, develop their character.
• We practice with the Great TV Debate.
• And play the final meditation.

In a future version, as described in the storyboard and in lieu of the farewell letter workshop from the original design, players will also record a vocal farewell message. Like the letters that reappeared in the physical larp during the act Despair, the sound files would be playable by activating some of the scribbles on the black walls of the VR eponym set.

Even more elaborate versions could allow for the different characters to have different in-game “abilities” and props: a pen that is only visible to Artist and Author would allow playing with  the idea of painting or writing on any surface. A camera for Scholar and Scientist would facilitate the documentation of anomalies. Guide and Scout could be able to message each other via trap diffusers, as described in the walkthrough document (Annexe V).

At the same time as these developments came to be, I sat down with Josefine Rydberg to discuss VR design. Josefine is an artistic research fellow at Uniarts Stockholm who works on VR and larp. We decided to develop a festival-friendly larp that would be easy to carry around and organize in different venues; something that is not possible with Lone Wolves Stick Together as it would require me to have and handle 7 different headsets.

Based on my exploration of VRChat, on some of the methods coming from Lone Wolves Stick Together (in particular the ritornello style of narration, the onboarding and workshop style and the attempts at creating a narrative and evocative atmosphere rather than a fully defined world), and thanks to Josefine’s luminous creative input, I write a new larp called Ancient Hours. 

Ancient Hours is a hybrid larp for two players with the following pitch: 2 demi-gods, Love and Memory, are being held captive by humans on different sides of the globe. They are being tortured and pressured into giving up some of their powers to their tormentors. Conjuring their joint abilities, they manage to meet in the memories of their love. You can read the design document, including character sheets and scenes descriptions here (Annexe IV).

The larp alternates scenes played in real life and scenes played in VR. In the physical space, characters are in a cell and interact with their tormentor (a NPC) and in VR, characters are in their shared memories and play together. The physical part of the larp is centred around symbolic torture that is represented by destroying the character’s costume: ripping off feathers that were personalized during the workshop, and progressively cutting the ribbon at their heart that symbolizes their character’s power. That intense sensorial play is meant to reinforce the violence of the physicality and contrast with the lightness of the VR play, which takes place in ethereal digital spaces.

Josefine and I organise a partial playtest as part of the larp festival Grenselandet in Oslo, then play the full version at The Smoke Festival in London. In both cases, technical issues out of our control (unreliability of the network) triple the length of the onboarding, but the player’s feedback is positive.

In 2022, other than through larp, I encounter new aspects of VR creation and roleplaying by working as a VR producer and a VR actor/pilot on the NRK series Dates in Real Life, directed by Jakob Rørvik and produced by Maipo film. This project has a much higher budget, uses PC VR, and has a team of high-end professional artists — which allows me to experience roleplaying in very different conditions. For instance, the avatars have full-body tracking (thanks to sensors at my waist and ankles), and more than 10 different facial expressions to juggle with.

Despite this, there is little immersion to be felt for me. Why? Because I am following very strict acting instructions and calculating which sequence of faces to put out. This is using what Rikke Jansen calls puppeteering: a finer way of controlling the motions and visible emotions of our avatar by assigning them to a variety of physical gestures that are recognized by controllers or sensors. 

I remember Rikke telling me, as someone who spends a lot of time socializing and creating in Social VR, that she got so used to doing a peace sign with her hands to get her avatar to smile that she now catches herself doing that as she smiles in real life. This is still very far from my relation to puppeteering, which feels more like intense console gaming even after a month of full time VR acting. 

It’s hard to describe the experience of spending so much time in VR spaces. Some days, the 8 hours shooting in epileptic VR clubs give me headaches and make me see blurry, and some days, the vast mediterranean sea that my character stares at is infinitely more lively and breathable than the dark film set we’re settled in. From my standpoint (safe, free, healthy/valid, in a wealthy country) I get a taste that some VR is certainly more appealing than some realities.

There is a lot to write and analyze about the fantastic creativity that was used to create a VR film set: having extras on different continents, a headset mounted on a camera rig, creating an invisible avatar for the cinematographer as well as local light that he could position to shift every scene, getting the first assistant director to give out instructions to the extras from a Discord server, waiting for the scenes to load, the clash between methods and expectations from the games industry and from the film industry etc…

To me, acting in these amazing sets with these amazing avatars did not feel more immersive or engaging than being in lower resolution and quality evocative spaces. There were moments where the facial expressions of Marvin — my character’s love interest — moved me (annoyance, tenderness, complicity), but playing against people with less refined avatars also triggered emotions. This got me thinking about how much we project onto people’s faces; there is so much that I see and interpret from these unintentional traits and these unchanging faces - the light jitters of the person behind the avatar. 

In the same line, when asked about his use of technology by music journal Fifteen Questions, electronic music experimentalist Aleksi Perälä says, “I use the simplest possible setup to get where I want to go. I’m not a very technical person. Machines excel at raw computing power and big data, humans excel at connecting spiritually.” When developing games and VR, I too believe where we want to go is more crucial than how much we can technically achieve. (Fifteen questions, n.d)

Here we are, at the threshold of the Chamber. The two expeditions merged into one and one by one, the characters enter or renounce the chamber. This act is the most transient moment of the experience: the place where the characters are briefly all what the players brought them to be. They can be this sum, precisely because a final decision awaits, precisely because they will cease to exist once the decision was made.

End of the Journey 

I repeated the premise of Lone Wolves Stick Together so often it’s reached a state of semantic satiation. Words have lost their meaning and return to the state of sound. Sometimes I have to take a second to recover what these sentences mean: two expeditions venture into mysterious Woods to find the Chamber, the place where their most intimate desire comes true. The experience builds up toward making that final decision: should I enter the Chamber, should I go back to my life and face its issues by other means?

It took me until the last time I wrote the name of this project in my application for a final PhD assessment, to understand how much of it is woven into the theme of belonging: to accept how much of larping, gaming, participatory play are nursed by a profound longing for belonging.

It took me until the final writing of this text to understand whether my research and my final project is the VR larp outcome. It is not; my research is a journey through our relation to creation, technology and community. A journey as a method, through different projects that explored physical and digital play alike, and a journey as an end.