Act 3 - DISILLUSION
As the sets get torn out, only 2 months into their grandiose existence, and as I crash as a result of the amount of work that holding this production together was, I wonder: can Lone Wolves Together ever get out of its tangible chrysalis and turn into a VR project? I don’t wonder about the design: its audiovisual nature, interactivity, surreal components, all of it was conceived to embrace VR potentials. What I am concerned about is how producible it will be: will it ever match a producer’s interests? Although the premise is relatively simple — an expedition is in search of a wish-machine — the story uncoils intricate themes (e.g., philosophy, esoterism, psychology, existentialism), uncanny aesthetics, on top of the vulnerability of roleplaying. What makes it such auspicious soil for reflection and experimentation is precisely what makes it such a hard sell to industrial producers.
June 2019
Biosphere releases the Senja recordings; a collection of field recordings from the Norwegian island of Senja. The distortions, the granularity, the palette of soft dark touches, the space that is perceptible through the soft reverb behind the electronic sounds (or through the wind) give me a sense of belonging throughout a difficult, dry year.
After the softness, the numbness and the protectiveness coming from a gust of Nostalgia, the players arrive in an intricate, impractical and noisy space. Acute angles, impossible acoustics, raising sounds of some abandoned industrial processes, the area is meant to wake them up from the dreampop space they just visited. Up until now, sets were built in a familiar way - following classic architecture rules, those that evolved from answering human bodies and instincts, from aiming to create feelings of safety, comfortable acoustics. The feeling we unconsciously get in such buildings is that the place was more or less intended as a shelter for a body like ours. Ironically, most social VR spaces mimic those principles, they use scales that allow users to easily see their surroundings, find a corner, a window or a cozy alcove to secure themselves a familiar and safe position in space. In this experience, the Disillusion set, although appearing human-built, was not meant for human bodies to feel safe or taken into consideration.
At the end of 2019, after almost a year of attempting to raise more funds and find partners, DNF grants me 40000 kr to work on a prototype. I use this research money to team up with Danish VR production company Makropol, technical artist and VR pioneer Rikke Jansen as well as artist Dlareme on a prototype (see the script there, Annexe VII).
The team meets for a 3-day development session in collaboration with the Sort/Hvit theater in Copenhagen. All of the participants work at very reduced rates. After a lot of debating, compromising and sacrificing, we decide to work with the Oculus Quest 1 and Unreal engine. Some of the technical and ethical dilemmas at stake upon deciding which technologies to use are summarized in this document (Annexe XI), which my supervisors Christy Dena (whose comments are visible in the document) and Bjarne Kvinnsland helped me unpack.
This first experience of developing for Quest proves to be rocky: the pipeline is quite different from PC VR, and the network technology is challenging. For instance, we need to limit as much as possible the number of polygons, simplifying shapes and scenes, which is an aesthetic dilemma when seeking to create a sensation of being “lost in the woods”. Rikke Jansen finds the solution of creating simple yet sinuous trees and fills the space with a fog shader. Eventually, we realized we wouldn’t be able to create a multiplayer experience in these 3 days of work, and that our documentation would be video-based rather than a functioning prototype. Although not having a functional prototype meant we couldn’t prove our concept to peers and funders, it allowed Dlareme to add a shader in post production to the trees that made them look as though some shiny sap was traveling at high speed from the ground to their peak. The results of this experiment are gathered in yet another document (Annexe VIII). Although the prototype turns out to be unplayable, the screengrabs merge nicely with the videos from the physical sets and with scenes from Stalker, giving us a hopeful glimpse of what a VR experience could feel like.
During this development session, we also tested pre-play workshops designed to navigate roleplaying, both physically and virtually. The workshops are meant to help the players to get comfortable with getting into character and to develop a bigger full-body expressivity. We thus start by training to roleplay blind-folded, relying only on a sensation of presence and on voice, then we train to roleplay with a mask, adding general body language to the voice.
The term teleabsence (Friesen 2014) categorizes the lack of bodily flow of information that prevents us from fully understanding and enjoying one another online: I cannot look you directly in the eyes, sense the warmth of your skin when we are close, see a chest inflate and deflate or perhaps catch onto a loud deglutition. All of these clues are what allow us to react to one another in subtle and intimate ways. In this sense and as of now, VR is more mediated: there is a stronger need to represent or magnify our emotions if we want to convey them. Much like roleplaying with masks, our body language doesn’t disappear, but we must make it bigger to be understood. Although we can get accustomed to it with practice, and although some can experience phantom touch, it is undeniable that VR larping takes us away from these finely sensual encounters and confabulations.
However, it can be intimate, raw, and strange too (Lipsyc, 2024).
At this time, my struggles with seeking out funding opportunities and partners is widely shared by the other PhD fellows of DNF who are also investigating VR or film as experimentalists. The ceaseless discussion around funding is the nervous droning undertone of all our research meetings, year after year. Entering our creative space seems so arduous — in particular compared to artists of other fields — that it makes us question the artistic research model for collaborative and expensive forms. Among these countless discussions, meetings, and brainstorming sessions, I started an exchange with producer and then industrial PhD candidate Camilla Jaller from Makropol, and producer and PhD fellow at DNF Frederick Howard. Our views on artistic research sometimes differ greatly, but we all see the need to formalize the tensions experienced as artistic researchers in our expensive artforms. Our goal was to explain what a juggling act we’re trying to put up when dealing with experimental art, critical thinking, and production at the same time. This exchange is summed up in a peer-reviewed article published in the International Journal of Film and Media Arts, which allowed me to formulate a lot of my struggles navigating the sociolects, responsibilities and expectations of different fields and different modes of collaboration.
“(...) it seems that the contract between the arts institution and the art-researcher is the following: the arts institution shields the art-researcher from the constraints of the commercial world that vastly prevent experimentation, so she can produce fresh, highly qualitative material and disruptive knowledge, knowledge that can ultimately be reinjected in education, and at the same time add momentum and acceleration to the growing field of practice. However, in film and new media, the creative utopia can appear to be a house of cards, ready to collapse as soon as the question of production is raised.” (Lipsyc, Jaller & Howard, 2020)
Being a paid artistic researcher is an incredible privilege. However, my ability to enjoy this privilege erodes a little as I see the door towards VR creation — what I first perceive as my central material and field — vanishing further away in my selva oscura. As the pandemic strikes, I return to reading and writing, and plunge fully in the extensive player feedback I got from running Lone Wolves Stick Together in the film sets. 37 of my 60ish players fill up the form.
Newcomers to larp found the experience of roleplaying to be extremely engaging and intense: some discovered the ability to shape a story and feel creative gratification from it, some experiment for the first time with “other ways of being” (again, the alibi), and some feel more immersed than in other forms of fiction. This excitement is similar to what I remember when starting to larp as a teenager. Despite years without roleplaying, I always returned to the practice, haunted by the idea I had been another version of myself and I had visited a remote land. As validating as it can feel to receive that sort of laudatory feedback, confined in my flat with the only presence of the snowy hills of Lillehammer, I start questioning if this is the outcome I’m aiming for with my own work.
There can be a certain culture of contentment and positivity in film and audiovisual production, in particular regarding more commercial productions: if a piece is fulfilled, if people are seemingly happy, then we ought to praise the work and move on. Artistic research however can embrace a bit of a critical tangent: what do we seek to accomplish beyond delivering a somewhat coherent result?
From players who are seasoned larpers, I get the feedback that the aesthetic experience of being in narrative sets oiled their ease to play and added elements of surprise and joy tied to feeling invited in a privileged space. Again, while I can connect with that sentiment, I also consider whether fostering that pleasure is what I seek the most.
Ironically, the central themes of the larp — the questioning our relation to desire, to artificial paradise, to solitude and loneliness — are present in the feedback, but on a more distant shore than the sensationalism mentioned above.
During this act, a broken phone revives and rings in the middle of those ruins, on the side of the group from the future. The message carries the news of the tragic fate of the character Guide, letting the group from the past hear about what should be ahead of them. It is the main event of the larp.
Hi, is this Scout?
I’m a trainee under Guide’s supervision. Or so was I.
They killed themselves. We found their body behind the bar. I’m calling because they mentioned you in their suicide letter.
They wrote: “Tell Scout not to enter the Chamber, it doesn’t work. Whatever horrors you did to your family, it won’t fix it. I tried to save my brother, it didn’t work. All it brought me was money; tons of it. Do you really think you can live with who you really are? Because that’s what the Chamber will bring you: the nasty things you truly want, not what you want to become, or what you think you want to change.” That’s it for me.
Players are free to choose how their character interprets the messages from the Woods and decide whether this was prophetic, a glitch, a farce or a metaphor. However, in all cases this act brings the idea that the wishing machine might not fulfill one’s most conscious wish, but perhaps, one’s least flattering one. The event is meant to have the characters discuss the question “do you trust your wants?” or rather “have you tended to the least flattering of your desires?”. This is a crucial part of the journey, generally changing radically the attitude of the players.
Ever since I started exploring the potential of digital immersion (with 3D, neuro-immersion, projections, and then VR), I have felt thrilled by its potentials in relation to larp. The possibilities for individual and collective presence, human and computer interaction, spatial creation, and so on. But now I question how much of this intoxicating feeling comes from sensing those burgeoning creative opportunities, and how much comes from the idea, that larp is perhaps the best vessel to birth an immersive mass media?
Gunther Anders, who studies our relation to technique knowledge in the industrial age, warns us about working with technology. He warns that developing technologies based on intellectual curiosity will inevitably lead to the technology realizing its potential. Nuclear physics were doomed to lead to the nuclear bomb, developing cameras paved the road to surveillance society, and working with roleplaying in VR is indistinguishable from pushing the world closer to an immersive hyper-engaging paradise.
“So this is the basic dilemma of our age: we are smaller than ourselves. In other words, we are incapable of creating an image of something that we ourselves have made. To this extent we are inverted Utopians: whereas Utopians are unable to make the things they imagine, we are unable to imagine the things we make.” (Anders, 1981, 96)
Although I thankfully do not have the pretension of contributing to something of the magnitude of nuclear technology, I am aware that media makers like myself are smaller than themselves. They’re often unable to grasp the implication of their work and the technologies they champion. But if we’re not the ones doing it, won’t it be someone with worse intentions? Oppenheimer famously answers in interviews that if they (him and his team, the USA, the non-nazis) didn’t develop the atomic bomb, then others would have first - which we now know to be true, with at least 9 countries having their own nuclear technologies. Yet won’t the time we spend intimately relating to the technology and its development change us, the way it might have changed the team working on the A/H-bomb into thinking the world needed a power demonstration even after Hitler’s death?
As I will be far away from my family and friends for the foreseeable future, unable to physically attend any conference or networking event for over a year and a half, I start thinking of another project; a producible project, more clearly rooted in an ethical pursuit. What VR story could use that sensationalism as a commercial argument, while being accessible to an audience beyond artistic research and while exploring important themes? What did I want to contribute with, using my material of choice: immersion and participation?
Despite pandemics, wars, and revolutions flourishing everywhere, the urgency of our time seems to be to ensure that our planet stays healthy enough to maintain abundant life. As the confinement slowed us all down into a contemplative stasis, many of us reroute our practice towards this concern.
“Nature was the place of victory. In the natural environment, everything had its place, including humans. In that environment everything was likely to be shaped by the reality of mystery. There dominator culture (the system of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy) could not wield absolute power. For in that world, nature was more powerful. Nothing and no one could completely control nature. In childhood I experienced a connection between an unspoiled natural world and the human desire for freedom.” (hooks, 2009, 8)
A year before, I had been reading The Dispossessed (1974) by Ursula Le Guin, a Sci-Fi novel that opposes a hyper-hedonistic future Earth and an anarchist human colony that had settled on an exoplanet. As hopes of space conquest are a popular cop-out from our ecological distress, and as left and right ideologies seem ever more irreconcilable, I find The Dispossessed both immanent and inspiring. In particular, in its way of approaching very unappealing situations of dispossession and discomfort instead of describing unrealistic utopias. The dilemmas and the beauty are plentiful on both planets; but one is free and the other one is a prison.
Inspired, I team up with VR artist Rikke Jansen and VR architect Kim Bauman Larsen, as well larpwright and ecology activist Martin Nielsen, to create an ecofuturistic VR larp-like experience that we later named The Space Between Us.
After the ecological collapse of Earth, two siblings find themselves on two different planets. All communication has been lost between the two worlds, but their bond allows them to defy the impossible and meet in their dreams.
We consult in an informal way with marine biologists, urbanists, sustainability experts, and develop a cosmogony around water. There is the predicted flooded Oslo city center, the preserved biodiversity of an underground river, and the hydroponics potentials on a deserted planet.
New Oslo is one of the last remaining megacities of Earth: crowded, worn out, over
modernized, piled up, and flooded. An important space mission for Exos, a planet located in a neighboring solar system, takes an unexpected turn, and two siblings – Kim and Mik – get separated. One will try to build up a life on Exos, while the other will strive to revive one in New Oslo.
The line of my research is maintained by exploring similar methods as I have with Lone Wolves Stick Together: character sheets, creating relations between players so they can roleplay, alternating moments of roleplay and collective narration to moments of individual experience and introspection (ritornello), playing both with surround soundscapes and intimate sounds, and conjuring filmic aesthetics. My main design intentions are twofold: I particularly want to explore the possibility of using roleplaying as a means to train our ability to form opinions, and, I also want to demonstrate VR affordances by constructing the game as an anthology of mini-gameplays.
The Space Between Us alternates between scenes of individual adventure with each player being on a different planet, and scenes of roleplaying, in their dreams.
Description of the first time in Dreamland:
In Dreamland, Kim and Mik can build “their perfect world” together. There are pieces of wood, branches, pipes, elements of settings from both their realities that they can grab and pile. A big construction book is here to give them ideas of things to build:
“Try to build up your perfect home. What would you pick to represent the building? The surroundings?”
“Try to build up a theme park. What would you pick to represent the main attraction? The entrance?
“What else would you put in your perfect world? Pick up object, build and tell Kim/Mik about it”
After a little while, the place and players microphones get blurry and faint, until it all fades to black and the narrator’s voice says: “You’re not sure what else happened that day, or how you ended up in your bed, but you fell asleep with an infinitely lighter heart. Knowing Kim/Mik was alright. Knowing that you hadn’t lost them. “
After the years of exploration, the VR-native identity of the project is stronger than it was for Lone Wolves Stick Together. For instance, we use Tilt Brush (VR-native 3D painting software) and Quill (VR-native hand-painted animation software) to create immersive paintings that would serve as cut scenes. The player is therefore able to navigate through moments frozen in time, moving in between the static characters and sets to discover more of the scene. We also make full use of the intuitive potentials of VR controllers: grabbing, twisting, rescaling, etc. As an example, to find each other in Dreamland, Kim and Mik must synchronize their hands through a portal that allows them to peek into the other’s reality.
Mini gameplay: Kim and Mik are seated and see each other as a toddler. Between them, are a bunch of differently sized and shaped blocks, that they can grab and pile up. On the side, there is a kids’ book, on which they can see construction models. (a castle, a skyscraper, a spaceship, etc)
If they try to speak using their mic, the only sound that goes out is a “bah buh boh” (baby gibberish). The mouth of their avatar will be clearly animated, and the mic icon will show activity. The narrator will tell them: “You had so much to say to each other, but none of you could speak yet.”
We receive an external grant from CEFIMA and develop a prototype. During our three-day jam, we manage to represent the two worlds and have a two-player interface. One world is a flooded view of Oslo’s famous neighborhood, Barcode, in shades of blue, and the other one is the spaceship wreck on a barren desert land, in shades of red. In a developed version, The Space Between Us will have elements of world exploration and vehicles: a skiff to navigate the flooded streets of New Oslo, and a hoverboard to levitate around the dust of Exos. Shortly after releasing our first prototype, we get selected to participate in the Cannes XR development showcase — seemingly, going in the right direction to become producible. The production workload became so heavy that year I lower my percentage of research to 50%, and take on an official VR producer role at Evil Doghouse AS, stretching my research time from 4 years to 6. Despite the international attention, our production efforts repeatedly hit walls as Norwegian public funds reject the project several years in a row.
The greatest disillusionment of artistic research has been the realization that new media cannot exist away from the industry and its own commercial and ideological agenda, even within the privileged fortress of artistic research.
In L’esthétisation du monde, vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste, Lipovetsky and Serroy state that “we have entered the strategic and mercantile stage of the aestheticization of the world (...) after the art-for-the-Gods, the art-for-the-Princes and the-art-for-the-Art, modern capitalism has developed and art-for-the-Market” (Lipovetsky and Serroy, 2013). Following that logic, where creative risks are almost systematically shut down, I wonder whether any artistic research in new media will ever get the industrial funding its form requires, whether I will ever fulfill any of these creative visions in their raw, slow, unfamiliar forms?
End of Act 3: the preoccupations of this stage of the design process
Why
Training ourselves to make decisions
As pointed at by Hannah Arendt, and other thinkers interested in the massification of mankind, fascism and other forms of domination thrive when individuals are stripped from their ability to form opinions and take political actions. “[T]he loss of the capacity for political action is the central condition of tyranny” (Arendt, 1954, 313).
Games can train habits, in particular our sense of gratification — by creating resilient gameplays that normalize and value the necessity to make narrative and moral decisions, we invite players to practice awareness and courage. It is probably not a coincidence that Umberto Eco, another notorious opponent to fascism, came to a similar conclusion: “The value of an aesthetic experience is determined today not by the way a crisis is resolved but rather the way in which, after propelling us into a sequence of known crises determined by improbability, it forces us to make a choice. Confronted by disorder, we are then free to establish temporary, hypothetical systems of probability that are complementary to those systems that we could also, eventually or simultaneously, assume.” (Eco, 1989, 80)
Facilitating connection
At this point, I want my work to be grounded in the world, and how our times of weakened collectivities create a craving for community and connection that playful practices can (at least partly) fulfill. Other than an important aspect of the human experience, connection is also part of the aesthetic experience of roleplaying: how we bond and feel in such an accelerated way, through borrowed identities and stories.To facilitate connection in a context that goes beyond crowds that specifically seek it, requires to provide potent and safe alibi. In The Space Between Us, this is the relation between siblings, which spans a lifetime of shared games and experiences. Siblinghood can be depicted as a place of closeness and intimacy, but also of intense play and relaxation.
How
Progressive gameplay
Aiming to ground the experience in the world also means it can be a tool for the player to acquire skills, using a progressive gameplay. A progressive gameplay relies on introducing cumulatively new elements into the experience, and/or increasing the difficulty — much like any other form of pedagogy. In this case, The Space Between Us aims to develop decision-making (the game demands that the players make impactful choices), executive skills related to VR functions (a lot of gameplay is centered around what hand movements can achieve in VR), and social/roleplaying skills (through developing a siblinghood and collaborating with another player).
Resilient gameplay
By allowing the experience to remain interesting and critical regardless of players choices, we convey the message that there isn’t a single road to a successful narrative (and by extension a successful life). This is similar to the narrative design choices of the crpg Disco Elysium: when a player fails a dice roll, the outcome of their failure remains narratively interesting. The rewards aren’t status or accumulation of resources, they are narrative and aesthetics content.
For whom
Gamers
In 2020, the main population to use VR is likely to be gamers, the year where popular franchise Half-Life releases a VR title which adds about one million VR users to Steam registry (Lang, 2020). Considering the size of the VR market then, it is a sufficient motivation to develop a game for gamers.
What
Creating more approachable games
Developing critical ideas that are only reachable by peers (other artists, other VR experimentalists), generally already sensible to those questions, is not conducive to impact or research. One could argue that artistic research is research by artists and for artists, but at this time of my fellowship, I attempted to explore themes and aesthetics appealing to a broader audience.