I saw “Death Of A Salesman” for the first time at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1997. I was 16 years old and just starting to stumble into what it meant to be an adult and as I watched Willy Loman, crumbling under the weight of so many different familial and societal pressures, miraculously, I started to recognize myself. I saw myself in that 63 year old salesman and in that 50 year old play. And so even though the play is a tragedy, I didn’t walk away sad. I was instead reassured because I knew that the same fears I was just then facing lived in everyone else too. I knew I wasn’t alone.
One of the great joys of interacting with art of any kind is the journey you take to find yourself in it, to uncover your own reflection there, as hidden as it may be, and so to see yourself as part of a new and greater whole. It occurs to me then that as we continue to wrestle with the notion of VR content, one thing to consider is that VR in large part eliminates this journey. We don’t have to conceptually find ourselves in a VR experience. We’re already inside.
By design, games address this by giving their participants specific intentions that then define a new kind of journey. And so it’s no surprise that games so far dominate virtual reality entertainment content. The other kind of popular content is experiential, or what a friend calls “You wouldn’t believe where I was” content. There are no intentions here other than to feel what it is to exist in a specific space―a mountaintop, a refugee camp, an alien spaceship, 10,000 leagues under the sea―and so no real journey. The question then is whether there is room for a third kind of content, one whose roots are in classic storytelling and one in which users can still be, first and foremost, an audience to a story.
Lots of content creators are taking their shot, that’s for sure, with much of the content structured around a conflict of what you’re seeing vs. what you’re not seeing and the related game of knowing where to look at any one time. But this approach misses a fundamental understanding that point of view isn’t just what a person sees but also what they dream and remember and imagine and believe. It is always extrasensory and as a storytelling medium, VR’s greatest potential strength is its ability to capture the totality of that interior life.
At the same time, immersion of this kind creates an intense sense of immediacy and a need to reckon with the environment in front of you and so we’re starting to see the way VR stories can instead structure themselves around the conflict between that environment and that interior life, between what we’re seeing and what we’re thinking. This then has ripple effects. For example, it eliminates the need for backstory, which exists to provide answers to questions that we’re now meant to answer ourselves. Dropping the viewer right into the middle of the action and allowing for a full exploration of their unique perspective and point of view to make their own sense of it instead becomes the new game.
Maybe VR is a little scary artistically then because it asks its audience to do the opposite of what they’re used to. They don’t have to find themselves in the story. They have to find their way out.
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