Recently, I was up late at night watching Jackass 2. You should know that I consider this to be an important part of my job at VR Playhouse. In one of the film’s stunts, the team had built a full pipe that they were trying to ride using what looked like a tiny, two-stroke pocket bike. The sequence mainly consisted of riders falling, over and over, taking their trademarked joy in their own pain. And then one of them pulled off the trick, riding this toy motorcycle all the way around the loop-dee-loop and, presumably, on to glory.
It made me think about one of the more famous moments in skateboarding history. It happened at the 1999 X Games, when legendary skater Tony Hawk landed the first ever 900 in competition. It was a cool moment made exceedingly more dramatic by the way in which it was done. Hawk would fail ten times before landing it. He would exceed the time allotted to each skater in competition, basically forcing the contest to suspend its own rules by allowing him to continue trying. He persisted through brutal fall after brutal fall, drenched in sweat, determined to keep doing this thing until he figured it the fuck out. And then he did.
The concept of “repetition with revision” is sort of a basic one. Life, in many cases, is about doing the same thing over and over, making subtle revisions along the way that hopefully accumulate over time and equal growth, learning, evolution. It’s not only a part of our stories—heroic protagonists like Hawk persevering and enduring—it’s part of the way storytellers build these stories. The playwright Suzan Lori-Parks, for example, is a noted practitioner of “rep and rev,” turning bits of writing into a kind of repeating and constantly shifting, choral refrain. Interestingly, more and more these days, repetition with revision is also a part of how audiences engage with stories. A huge portion of our storytelling servings now comes in game form and gameplay is built on repetition and revision, on the idea of repeatedly moving through a story so as to master those moves. Sometimes that repeatable move is simple—the timing of one push of one button. Sometimes, it’s a dizzying combination, requiring a lot of repetition and a lot of revision to get you to t
he end of the story.
This ability to enter into a narrative world over and over again and to explore it to the point that you comprehensively understand it—you master it—is now a very real desire and one that virtual reality inherently fulfills in nifty ways. As a storytelling platform, 360 VR is unique in that its design ensures you will miss things. You can’t be looking everywhere at all times. And so any story in VR presents itself as a kind of puzzle. It demands repetition and revision; a gradual understanding of where to look and when, creating a combination of moves that unlocks the puzzle and wins you the game.
It’s sometimes easy to know when you’ve unlocked that puzzle and won. You spin around two and a half times in mid-air and land back on your board. You beat the boss. You save Princess Toadstool. Sometimes, though, it’s harder. It’s not clear yet what it means to master a story, to win at a story. It’s not even clear if “winning a story” is even something we should be striving for or if it instead debases the whole meaning of story by suggesting an objective right and wrong. But it is becoming clear that virtual reality will provide some answers. And that’s exciting.
Very nice depth 😉