To qualify in the somewhat generalised category of XR at the bare minimum, creators are expected to allow room for agency of navigation in a digital space. This is the baseline. However, it’s important to recognize that this is simply a minimum entry requirement and not a guarantee of success. In order to get anywhere close to a level of quality XR you also need engagement. “Engagement is all that matters. Engagement is Everything!” Palmer Luckey recently cried from the rooftops (of his blog). So how do we create engagement? What is engagement in the context of extended and virtual realities?
A simple definition would go something along the lines of this — engagement is when you interact with the world and in return the world interacts with you. But true engagement is not a single cause and effect occurrence: it is a cycle that breaks when one side does not return a satisfactory equal and opposite force. Pantomime functions as a perfectly crude example of this relationship: “oh, no it isn’t” is responded to in kind from the audience with, “oh, yes it is!” from now until the end of time.
AI Cannot Breathe
Unfortunately, this is an area in which XR will never be able to outdo immersive theatre and can only hope to imitate it. The reason for this is that the main tool for theatre’s interaction with its audience is a living breathing actor. Every performer has the freedom and ability to act, react, improvise and respond in ways that an advanced system (even in a sci-fi future) may never be able to match. However, as several makers are beginning to find out, there is room for this same tool in their XR.
Yes, and…
An example of this radical engagement at work is Draw Me Close, a co-production from the National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio and National Film Board of Canada. Created by Canadian theatre Director Jordan Tannahill, it draws heavily on one-to-one theatre. A single audience member and lone actor inhabit a physical space; the audience member wears a VR headset and sees the world (including the actor who wears a mocap suit) represented in the VR HMD as an illustration of the author’s childhood home.
Both participants can interact verbally and physically, making way for a meaningful intimacy designed to mimic the mother and son relationship experienced by writer Tannahill himself. The capacity for role play is deepened every time the audience performs an action which is then accepted and expanded upon by the actor.
The phrase used in improv to describe this type of engagement, ‘yes, and’, allows for a continual building of the experience beyond the defined boundaries of the build. It also solves an issue that often arises in intimate situations in immersive theatre: it gives the audience somewhere to hide. They are protected in their virtual world, they can be more honest, and they can play their part. The headset functions as a mask, much like the ones used in many of Punchdrunk’s shows.
Object-Oriented Programming
For those without the resources, or for those who are making work in which the inclusion of a live actor is not conducive to meeting their aims, you’ll be happy to know that computer games have already devised their own solution. In 1977 the text adventure Zork was one of the first to use object-oriented programming, and as such it was able to respond to the inputs of the player in a way that other software of the time could not.
“The Zork dungeon rooms form a branching structure, but the magical objects within the dungeon each behave according to their own set of rules. And the interactor is given a repertoire of possible behaviors that encourages a feeling of inventive collaboration.” (Murray, 1997)
Here Murray is advocating for a structure of cross referencing where the rules for each object and action combine in a way to produce exponential results (therefore favoring emergent pathways over rigid predetermined routes). We may yet find a way to model AI on actors and their behavioral methods. A contemptuous commentator on the craft of acting might view it as being a series of complex ‘if’ statements, so half the work may already be done. In the meantime we can easily copy the working method of Zork to make every experience unique and give every interaction a meaningful reaction.
Authored by Roderick D. Morgan, Director and Producer Trajectory Theatre
Originally published on Our Trajectory Medium on 4 February 2019