VR and Narrative

Narrative in VR, at core is a problem of agency.  There is not only a problem of exactly who is TELLING the story in an interactive environment, there is the issue of whose conflict is DRIVING the story—the hero or the viewer?  Traditional novel form of the hero’s journey is one of the hero being in action, not the audience.  The primacy of Western, Aristotelian plot-driven structural narrative strategies will have to diminish.  VR will also require a radical restructuring of traditional 2D film making since in that case the director is the storyteller, not the viewer.  These are issues many have pointed out from academia to the latest conference on interactive storytelling, but warrant discussion because although much of what is out there covers the challenges, few offer any suggestions.  The game industry is where most of the story development has happened since the 1990’s.

There is much that can be learned from the extensive research done in game story development.  Games are the big money makers now.  VR gear has grown out of desire from gamers for more realism, not moviegoers, and so it makes sense that their narrative construction insights might be useful.  But game narrative is like porn or Greek myth—the point of everything is to get to the next action moment to do battle (or whatever).  Most game “story” I’ve seen (which admittedly isn’t all that much) is very basic, despite multi-level branching plots and characters.  Part of this is determined by the economics of production and the impossibility of accounting for the infinity of possible narrative lines.  Another is that players are generally concerned about the action in the game, not the plot used to get there.  Although we’ve come a long ways from Space Invaders, that is not a storytelling bar anyone wants to be referencing.

VR and Joseph Campbell

The first casualty of narrative in virtual reality will be the hero and his (usually HIS, still even in 2017) journey.  The point of the hero in Western narrative is to be a flawed character who makes choices we would find too bold to make, and then to suffer for those choices until, when life is at its worst, make the enlightened choice and transcend themselves.  I have a lot of issues with that story structure, but even still when it comes to VR and narrative, it is not a simple matter of putting the viewer in the scenes of such a journey and expecting the audience to respond the same as if viewing it from a distance in 2D. 

The basic formal structure of current storytelling codified by Aristotle demands a beginning, middle, and end, following a singular hero burdened with a singular issue existing for the sole purpose of transcending that issue and thus generating catharsis in the audience.  Narrative experience, even if passive, is/wiil be very different in an immersive environment.

One challenge is the experience of place and time.  Traditional storytelling accomplishes this via a complex construction of interactions between structural and visual rhetorical tropes.  At its best, narrative is the compression and expansion of place and time, a distillation and condensation of reality in order to express an idea.  VR is experienced in real time.  Can we find ways to compress and expand time that will be understandable in VR?  Sure.  They just might not look/feel like what we’ve done in 2D to date.

Not all will want to shoot bad guys or go flying through the air.  Many (in fact, I would say MOST) will still want stories TOLD TO them.  Stories that they don’t have to do anything but sit back and experience.

I do expect viewers will want the option of choosing being automatically placed in pre-determined places for the best view of the scene.  I would also expect more interest in ensemble stories, where multiple characters have their own arc that could be explored individually.  This has many natural connections to current game story structures that might be useful.  But this sort of narrative still requires “following” a character.  As a consequence, very quickly some acceptable visual standards and conventions will be established that have nothing to do with storytelling in 2D.  These cannot be pre-determined because those practices have to do with the way many, many VIEWERS, not the creators, over time respond to VR. 

Not all conventions will be replaced, some will simply be repurposed in a different way with a new emphasis, e.g. portraiture has been around since the beginning of photography, but very few photogs turned the camera on themselves.  Ten years ago no one knew what a “selfie” was.  Now it is the most used genre on the internet (okay, maybe cat videos still lead, but not by much, I’m sure).

The hero’s journey will always have an audience, but new experiences of narrative will open up in VR.

VR and Cinema

It only takes 24 frames a sec to fool your brain into thinking it is seeing continuous motion.  Today, our brain is also oblivious to the raster lines of display diodes that are tinier than we can see and scanning faster than we can notice.  Both are tricks on your brain.  But in 2D we are always in the third person because we are not in the action of the scene.

There is a language of 2D cinema that only lets us see what the director wants us to see, when they want us to see it.  Something as simple as a Guy Ritchie cross-cut between two locations would be almost incomprehensible in VR.  The immediate shift from one location to another is a visual rhetorical device that everyone who was born after the invention of television has understood since childhood and works great in 2D.  However, the experience of abruptly shifting from one reality to another, then back and forth, will be annoying at minimum, at least as we can imagine it being experienced at this point.

In 2D we do not see what the camera does not see.  This has two implications: pragmatic and aesthetic.  On the pragmatic side, the simple illusion of “natural light” requires multiple set lights, generators, crews, etc. all outside the camera frame.  If the consumer can see 360 there is no place to put those support items.  You could shoot 360 with available light and digitally remove unwanted camerapersons, equipment, etc.  Or shoot like Mr. Cameron, in 360 greenscreen with actors moving around a built set (remember the “jungle” scenes in 40’s black and white movies—real trees and real water in a pond, but with a fake backdrop?  Same, same—but WAY more expensive).

Certain genres, let’s say horror and thrillers, depend greatly on what the camera is NOT showing you—the monster, the thing hovering just behind the character but they don’t turn around, the thing/monster/killer just out of frame as the victim backs up.    Other genres, like action, depend on frenetic editing and the perfect camera shot to keep you interested.  If all you have is the experience of riding in the car as Vin drives his fast and furious supercar like a maniac, that holds a certain amount of excitement, but will quickly become annoying and/or boring as the novelty wears off. 

But more importantly, what those stories are about are the characters experiencing those moments FOR the audience, not the audience themselves having the experience and related emotions.  Successful narrative at the emotional level doesn’t work by showing the audience the character crying—it is about making the audience cry, that is, catharsis.  It is generated by vicarious emotional manipulation, not personal lived experience.  Sometimes, once in a while life gives us a moment so intense we get that same emotional discharge, but audiences today expect that cathartic feeling every time they watch a feature film.

We are at a point where we are creating a monster by placing this old way of storytelling onto a new tech and wonder why it isn’t quite working.  This is quite normal.  Eventually the tech itself will reveal its own best practices different from 2D.