Tag: technology

Aesthetics, Possibility and Ethics of an Immersive Mass Media

This article is a personal commentary on a few major topics I picked up throughout the past six years of creating for VR/new media and larp. The principal aim of this text is to touch on philosophical themes related to industrial technology, as our community gravitates closer and closer to new media and A.I.. I also wanted to address the main question I have been asked by larpers: why VR, when we can just larp? This article thus blends thoughts on common grounds between larp and VR, impressions from VR experiences that I found inspiring, nostalgic rants, and speculations on the future. Finally, it opens a discussion on the possibility of larp contributing to an emerging immersive mass media. 

I. an.other_reality

One of the first things I associate with larping is the idea of some sort of trip. If not in kilometers, it feels like a travel in time, consciousness or fantasy; a displacement from oneself and one’s own reality. If our perception of the world is called lifeworld,((Husserl (1936) calls “lifeworld” the evident reality that we perceive and experience together. A fiction-based reality that is experienced collectively as a group can be referred to as “storyworld”. Others also use the term “storyworld” to refer to a worldbuilding method or in previous larp literature (Brind 2019), but in this text it is purely a deviation from the phenomenological concept.)) we attempt to travel to a storyworld – a fictional reality that we perceive together. 

When experiencing larp in non larp-spaces  –  arts spaces, tech spaces, video games spaces etc – I realized that such ability to travel to a storyworld relies as much on the larp design and environment as it relies on the culture nurtured by the larp community. In the way larpers interact, relate, find activities, open-up while playing, they help each other suspend disbelief and co-create the storyworld (Bowman 2017). In other words, larp designers and players alike tend to have a creativity that spans across fields. It is through this interest and ability to seek out fine details of reality building that we create levels of illusion, making the event feel more special and intricate. 

Such attention put into layering ideas to engage ourselves or our players is what makes VR a promising ground for larpers: VR is not a medium, or a media, it is a milieu  – which in French refers to environment, setting and social environment at the same time.

As such, VR has its own creative tools, that are ambidextrous,((VR headsets, like a minority of game consoles, generally include two controllers, one for each hand, which frees movement potentials for both limbs. Consequently, VR apps and games make use of these ambidextrous possibilities.)) 360 degrees and embodied; it is close to what our bodies can do and experience, and therefore it is more intuitive than our usual screen-keyboard-mouse tools or even our digital pads. For example: a few days ago, defeated by my inability to explain an exhibition concept to a collaborator, I hopped into the 3D VR software Gravity Sketch and drew the rigging I imagined. Visiting the exhibition’s life-sized model and looking up at the suspended objects, I realized from my own physical sensations that some ideas didn’t pan out as I had intended, and I corrected them.

Other than a creative tool, VR can be a sensational spectacle. Earlier this year, I was at a Fatboy Slim concert, dancing while free falling. From the sky, along with the rest of the audience, I overlooked his perfectly modeled Pioneer deck, before landing on the oversized table of an American diner. On the table, we could ride cockroaches alone or with someone else, towards the gigantic face of Steve Buschemi. As I was teleported from one impossible setting to the next, I felt the thrill of being effectively transported into someone’s unhinged imagination (Eat, Sleep, VR, Repeat (2023)).

For some, VR spaces can also be the avenue to explore transcendence; and I have met VR practitioners who have been exploring the similarities between traveling in VR and reaching other states of consciousness – through spiritual pursuit, drugs, or both. Today’s state of the technology is already allowing “VR shamans” to guide volunteers through digital spaces as though those were the meanders of their own consciousness, and some even explore the creation of VR psychedelic trips, like Ayahuasca VR (2020). 

VR is certainly not perfect; not the “customer friendly” headsets at least. Despite the skyrocketing progress of VR graphics and playability in the past 10 years, I am still hearing the same comment: “I won’t be sold to VR until the pixels are invisible.”  It can be cranky, it can be laggy, it can be obtuse or even painful. But if we can convince ourselves that a latex sword is Excalibur or that a green patch behind a parking lot is a lush forest, shouldn’t we also see giants as we ride jittery horses towards pixelated windmills?

I like inviting VR newcomers to lean into how conspicuous and ugly those spaces can be  – firstly because you might discover you can get used to it as comfort adjusts, and secondly because these might be a few precious years before we enter an avalanche of hyper-realistic or hyper-convincing virtual realities. In fact, there might be questions to consider beyond the aesthetic appeal or revulsion of this imperfect VR. Adorno (1938) developed a praise for “dissonance” in musical aesthetics, as a disturbance that allows the listener to see the material “truth” behind harmony. Dissonance keeps us critical, while a perfectly harmonious music piece lulls us into accepting whatever purchase or ideology comes with it (Adorno, 1938). In this state of pleasant artistic immersion, we become “acquiescent purchasers”, ready to be mouthfed with an advertisement or a lifestyle. This praise of dissonance is similar to the “epic theater” developed by Brecht and used to describe “meta-awareness” in larp by Hilda Levin (2020). Somehow though, for some, realism seems like a sine qua non of VR, rubbing out entirely the question of keeping an awareness that we are in a virtual milieu. And so, I wonder: do all these people who told me VR wasn’t realistic enough really want to be fooled? And if so, why is that, and are they quite sure of themselves?

II. an.other_body /  no.body

Have you ever wondered what your larp experience would have been like if you hadn’t felt limited by your body ability, appearance, normativity, humanness?

One of the first VR games I played was called Drift. It was a “die and retry game” developed by my highschool friend Ferdinand Dervieux. In Drift, you are a bullet sent out in full speed in a brightly coloured cubist world on hard electronic beats. If you touch something (a wall, an obstacle etc) you lose and restart. Throughout the experience, only your head movements control your trajectory and only the position of your head matters. After being reborn a projectile again and again for 30 minutes, a metonymic transformation happened:  I was fully my head. 

Experiencing Drift made me first wonder: how long would it take for us to get fully used to not being a human body? And what are the spaces we would crave, un-bodied in worlds that obey impossible physics rules? I regularly reopen the book Mind in Architecture edited by Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa (2017) that accounts how we conceive and build spaces based on embodied sensations. What we perceive as sheltering and comfortable, or towering and divine, or angular and dangerous, is an immediate physical reaction. Supposedly, we learned to create spaces based on those evolutionary instincts. As a projectile, almost annihilated, I craved movement, I sought feelings of orbiting and my comfort came from always sensing a spatial opening somewhere. Had there been other bullets, I would have wanted our trajectories to flirt with each other; for our interaction to be confrontational collision, cheeky scraping, avoidance. What spaces will we create for our other-bodies? Who, or what, can we discover we can also be?((VR headsets, like a minority of game consoles, generally include two controllers, one for each hand, which frees movement potentials for both limbs. Consequently, VR apps and games make use of these ambidextrous possibilities.))

Ancient Hours (2022): a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc (Design) and Josephine Rydberg (Production).

Some abstract forms of larp already invite us to imagine ourselves as non-human or more-than-human((See the work of Nina Runa Essendrop, Jamie Harper, Alex Brown, Nilas Dumstrei, to name a few.)) and there is a prodigious potential in VR to explore our ability to transpose our mind into different bodies. In particular, we can already reroute our motor functions via puppeteering.((Puppeteering commonly means manipulating the limbs of a puppet to make it lifelike.)) VR pioneer and technical artist Rikke Jansen colloquially uses the word puppeteering to refer to a finer way of controlling the motions and visible emotions of our avatar, by assigning them to a variety of physical gestures that are recognized by controllers or sensors. For instance, a sensor on a foot could control a cluster of your avatar’s tentacles, another one at your waist could stretch out your outer membrane, raising your right index finger could get your helix to turn etc. In other words, digital prosthetics do not have to be thought of in terms of achieving a normative, valid body interpretation, but can be conceived as ways to experience full other-bodiedness. Puppeteering is likely to be a transitory device, as the technology is fast evolving towards image recognition through camera, full haptic body suits, and perhaps even EEG controllers.((Creating controllers that are directly connected to our “thoughts” by measuring our brain activity through electroencephalogram or EEG has been a longstanding area of research. Despite some misleading commercial communication, they are not functional yet. See Padfield et. al (2022).)) However, it is a functional current solution to explore the sensations of our mind being connected to another body.

Other than those extreme examples of being other-bodied, there is a more obvious point to emphasize about VR bodies in conjunction with larping or any other form of VR socializing: we can create or find whatever body we want. I have raved as a very large astronaut, held a speech as an orb of light, walked around as Laura Palmer, I have been the gray default robot avatar and an uncanny rendition of my IRL self.

What this also means is that we can make our VR body as conforming and valid as we wish for it to be, and VR social spaces are a testimony of it.

Discussions around ageism, lookism, fatphobia, racism, ableism etc. regularly arise in the larp community. Like in any part of our flawed society, presenting as normative as possible will grant us better social capital, integration and play opportunities (van der Heij 2021). If we push the thought experiment far enough, we land in a potential digital future where what our bodies are in the lifeworld does not matter socially anymore, as long as our avatars conform. Let’s stay with that scenario a bit longer: the dominant aesthetic might not be available to us in the real world – body type, skin color, hair, fashion, etc – but it is in the virtual world. All of us get to access valid-presenting bodies, publicly celebrated bodies, or even a gender representation that might alleviate some personal pain. Dissociated from our own body, our mind fully identifies and appropriates these virtual bodies. Is that the body equality that we crave?

This question should linger on throughout the process of designing a VR larp: which avatars are available to the players? What normativity do they shape? How can design and facilitation frame our relation to these digital bodies? Sometimes of course, budget or technical limitations will restrict design choices, as I experienced with my VR larp prototype Lone Wolves Stick Together.((VR Larp for six players designed by Nadja Lipsyc and inspired by the film Stalker by Tarkovsky (1979). The design was prototyped as a physical larp in 2018, then as a full VR prototype in 2023 in collaboration with Breach VR.)) We were only able to develop one avatar model for all six players; a half body, vaguely female, vaguely dark and masked. In this case, the larp is very discursive, and players’ voice coats those basic avatars with more embodiment and personality.

I won’t expand much on the topic of voice, but I’ll let some of my thoughts reverberate here. Voice recognition and voice alteration are still marginal in VR and in online spaces, despite already being technically achievable and available to the public. As such, voice remains the one close-to-intact physical impression of another person – a particularly vulnerable shadow that lets our mind speculate on what body could withhold it. This is quite mysterious to me and I wonder: is our ease of recording and transmitting live sound (compared to recording and transmitting 3D bodies) the reason why we do not disguise our voices in digital spaces? Would we default to avatars of ourselves if scanning ourselves convincingly was easier? Has our cultural obsession for visuals simply raided all our workforce? Or, perhaps, is there a particular attachment to sending our own naked voice out there?

III. technical difficulties /  \ the cult of the technical

The app crashed. My headset died. The controllers are not recognized. You’re so glitched. I fell through the floor. I have no idea what’s happening. I feel sick. I’m lagging so much.

We lack a word to describe the specific flavor of pain that we experience when technology fails us. We are so close to our devices that we flirt with being cyborgs: the immediate reactivity of our computer or our phone feels just like any other action that happens seamlessly from intention to execution. Grabbing a plate from the cupboard, aligning pens on a table, and juggling through dozens of tabs and apps require a similar level of effort. However, at times, we might attempt what feels like a simple digital action, such as fixing the alignment of a paragraph in one click or connecting our computer to the only printer in the area, and it fails. Something imperceptible stops us –  and this is infuriating. How to explain such fury, while we are aware of the complexity of the technology we use? Could it be connected to the profound sensation that technology should be easy, intuitive; the perfect extension of our will? These expectations of perfect performance and immediacy are in line with our expectations of high resolution when it comes to VR.  If it pretends to be a digital reality, then the technological interface ought to be a perfect continuation to our experience of the world. 

Graphic quality aside, technical difficulties in VR are still dissuasive to many, as there is a heightened risk of bug/crash/undiagnosed issues compared to the platforms we are used to. One way of alleviating the anxiety one can feel when facing technical issues is to learn enough about the machines not to feel completely helpless – should it be VR, a 3D software, a synthesizer, etc. To many of us, this seems difficult to prioritize, and we would rather wait for simpler interfaces. However, I do believe we should examine our passive (or even avoidant) posture towards the efforts required to understand technology. Such passivity could have worse consequences than keeping us frustrated in front of a stubborn printer.

Günther Anders’s (1956) concept of Promethean shame points at the inferiority complex we experience when we face the intricacy and performance of the technologies we have created. We escape that shame by avoiding any comparison to those machines – including our attempts at understanding them. We get used to machines thinking and executing for us, to the point we also lose track of our pragmatism and our faculty to foresee their impact on our lives. Our human abilities, both cognitive and emotional, cannot conceive the scale in which the things we create can operate. Anders takes the example of the nuclear bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 as a result of the gap between our understanding of concept and use. 

With bringing more advanced technologies in larp, we can also question the gap between what we understand and what we might end up creating. As we merge larp with VR and with A.I., perhaps with little incentive to get more technologically educated, what use of our creations can we get blindsided by? 

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)

Rather than being defeated by the fear of future technological monstrosities, we can take Anders’s analysis of industrial times as a call to stay active and involved when dealing with new technology. Rather than distancing ourselves from how things work and rather than constructing inconspicuous technologies, we can learn to keep discomfort, emotions and difficulties a part of human-computer interactions. In fact, our human limitations and anxiety must remain part of the future if we want the future to have room for humans. 

IV. poetics of  >presence< / <presence>

“But why VR, when larp is about being there together?” 

Fragments of VR presence:

A distant voice calls, I turn the other way, just in time to see a silhouette of light vanish.

Notes on Blindness, Ex Nihilo, ARTE France, Archer’s Mark 

I pick up a pen and draw around me the roots of a tree 4 times my size. The ink pulsates to the repetitive rhythms of a track I chose. 

Tilt Brush, Google

I mute myself and approach my players as discreetly as possible. The sound is local, so I need to get close enough to hear them and judge whether it is a good time or not to trigger a flashback scene. 

Lone Wolves Stick Together VR, by Nadja Lipsyc and Breach VR

In a karaoke room where 20 people with accents from all over the world sing on top of each other, I notice that someone is trying to get my attention. Their avatar is small and doll-like and they jump around me. I open my wings wide and cover them entirely.

The furry karaoke room by Duustu (VRChat)

I am playing with the animated locks of my co-actor’s hair, while laying on a bed by the sea. Our avatars are almost spooning. The warm light is softly reflected on the mediterranean stones, and red curtains gently move with the breeze. The director yells “Cut!”, I remove the headset and find myself lying alone on a wooden platform, in vast and austere black film studios.

Dates in Real Life, Maipo Film production.

I already miss larping, the way it felt “to be there together” 15 years ago, and that is widely due to technological changes. I miss larping before the avalanche of websites, before we checked our smartphones in our beds after playtime, before social media tipped us on the best and the worst, and before a plethora of pictures would mold my mental representation of larps. 

Most of all, I miss larping when we had few enough opportunities to play that most of us were full of anticipation and entirely present at each event. This first flavor of presence is related to a mental and emotional availability; an ability to bring focus and commitment to the current experience that is perceived as an exceptional occurrence. In a form relying on togetherness, the unavailability of some will impact the sentiment of presence of all. 

This longing doesn’t mean I am not fully enjoying the options, media and discussions that I now have; but larp already feels different than it did when it comes to this quality of presence – both because of technology and of commodification (Seregina, 2019). Whether the larp is physical or virtual, I am interested in discussing how we can create, participate, organize and self-organize for that sort of presence. I am making this point first, because I do not believe that digital interfaces are the main obstacle to nurturing it.

“It’s not the same as being in the same place as someone else, it will never feel like a larp.”

The term teleabsence (Friesen 2012) categorizes the lack of bodily flow of information that prevents us from fully understanding and enjoying one another online((See Lindemann, Schünemann (2020) for more discussion on the concept of presence in digital spaces.)): 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,((We should of course imagine a near future where most of our perceptible biofeedback can be transmitted to our avatars.)) 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,((Phenomenon when a VR user gets physical sensations from perceiving a virtual touch or impact. VR is frequently used as a treatment for phantom pain or as exposure therapy due to its ability to trick our sense of reality.)) 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. 

Co-creation between VR players can flower just as much into the moments of beauty which Stenros and MacDonald (2020) also refer to as presence: “being sensitive to the emotions around you, understanding the exact situation, creating the right character response, feeling the emotion.” Presence in VR also has its signature poetics which lie in the expressive fluidity of spaces and bodies, in the playfulness of planes and perspectives, in the richness of sound integration and in forbidden intimacies. 

Space and scale become potentially expressive and reactive as both the environments and the bodies you chose can be molded following your emotions or intentions: they can be gigantic or minuscule, they can form a vast open field or the most angular of cells, etc. We rarely intentionally fully design physical larps taking into consideration the perspectives of our space, where people are, how they can hear one another. VR spaces can be fully understood by the designers, either because they built them, or because visiting them and learning all their nooks and crannies is only a headset away. This option opens a more filmic or theatrical relationship to larp creation, which calls to refine our relation to larpmakers’ artistry, artistic emergence, and players’ creative agency.

But a rather easy and crucial element that I want to highlight is the potential that lies within VR larp sound design. Surround sound with outputs all around the space can create an “immersive” soundscape a lot more easily than by using physical sound sources or speakers in real life larp. On top of this immersive soundscape, you can localize sound sources as expressively as you desire: to bring objects to life, to bring participants’ attention to a specific spot, etc. And finally, you can create player-specific sound cues: whisper directly to the ear of each of your players, have them hear individual musics or, like in Lone Wolves Stick Together VR, have individual streams of thoughts for each character. This larp is about contradictory desires and introspection, and the streams of thoughts are triggered between each roleplaying scene to represent or prompt an evolving mental state. The soundtracks therefore help to guide the players going from act to act: from doubts to nostalgia, to disillusion, despair, and then finally, truth.

Sound alone can induce sensations of variation, call back previous moments, and give spatial and environmental impressions. Blackbox larps often rely on soundscapes and music to displace the fiction to a different place, and, with VR sound design, this trick is all the more potent: we can recreate the acoustics of an immensely tall building, make the players’ footsteps sound wet or frosty, create a musical space that reacts to players movements, etc.

There would be a lot more to explore and describe when touching upon the poetics of presence in VR, but the last trail I will allude to here is that of forbidden or impossible intimacies. VR lets us be where we shouldn’t be: in places that are inaccessible to the public, in places where sustaining life is impossible, in voyeuristic points of view. This emotion of looking at an impossible artifact from up close, of being a ghost, of being a speck of dust in a piano, of seeing someone from behind another person’s eyes, triggers an uncomfortable and shy curiosity that I have found to be a VR-specific source of inspiration.

V. the possibility of larp as mass media

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Donna Haraway 2016)

Larp has changed a lot over the past decade. It has become more international, more professional, it has blossomed into a vast array of players’ aspirations and of creative styles, it has even become mainstream in China (Shuo & al. 2022) and commonly played as an online form (Otting 2022). Industrial media and mainstream entertainment have had a more or less distant eye on larp; from big tech companies to audiovisual studios and theme parks. This proximity with the industry reinforces the expansionist dream that is a source of both excitement and trepidation among larpers. As someone working professionally with larp and VR, the first question I am asked when talking to game studios or stakeholders is: how can we reach more players or sell more copies? It is a question which generally turns into: how can we automate the game mastering or facilitation, massify the experience?

VR, like many new technologies, is connected to an all-encompassing need to massify. Its biggest actors, which are Facebook/Meta, Google and soon Apple, operate on a mass level, with only widespread adoption being able to stomach the developmental costs of their technologies and projects. Similarly, massification is what would allow more larp designers to live off their craft, and perhaps even prosper from it – an unprecedented potential.

I have been thinking that larp and VR were a match made in heaven due to their common affordances and potentials for presence, interaction, spatial creation, etc. (Lipsyc 2017). Retrospectively, I wonder how much of my initial excitement came from contemplating those creative potentials, and how much came from another sort of intuition: that larp could be the most appropriate form to create an immersive mass media.

With immersive technologies being more and more customer friendly and with the ascend of creative A.I., larp will potentially be able to rely on procedural environments,((Procedural generation combines human-crafted assets with algorithms to automate and randomize the creation of large amounts of content, for instance entire game environments.)) scenes and characters. Similarly, our most brilliant designers might train digital automated facilitators, which could be combined with massively multiplayer immersive digital spaces and even possibly persistent open worlds.((Persistent worlds are digital spaces that are maintained online for all players to join and leave as they please without losing any data.)) This might thus be the way for larp creators to land an industrial career, but what are the other implications?

the space between us, a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc and Josephine Rydberg.

Who’s getting paid for larp?

Larp is not free as is – it comes with a lot of labor, which in our society must be paid by someone (in this case, the designers and their direct support network for non-profit larps, as well larper-customers for commercialized ones) – and it is not free to attend, with continuously inflating participation costs. The cost is mutual, just like the quality of a larp experience relies sometimes almost equally on designers’, organizers’ and players’ competence and engagement (Torner 2020; Jones, Koulu, & Torner 2016). Altogether, larp has been dependent on the goodwill and gratefulness that exists between designers, organizers and players. 

However, this goodwill might collapse like a house of cards if larp effectively leads to some people becoming individually prosperous, famous or ascending socially thanks to the free labor of many others. The digital age has been normalizing free creative labor that people do at home: social media relies on its own customers’ content creation, creative A.I. is growing thanks to the free training its customers provide, and a mass media based on larp is just as likely to run thanks to the free contribution of its players. In other terms, many of us are or will be working a daytime job in order to be able to pay to work a creative job.((Günther Anders (1956) writes: “In a certain way, each individual is employed and occupied as a domestic worker . . . whereas the classical domestic worker made products in order to assure himself of a minimum of consumer goods and leisure, today’s domestic worker consumes a maximum number of leisure products in order to collaborate in the production of the mass-man.”))

Larp as a sustainable practice

A wonderful quality of larp is that it can be a very sustainable activity, given that we do not order cheap Chinese merchandise for costuming and that we do not fly ourselves to faraway countries every time we’re given a chance to (Brown 2022). As such, the environmental costs and political questions that come from working with technology are still unforeseen in larp. From relying on A.I. which demands extreme amounts of energy to train, to persistent multiplayer digital spaces, the maintenance of which also depends on keeping powerful computers churning at all times, and to supporting the electronics industry where mere components are obtained through excessive mining of rare materials at the expense of ecosystems and underprivileged workers in South America, Africa and South Asia (Asher 2022).

To remain sustainable, must we oppose the development of larp in the industry? Or, by excluding ourselves from those chances out of moral purity, do we also exclude ourselves from decision-making and shaping what this artform can become? How to react and act in the face of the climate crisis and what to do with industrial capitalism are questions that vastly exceed the scope of this article, but the possibility of industrial development should always come with self-reflection. 

the space between us (2022) crew.

What other realities will we create?

If larp makers are potential creators for a future mass media, their influence and creative choices will radiate beyond our small community and pervade the general society. Both for the sake of our current community and our future practices, we must examine the realities we have been creating and plan to create. In particular, we must interrogate our tendency to reenact a glamourized dominant history (see Wood & Holkar in this volume). Nietzsche (1874) warned us against the temptation of over-studying history and fetishizing the past; such a tendency to “idle in the garden of knowledge” prevents us from taking action to bravely shape our lives.

Not only can a fantasy based on historical fallacy further cut us from the desire and ability to impact the current history, but our romanticisation of history is also contributing to making larp a space perceived as white and exclusive. Larp is not a diverse form for many reasons, one of them being that it ceaselessly recycles eurocentric history, representation, and codes of conduct. This isn’t to say that larp is particularly flawed as a form or a community. In fact, larp has more representation of gender and sexual minorities than most tech fields.((We now see the impact of these population biases on the technology these fields create (Zalnieriute & Cutts 2022, Buolamwini 2019).)) Yet, larp is profoundly biased.((See on YouTube the Larpers of Color Panel – Unlocking the Spectrum from Knutpunkt 2018 with great insights from Jonaya Kemper, Mo Holkar, Clio Davis, Aina Skjønsfjell Lakou, Kat Jones & Ross Cheung. See also Kemper (2018) and Holkar (2020).)) What body we wear, what space we create, those are not simply a creator’s preference or some fan service; those are statements on the digital future we are vouching for, and we now have very concrete options to challenge our usual aesthetics.

Massification’s impact on the artform

As a mass media, larp wouldn’t be the form that we now know –  it would not be, feel or look the same, and we might never recognize it as larp. We might call it worldhopping, sim, VR MMORPG or VR gaming, and this immersive mass media might even mostly ignore the larp community’s praxis and reconstruct its own independent history towards storyworld-building and roleplaying. 

In all cases, massification calls for mainstream content: less room and visibility would be given to experimental forms, but a bigger number of people would be getting something out of it. If it is anything like other mass media, an immersive mass media would be a constant flux of standardized content, of adaptations and of franchises. A.I. content creation being a condition to massify larp, we are likely to witness a new degree of standardization((Usva Seregina (2019) already pointed at the standardization that stems from commodification.)) in larp and across all artforms. 

Another consequence of using A.I. in our creative processes is that it can go as far as removing the dialectic we engage in with our creative materials: instead of dealing with the limitations that come with mastering a media, a material or an interface, we generate references and tweak them to get closer to our intuition or what we imagine. These limitations are what allow us to think of original solutions: it is because I cannot program the physics system I have in mind that I am adding the extra jumping power to my character which turns out to be the most fun part of the game, it is because the pigments I can access are not the right shade of blue that my sky is a bit green and all the more evocative, it is because I cannot find the right drum set in my sounds library that I recorded and distorted the sound of a bottle floating on the shore, relentlessly hitting a rock. Originality often comes from that friction between what we desire to create and what we can achieve. In a world of automated combinations of references, not only are we losing control and mastery over the creative technologies we use, we might accidentally lose one of our greatest creative tools: our ability to find ways to overcome difficulties.

Recorded larps

An additional disruptive potential for the larp form is the possibility to fully record a runtime: from all the players’ points of view, from all corners and angles. As of now, larp can contain a lot of secrets and privacy; a confession far away at the edge of the playscape, a joke that would only be appropriate for your good mate to hear, an off-game discussion to talk about a personal trigger, etc. In a virtual space, larp can be recorded, witnessed or re-lived. A larp recording can be an immersive reality roleplay TV experience for an external audience, or a pilgrimage through our own memory for returning players. Challenging the ephemeral and private attributes of larp, immersive mass media could become a persistent form, a voyeuristic form, and a place of collective memory (Yasseri & al. 2022).

Much customized such me wow

Streaming platforms, e-commerce platforms and social media all rely on learning and predicting customer preferences. Any digital mass-production is going towards data-driven content. As such, we can easily imagine that commercial data-driven larp would be informed by our recorded player behavior. Characters could be customized for us – with the tensions, surprises and alien elements we need, with the themes and flamboyance we want to address, with the aesthetic variations that feel the closest to our deeper selves. Although cultural products are already sold to us using the familiar language of our cultures, subcultures and social class, roleplay and identity play add the use of our own individual data: biofeedback, idiosyncrasies, fantasies and aspirations, furthering the ability to customize our online and offline experiences.

How to remain critical without being left out?

A larp mass media could also be extraordinarily connecting, enriching and educational. Larp has allowed a lot of us to explore our identity, to overcome personal limits, to develop a sense of community, to expand our knowledge and creativity – why not open those wonderfully enriching opportunities to everyone? Why deprive ourselves of contributing to a field that might make larp creators prosperous? Why shield ourselves from the excitement of discovering more immersive forms that might enthrall and stimulate us?

Automation, sustainability and accessibility are complex and abstract concepts that are close to impossible to grasp and handle at an individual level. However, we can aim to develop tools to measure impact and risks, and balance out our contributions. We can ask what our environmental budget is. Or how much do we use free labor for our own interest? And how much do we truly return to the wider community? 

This isn’t a radical solution to oppose the changes of the world, but to keep in touch with our complex realities and remain alert enough to make decisions for ourselves and as citizens. Industrial arts and new technologies are defined by a rapid progression, a rush to new projects and new ideas in order to “make it”, with little breathing time spent on forming critical opinions. Such speed, combined with the massification of our expression and desire to constantly create more and more content has been flagged by thinkers contemporary to the rise of fascism in Europe – the school of Frankfurt, Günther Anders, Hanna Arendt, Guy Debord (1967), etc.

Walter Benjamin (1936) ends his famous text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction with the following sentences: 

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.

He urges us to remain critical thinkers and active actors, as opposed to creators and consumers. Similarly, Hannah Arendt (1953) argues in Understanding and Politics that fascism does not build on the radicalization of masses, but in deconstructing their ability to form opinions. With the possibility of our community being closely involved in immersive mass media and disruptive technology, we must confront one another, debate, take stances, and use the democracy tools accordingly, however eroded and illusionary they seem to be – voting, protesting, rioting.

Bibliography

Theodor Adorno (1938):  On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, The Culture Industry, Routledge.

Günther Anders (1956): The Obsolescence of Mankind. Editions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances, Editions Ivréa. Vol. 1. English translation publically available on https://libcom.org/

Günther Anders (1981): The nuclear threat, Radical reflections on the atomic age. Beck

Hannah Arendt (1953): Understanding and Politics. Partisan Review, vol. 20.

Claire Asher (2022): Playing dangerously: The environmental impact of video gaming consoles. Mongabay. https://news.mongabay.com/2022/10/playing-dangerously-the-environmental-impact-of-video-gaming-consoles/, ref. July 2023.

Walter Benjamin (1935): The work of art at the age of reproduction. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. Schocken Books, 1969.

Sarah Lynne Bowman (2017): Immersion into Larp. First-Person Scholar. http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/immersion-into-larp/,  ref August 2023.

Simon Brind (2019): Narrative Design. In Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen. Tampere; Knudepunkt 2019.

Alex Brown (2022): Imagining a Zero Carbon Future: Environmental Impact of Player Travel as a Design Choice. Nordic larp. https://nordiclarp.org/2022/11/07/imagining-a-zero-carbon-future-environmental-impact-of-player-travel-as-a-design-choice/, ref. July 2023.

Joy Buolamwini (2019), Artificial Intelligence Has a Problem With Gender and Racial Bias. Here’s How to Solve It. Time. https://time.com/5520558/artificial-intelligence-racial-gender-bias/, ref. July 2023.

Guy Debord (1967): The Society of the Spectacle, Gallimard Blanche, 1992.

Norm Friesen (2014): Telepresence and Tele-absence: A Phenomenology of the (In)visible Alien Online. In Phenomenology & Practice, vol 8 special issue Being Online, edited by Norm Friesen and Stacey O. Irwin.

Donna J. Haraway (2016): Staying with the trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press Books.

Karijn van der Heij (2021): We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps for Participants and Organizers. In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. 

Mo Holkar (2016):  Larp and Prejudice. In Larp Realia, edited by Jukka Särkijärvi, Mika Loponen and Kaisa Kangas. Solmukohta 2016.

Edmund Husserl (1936): The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press, 1970.

Katherine Castiello Jones, Sanna Koulu, and Evan Torner (2016): Playing at Work: Labor, Identity and Emotion in Larp. In Larp Politics. In Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen  and Jukka Särkijärv. Ropecon ry.

Jonaya Kemper (2018): More than a seat at the feasting table. Nordic larp. https://nordiclarp.org/2018/02/07/more-than-a-seat-at-the-feasting-table/, ref. July 2023.

Hilda Levin (2020): Metareflection. In Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen (eds.). What Do We Do When We Play? Helsinki; Solmukohta 2020.

Gesa Lindemann, David Schünemann (2020): Presence in Digital Spaces. A Phenomenological Concept of Presence in Mediatized Communication. In Human Studies, vol. 43. Open access on https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10746-020-09567-y

Friedrich Nietzsche (1874): On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for life, Hackett, 1980.

Ylva Otting (2022): The Online Larp Road Trip. In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

Natasha Padfield, Kenneth Camilleri, Tracey Camilleri, Simon Fabri, and Marvin Bugeja (2022): A Comprehensive Review of Endogenous EEG-Based BCIs for Dynamic Device Control. In Sensors 22, vol. 15.

Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa (2017): Mind in Architecture, Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design. The MIT Press.

Legacy Russell (2013): Digital Dualism And The Glitch Feminism Manifesto. The Society Pages. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/12/10/digital-dualism-and-the-glitch-feminism-manifesto/, ref August 2023.

Usva Seregina (2019): On the commodification of larp. Nordic larp. https://nordiclarp.org/2019/12/17/on-the-commodification-of-larp/, ref. July 2023.

Xiong Shuo, Wen Ruoyu, and Mátyás Hartyándi (2022): The Chinese Hotpot of Larp. In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

Jaakko Stenros and James Lórien MacDonald (2020): Beauty in Larp. In What Do We Do When We Play? edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen. Solmukohta.

Evan Torner (2020): Labor and Play. In What Do We Do When We Play? edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen. Solmukohta.

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Monika Zalnieriute and Tatiana Cutts (2022): How AI and New Technologies Reinforce Systemic Racism. Study commissioned by the United Nations.

VR Experiences and Softwares

Ayahuasca VR (2020): Experience by Atlas V, Small Studio by MacGuff, and Ryot.Dates in Real Life (2024): Series partly shot in VR, directed by Jakob Rorvik and produced by Maipo Films for NRK.

Drift (2015): VR die and retry by Ferdinand Dervieux and Aby Batti.

Eat, Sleep, VR, Repeat (2023): Fatboy Slim Concert by EngageVR.

Gravity Sketch:  VR native design software that allows you to model 3D objects with collaborators.

Lone Wolves Stick Together VR: larp designed by Nadja Lipsyc as part of the Norwegian National Artistic Research PhD program. Developed with Breach VR and playtested in 2023. Older prototypes were tested in 2020 and 2018.

Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (2016): short film directed by Arnaud Colinart, Amaury La Burthe, Peter Middleton & James Spinney and produced by Ex Nihilo, ARTE France, Archer’s Mark.

VRChat (since 2014): social online virtual world platform that relies on Unity-based user-content. VRChat worlds mentioned in this article: Club Babylon by Rikke Jansen (private), VR Furry Karaoke by Duutsu (public), Wind and Grass by Byanca (public).

Further Relevant VR Experiences

Ancient Hours (2022): a hybrid VR larp using VRChat, collaboration between Nadja Lipsyc (Design) and Josephine Rydberg (Production). Playtested at Grenselandet 2022 and premiered at The Smoke 2023.

Oxymore (2022): Jean-Michel Jarre Concert by Vrroom.

The Under Presents: Tempest (2020): immersive theater piece directed by Samantha Gorman and produced by Tenderclaws.

Welcome to the Respite (2021): immersive theater piece by the Ferryman Collective.

Talks

VR & Larp (2017), talk by Nadja Lipsyc, State of the Larp.

VR & the Future of Larp (2021), panel discussion organized by Anders Gredal Berner, facilitated by Johanna Koljonen, with Francis Brady, Rasmus Hogdall, Nadja Lipsyc, Bjarke Pedersen, Josefine Rydberg, Knutpunkt.

This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

Lipsyc, Nadja. 2024. “Comments on VR, Larp, Technology, Creation: Aesthetics, Possibility and Ethics of an Immersive Mass Media.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

Cover photo: VRChat avatars. Image authorized by Rikke Jansen.