In 1995, LucasArts began a serious effort to recruit designers for its upcoming Jedi Knight and Outlaws FPS games. But the discipline was still in its infancy. There was no clear “previous experience” to draw from.
So, they looked primarily to two different groups: QA testers and people with architecture backgrounds. The architects understood crucial rules of proportion and scale and structure. They knew how to use architecture to draw the eye, and help people navigate a coherent space. They also knew how buildings could create emotion. The testers, for their part, were attuned to player behavior and expectation. They knew how to create challenge, anxiety and relief by strategically placing enemies, power-ups and puzzles. As “level designers” these two groups talked a lot, learned from each other, and began to cross-pollinate ideas, resulting in some of the industry’s most beloved games.
I believe VR film-makers and video game designers have much to share with each other. VR film is a rapidly emerging new art form, in search of a standard grammar for who the their audience is and how they expect to interact with the worlds they inhabit.
First of all, that term “world” is now being used to describe the visual experience of VR. Game designers are very familiar with the concept of immersive worlds. We’ve long engaged in how to create and sustain a game world, often under brutal framerate and resolution constraints. How much is just enough? Designers are constantly exploring the options of art style, object density, room-size, and occlusion, in order to pull off bigger and better worlds inside their games. Imagine cross-pollinating these skills with a traditional film-maker, who brings a wealth of knowledge about camera and lighting and visual grammar!
Game designers study how players interact with new spaces, and new characters, and constantly tweak the game in response. They strive to balance a person’s desire to interact with the world against the limitations of the technology— and somehow honor both. Good game design establishes clear and consistent player agency— whether that be fully 3D first-person open world, or the most humble 2D flash game.
VR film-makers are now beginning to explore the nuances of what we’ve been calling “environmental storytelling.” The small details in a room, or a landscape, aren’t just props— in an interactive world, they become storytelling tools. Many VR articles have noted that immersion will “break” if viewers notice a detail that seems incoherent to the narrative, or arbitrarily non-interactive. Game designers learn how to draw attention to the right details, and sustain player interest and trust in the world.
But most of all, I think VR film-makers and game designers should talk about players. Because in VR, viewers become players, and players viewers. The line is blurring.
In any given experience, we should be asking each other: Who is the audience, and how much agency they expect? What role does agency have in the concept of “presence”? Heck— what controllers are they holding? And, of course, what missteps historically break immersion and cause frustration?
VR film-makers are about to enter into what might seem a brave new world of questions, but there are designers out there who have been pondering these same questions for many many years. Let’s talk!
