As I write this, I have a fully-written, but not published article sitting in my drafts folder titled, “Immersive Theater and Appropriation: Telling the Right Story at the Right Time.” The seed which led to that article’s creation was a question I’d been mulling over for quite some time, which is: does virtual reality actually deliver on the much-touted promise of being an “empathy machine”?

For many of us on any side of the curtain in immersive theatre, we’re no strangers to role-playing, acting, and the process that goes into putting ourselves into other people’s shoes. It is part and parcel of both the creator and the participant mindset, and often, the shows and experiences that draw the most enthusiastic responses are the ones that unabashedly place us into a role that impacts us emotionally. Think: Then She Fell, The Nest, The Tension Experience, and more.

“But Jessica,” I hear you ask. “What the heck does this have to do with GDC?”

“Patience,” I say to nobody in particular, drawing funny looks from the other people at this table where I’m sitting. “I’m getting to that.”

One of the talks I attended was titled, “The Art of VR,” which was a series of microtalks from artists who are working to push the boundaries of what virtual reality can do. In short, they’re exploring virtual reality’s potential as a medium to be more than just a video game platform or engine.

One artist in particular, Alex A.K., spoke about their current project, 5 Minutes, which recreates their experience of trying to get in contact with their brother after a terrorist attack. Where most VR experiences try to place the viewer/player in larger than life, wild environments — like far-flung planets, centuries in the past, or exotic locations on our own planet — 5 Minutes bucks this trend by placing them in Alex’s shoes on the night of the attack: sitting on their couch in their living room at home. It’s hard to describe this experience as a game per se, and it’s hard to use the word “player,” but that’s one of the closest approximations, given that interactivity is built into the experience itself. That interactivity mostly comes via the cell phone they have in their virtual hand, which A.K. describes as a “portal to the familiar.”

So the “goal” is to get in contact with your brother, but the thing is, in the midst of any kind of terrorist attack, the phone and internet networks are rendered pretty much unusable by the mass of concerned family members and loved ones trying to make sure the person they care about is okay. It’s a limbo that pops into existence unexpectedly, a pocket dimension wherein your loved one is (to put it bluntly) both alive and dead at the same time. As anybody caught up in that strange, awkward liminal space can tell you, it’s a surreal place to be.

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From a meta-standpoint, A.K. said that the experience’s goal was to try to get viewers/players to feel the same kind of anxiety, the same kind of worry and sense of urgency they felt when they were living that moment. And let’s face it: the “face” of VR consumption right now is rich, young, white, cis het male, self-described “gamers,” people who, as recent history has shown us, could use a little more empathy and understanding in their lives.

The key, A.K. said, was not in emphasizing how their experience was different or strange, but rather it was in showing how their experience was exactly the same as anybody else’s.

In 5 Minutes, those similarities lie in the setting: sitting on the couch in a living room that could very easily be your own, using a mobile phone, something any millennial or Gen-Z’er is likely to have, things like that. A.K. described it as “using mundanity as a background,” upon which you show the contrasting elements. In establishing common ground with your viewer, you bridge the gap between their world and your own. Essentially, that mundanity leads to immersion, which, hopefully, leads to empathy and understanding with the character — and thus, by extension, understanding within the viewer/player themselves.

“Sensationalism,” A.K. said, “widens the divide between experiences.” It gets in the way and ultimately proves to be distracting, which ends up diminishing the impact you’re hoping for.

One virtual reality experience that successfully bridges the gap between experiences while using literal set pieces is Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s CARNE y ARENA. In that experience, participants are asked to re-contextualize the mundane act of taking off one’s shoes in a wildly different setting: a border control detention room, known as a “cooler.” It’s so called because it’s kept at a lower temperature than normal, designed to make detainees (in this case, participants) as uncomfortable as possible. You can read more about it in Noah’s write-up of the experience, where he delves into the feelings around his senses being on edge.

So how does this translate to immersive? Well, consider some of your favorite immersive experiences/theater pieces. Often, works are touted for their ability to “transport participants to another world.” After all, that’s what immersive is supposed to do, right? But ask yourself: what do these companies do to establish common ground with you, as a participant or audience member? What do they do to help you really feel like you’re entering another world? What is it about these “pre-experiences” or intros that stick out to you?

I’m more than willing to bet it has something to do with the sudden, surprising realization that these fully-realized, imagined worlds exist just beyond the looking glass of your everyday life. These stories all barely tread the border between the fantastic and the mundane. Immersive has this way of taking the familiar and turning it into something new to you. An example I often turn to is an ARX that was very near and dear to my heart: The Latitude Society. I go into much more detail in the longform article I wrote following its closure, but in short: it turned a small section of the city I grew up in — the only city I’ve ever known and loved — and turned it into something truly magical. It showed me, in very real, visceral ways, how the creative heart and soul of San Francisco was still alive and beating, quite literally right under my nose.

In not quite so many words, it worked exactly like how A.K. suggested for virtual reality: it used the mundane as a way to build empathy. It took the building blocks of the familiar and it turned them into a bridge to greater understanding of ourselves, our world, and all the people in it.

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