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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 19 2017, @02:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the hardcore-henry dept.

Would you watch a virtual-reality Casablanca?

The question is ridiculous, but usefully so. VR will never be like the movies, culturally or aesthetically, and the best way to understand why may be to imagine you're experiencing the 1942 Warner Brothers classic not as a linear story viewed from a theater seat, but as an immersive world accessed by a digital headset.

Most of us would never leave Rick's Café Américain. We'd go behind the bar with Sascha, hover by Emil the croupier at the roulette table, hang out with Sam as he played "As Time Goes By" again. Me, I'd be following Peter Lorre's sniveling Ugarte. But the central drama of Rick's rekindled love and sacrifice for Ilsa Lund? We'd probably never get that far. Director Michael Curtiz and the Warner Brothers elves did such a brilliant job imagining the world of Casablanca that we'd be content to explore it until we bumped up against the walls, like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show.

[...] VR will never become the new cinema. Instead, it will be a different thing. But what is that thing? And will audiences trained in passive linear narrative—where scene follows scene like beads on a string, and the string always pulls us forward—appreciate what the thing might be? Or will we only recognize it when the new medium has reached a certain maturity, the way audiences in 1903 sat up at The Great Train Robbery and recognized that, finally, here was a movie?

Movie critic Ty Burr goes on to review and discuss several VR productions and how they succeed or fail at using the new potential of virtual reality.


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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday February 19 2017, @06:14PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 19 2017, @06:14PM (#469005) Journal

    Seems games like Mass Effect and other RPG games is the model to follow regarding VR.

    Well, yes.

    Fiction that is (nominally) nonlinear and which is interactive (to whatever degree) is not a new thing that just now came about with VR. (See "Interactive Fiction" [wikipedia.org] at wikipedia for a treatment of the topic.)

    Focusing on the "fiction" aspect, there are choose-your-own-ending [goodreads.com] books that represent a primitive form of the genre, expanding outward in complexity with text adventure [web-adventures.org] games, and the natural extension illustrated text adventure [infocom-if.org] games.

    Focusing on the "interactive" aspect are story-bearing 3d first-person action games [Slideshow at RockPaperShotgun [rockpapershotgun.com]] as well as online multiplayer RPGs [wikipedia.org] and other online multiplayer environments.

    And, focusing on both the story and on interactivity are DM-curated games such as DnD [wikipedia.org].

    In short, this is already a rich method of storytelling that has had roughly a half-century to develop in modern incarnations. Each of the aspects above has something to contribute from its maturation and growth.

    Force partial linearity? You have to find the blue key to get past that checkpoint.

    Provide unpredictability and spontaneity? Here, use our MMO login page.

    The environments are not identical--VR environments are viewed and controlled using their own interfaces--but the approach itself is the same. VR storytelling == interactive fiction.

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