What do we do in virtual reality? Two years into the second VR revolution, the answer is still unclear. There will be games, of course, but what form will they take? Outside the constraints of gameplay, what stories will we tell – and how?
Defining the new medium is proving harder than many people expected. VR is still at the stage film was in the early twentieth century, before the first directors to pan and jump cut defined its grammar and language.
Ctrl, on show at the RADA Studios in London, is one of the first scripted dramas performed almost entirely in virtual reality. Created by British company Breaking Fourth, the 20-minute show attempts to give VR form by borrowing the values and techniques of theatre. The results are mixed, but the approach is promising.
The show begins when the audience is ushered down into the darkened studio. A smarmy host – “Dom ‘Dominator’ Williams” – introduces himself, explains how to use the Samsung Gear headset, and, in character, sets the scene for what is about to occur. “Are you excited?” asks Williams. “Of course you are, it’s the final of the world esports championship!”
Inside the virtual world, we are transported into the set of a chess-like video game. Williams is here as well, alongside an equally odious co-host, but we see them on a giant screen above us, where they are presented in live action. The mix of film and animation, unusual for VR, works extremely well. So too does the soundtrack, an intuitive blend of binaural, stereo and spatial audio, communicating instantly the nature and position of the environment’s many sounds.
Playing to win the grand prize is Liam, a nervous teenage boy of around fourteen. Behind him we see the wall of his mother’s flat – he's using her laptop, he admits, rather than a powerful gaming PC. “A craptop!” booms the hateful Williams, who forces Liam to confess that, if he wins, he will use the money as a deposit on a flat in Coventry. It’s a strange ambition for a teenage boy, and as Liam’s mother appears in the background, it's clear that something is not right. Her new partner is abusive, threatening and, it becomes increasingly evident, violent.
The scene is set: can Liam win the tournament, freeing his mother from her abusive captor? In film, this premise would mean cutting constantly between game and life. Virtual reality allows director Nigel Townsend and writer Abraham Parker to situate the audience in the game. Liam expertly manoeuvres his avatar as we watch in vivid close up; meanwhile, on the screens above, we see him through his laptop camera, as if on a Skype call.
Townsend and Parker both have theatrical backgrounds – Parker is a graduate of the Royal Court’s Young Writers programme – and details like this highlight the benefit of their experience. Among aficionados, there’s long been a theory that, although VR superficially resembles film, it is in reality closer to theatre. To understand why, consider the question of field of view. In films, as in games, the screen defines the view; in virtual reality, as in theatre, the viewer can gaze where they want. Theatrical skills of misdirection are required to command an audience’s attention. The newest medium refers back to the oldest of them all.
Ctrl offers glimpses of this emergent virtual theatrics, but its plot and characters tend to run in straight lines, sticking relentlessly to their original path. Fatally, the show also fails to take advantage of the fact that its audience is present, rather than at home on the sofa. The performance ended when the headsets came off – what we needed was a further act, to provide narrative complexity, and connect the virtual world to the real one. In other words, we needed more theatre. As it was, a drift of dry ice was left to convey what was presumably meant to be a sense of unease and ambiguity.
After Ctrl finished, with a scene of metaphorical violence played out in the gaming world, some audience members were shocked by the conclusion. Upstairs, in the bar, the debate began: was the show too dark, or not dark enough? Was VR too visceral for this kind of drama? The fault, however, lay not with the medium, but with the message. Good art requires no explanation; it justifies itself. When VR achieves maturity, we will only need to present it. That alone will be enough.
Ctrl is being performed at RADA Studios in London, from July 12 to 16 and July 18 to 23
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
