Playing with Reality by sciencegallerybengaluru

GAMING REALITY NOTES FROM THE MAKING OF GOLIATH VR

DO YOU KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WHAT IS REAL AND WHAT ISN’T REAL? ARE YOU SURE?

Holding this little pamphlet in your hands you have some expectations. You expect the paper to be solid. You can feel its weight, its texture, the imprint of the text. You expect that when the time comes you can hold this page between your fingers, bend it slightly creating a particular sound that you already know you will recognise, and perhaps even a whiff of the printing press from where it came, it will succumb to your desire to turn it.

�

There you go. No surprises there. And you continue. Words are absorbed by your eyes which skip along the page briskly conjuring shapes into voice and voice into information. In a blink of an eye. So far so good. Sensation and expectation are knitted together to make our reality. But sometimes our senses fail us. We miss what is there, or, perhaps, we see, hear, or feel something that is not.

If you stop reading and look up, what do you see? Reassuring isn’t it. You see what is there. For you. It's easy to assume that what you see is what everyone sees. But how could you ever know? Reality is also made by consensus — by what we, as a society, agree is real — and our position within this can change, in the blink of an eye.

GOLIA PLAYING WITH REALITY

ATH

Goliath: Playing with Reality is a virtual reality experience that was made between 2019 and 2021 by creative studio Anagram. It tells the story of a gamer, Jon, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was a teenager and spent several years on a psychiatric ward. He discovered gaming after his release and joined the online gaming community, becoming a regular streamer on Twitch as GoliathGamesTV. He has a community of friends and followers who together help each other win. The medication and the illness make Jon lethargic and heavy. His paranoia means he avoids leaving his house much. But when he is streaming, his voice becomes animated again. He sounds like the boy he was before the diagnosis and the long years in hospital.

Anagram started experimenting with technology in 2013 to explore how it could be used to get beyond the voyeurism of some documentary storytelling. We wanted to translate experiences that are usually hidden into stories that could be understood, on a visceral level, by others. With Goliath we were clear that we didn’t want Jon to be seen as a victim; rather, he is the hero of his story. We wanted users to empathise with him, not pity him. And in doing so, to question the common conviction that, in wider society, our own realities can be trusted.

This text is an attempt to capture some of the challenges of telling Jon’s story: a story about the unreal experience of psychosis, the real experience of gaming communities and the magic of virtual reality. Jon’s life as a gamer is also a story of a way of being in online worlds where you can be something other than yourself. And to see that as invalid is as flawed as seeing psychosis as truth. Two sides of the same coin. 9

UNDERSTANDING AN IMPOSSIBLE MIND In society at large, schizophrenia is portrayed as dangerous but those who suffer from it are more likely to be a victim of crime rather than a perpetrator of it. Often they are pushed to the fringes of society. During Covid perhaps many of us felt some of the effects of isolation, but this has always been a deadly reality for those with schizophrenia. Studies show that those diagnosed with the condition die for 18 years sooner than their peers. And not due to medical reasons. In other words, loneliness kills.

Because of this, we know very little about what it’s like to have schizophrenia. Those few representations available to us — in films, books, art — are often rendered in a crude and sensationalised form. Think Psycho. The term lumps together a lot of symptoms such as depression and delusion with a reputation for being untreatable. But many argue that the label is useless and does nothing to help bridge the gulf of understanding. In workshops we held with people who had experienced psychosis other terms were bandied around. ‘A person with unusual perception’ was one suggestion.

‘Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy. Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense; we divide the interminable days into years, months, and weeks. We hope for ways to corral and control bad fortune, illness, unhappiness, discomfort, and death — all inevitable outcomes that we pretend are anything but. And still, the fight against entropy seems wildly futile in the face of schizophrenia, which shirks reality in favour of its own internal logic.’ — Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias

�

WHAT IS IT REALLY LIKE TO HALLUCINATE? Psychosis affects the way your brain processes information. When someone takes a psychotropic drug, like LSD, the receptors across the brain link up: information from one part is translated by another, hence we see something that might not be there. Even without drugs, people are prone to making up their reality.

5-10 percent of people will experience a psychotic episode in their lifetime. If that episode is pleasant, they are less likely to report it. But many of us might see have seen a flash of something pass us by and the hairs stand up on our arms as we experience a blip in the matrix. Jon’s condition is utterly unique; no one can really understand what it’s like, not even the doctors who medicate it. And at the same time, all brains are unreliable, all perception fallible. And so made sense to use VR — a tool that creates fake realities to tell the story of someone who experiences an unusual one.

PLAYING WITH MAGIC ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

VR is a brilliant illusion. Like a magician, it works by sleight of hand. The high frame rate tricks our brain into believing something that isn’t actually there. If the images were produced at a slower frame rate it wouldn’t work, and the mechanics of the illusion would be exposed. The perfect number of frames per second make that world suddenly solid. The visual of a ball making impact with your hands is timed accurately with the haptic impact in the controller that you hold. This collision – between what you see and what you feel, between expectation and sensation — is what makes you think you have caught the ball. A sound is added and then it’s real. The material is identifiable.

The joy of making VR is the joy of inventing physics. Where is gravity? Is it beneath you? Do things float? Are you hovering or standing? Distract the person enough and they can roll with any set of rules. As if getting comfortable with the logic of a dream.

MAKING AN IMPOSSIBLE WORLD We wanted to create an alien alternate reality where everything has an undisclosed meaning. We went through 163 iterations made by a team of over 40 designers, artists, directors, writers, and coders, to create the final dreamlike world of Jon’s story. The visuals evolve from the pixelated aesthetics of arcade video games to hyperreal, creating a new visual language that bridges the gap between the user and Jon.

Echo, voiced by Tilda Swinton, is your guide, introducing you to the mechanisms of the experience. At its essence, it is the story of Jon’s life. But you, the user, participate in the unfolding of this. You announce yourself and the experience begins: floating text and audio interact, and your movements reveal hidden messages and whispering voices. Echo helps you move through the world, Goliath narrates his story, and you watch as time and space disintegrate around you. You play an arcade game, you catch floating pills, you go to a party and in this way, you enact elements of Jon’s story and experience his fractured reality. The visuals come apart and you find yourself stuck in a hospital room, a figure a few feet away from you lying on a bed. 19

It is here that your own voice comes back to haunt you, like a spectre. Within the game itself, your sense of reality is tested, and this is crucial in order to create empathy between the user and Jon. Much like Jon was contained within that psychiatric room, the user is locked into VR. Nothing interferes with your field of vision: there is no rustling audience in the stalls, or irritating fly buzzing across the cinema screen. The reality of the experience is hermetically sealed — the only other thing you are aware of is yourself, your body, your breathing, your beating heart. So, when the ground shifts beneath you, the walls move, and your space diminishes, you might feel shaky, disorientated, or even a little queasy.

After falling through space and being bombarded by voices, you finally come to Goliath’s living room. Spectral noises are replaced by the soft murmurings of other gamers in the background and a sense of safety is restored. You follow Goliath’s journey, experiencing the stages of breakdown and redemption. By participating in and being at the centre of the story, you put yourself on the line. It is your reality that is at risk. Echo, your guide requests that you use the same perception you've developed in this space inside the next one. And emerge, blinking, a little lost, and perhaps less sure of what you know to be real or not.

NOT JUST A GAME Central to Jon’s story is gaming. Gaming culture gets a bad rap. Since the 1970s, news outlets have enjoyed blaming it for violence, although studies that refute that myth abound. In fact, a 2016 study published in the Southern Economic Review suggests the opposite: much like Ancient Greek citizens were obliged to watch violent tragedies in order to purge themselves of their savage desires, so people who play video games channel their aggression into the controller.

If gaming isn’t inciting youth into violent rampages, then it’s leading to socially inept young adults, locked in their bedrooms. In 2018, as Fortnite released a port of the game that runs on mobile phones marking its growth into the world's largest MMO, the World Health Organization (WHO) added Gaming Disorder into its list of addictions. Similarly, it featured in the DSM-5 the official manual of psychiatric terms which has been re-released seven times since its first issue in 1952. A tome which evokes scientific objectivity but through its history reveals the ways the cultural context evolves our understanding of what is normal. Only in 1978 did the condition of homosexuality get removed as a condition from the manual. And the changeable definition of schizophrenia continues to cause much controversy.

‘USURP THE BODY! BECOME YOUR AVATAR!’ – Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism

But back to games. What is the potency of the gaming world that drives these new “addictions” and the migration of millions into them? What fantasy is exploited by corporations who promise us that it is on their ark that we will be sailed into the metaverse? It was when Jon’s brother pointed out that when Jon was streaming, his voice sounded just like he did when he was a kid — a time before the diagnosis, internment and before this whole story began. A story that looks at how online networks can be a freedom for some — free of some of the friction of our identities and histories that mark us in the real world. Such optimism is found in Glitch Feminism, by Legacy Russell published midway through the pandemic in 2020. In it Russelll argues for the liberating potential of the digital sphere, where the physical body, so often restricted

by the social demands put on it in real life, dissolves. It is in the space created by this that new possibilities open up. Identity is a construct, which is what Simone de Beauvoir meant when she wrote: ‘one is not born, but becomes a woman’. Russell extends this, reframing what it means to exist when she writes, ‘one is not born, but becomes, a body.’ Without the limits of the corporeal, identity requires restructuring. It is these new forms, which transcend gender, age, sex, race, to which Russell looks, encouraging us to learn from them and bring aspects of their fluidity, freedom and tolerance back to the ‘real world’ (or, as she calls is, AFK, ‘Away from Keyboard’). So, it is not ‘either/or’ but both together: using the digital space, like online gaming, to explore and

transcend identity changes how we view ourselves and others in the physical world. In this light, online gaming is not a source of isolation or power play, but a platform for a kind of new radical community that we, as a society, have not yet come to understand, where the rules of engagement, identity and possibility are different. At least for Jon and his friends, Russell’s theory is a definite reality. One of Jon’s teammates is paralysed from the neck down, but this doesn’t matter online. In fact, he is one of the best players on the team. Online, he transcends his physical restrictions. A freedom more powerful perhaps for a man like Jon bearing the deeply vilified label of “Schizophrenic” that presupposes where he should fit in society.

And it is when Jon is gaming that the voices in his head recede, replaced by those of his teammates. It is when Jon is gaming that he feels most like himself. Goliath: Playing with Reality is an introduction to this world as much as it is a representation of his unusual reality. It is a ‘game’ about gaming saving your life. That is how Jon explains it. In 2021 gaming is a bigger industry than cinema. Twitch exceeds YouTube in its number of streaming views. A generation is growing up comfortable with games as places you go to do things. Perhaps things you can’t do elsewhere in the ‘real world’, but still as valid. The achievement is real and the status that comes with that too.

The gaming community is notoriously ruthless and ahead of the launch of Goliath we waited, terrified for the review that would tear it up for its linear form and limited gameplay. The first review was a clanger. One star and “What's the point about this I thought it would be an online game but it turns out to be a story” But then a lot more reviews followed. And they blew us away. People have shared similar stories of struggling with mental health and isolation, and finding comfort online. One user who has schizophrenia said, “it's like you took the game right out of my mind” and urged others with mental illness to use it as a way to, “rediscover themselves”. A war veteran confessed he has found relief from PTSD in gaming, describing it as the “only way to connect to humanity”.

The experience has not just struck a chord with those suffering from acute mental conditions, but offers hope for future treatment, as a mental health counsellor who has suffered from periods of psychosis, wrote: “I’ll be sure to share this with fellow patients as I think it really does open your eyes to how life is before, during and after treatment.” We received messages from people with autism and bipolar diagnosis who use games as a social space and to “express myself comfortably”. Something in it resonated. Reading others’ stories of how gaming has helped them battle isolation and their own minds showed us that Goliath: Playing with Reality is operating on several levels: engaging with an existing community of online gamers who

struggle with mental health while also educating those new to the world in the language of gaming and illness. But Goliath is just one man’s story and one experience. The influx of responses shows the need for these kinds of stories and the power of VR to tell them.

THE FUTURE IS (UN)REAL ‘The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope.’ — Walter Benjamin

Working with a medium like VR made us rethink how we tell stories now and imagine possibilities for the future. There are moments through history where a new medium offers not just a new way to tell stories but a shift in how we relate to ourselves. In the 1700s the novel came into popularity with a new leisure class in Europe. Its form allowed for lengthy first person narratives driving by character. It was epistolary and confessional. It addressed ‘a reader’ because it needed the reader to know what it was: so new was this technology, a novel! Scholar Nancy Armstrong in the book How Novels Think argues that it's the novel that drives development of the modern individual. Alongside the novel with its creation of a

subject, one displaying wit, will, or energy capable of shifting the social order, readers understood themselves in terms of a narrative that produced a self-governing subject. By the Modernist period, this particular letter driven form had disappeared. But the writing still held onto that intimacy. Language melted into sound and space. What was retained, however, was a sense of the reader’s consciousness, and their participation in the story. VR as a narrative tool is creating a new cultural experience that we are just beginning to understand. It breaks down the narrative frame and turns it into a room, a seascape, a black hole. Because the medium is so new each time a piece of VR is made, new tools and processes are invented alongside it to make it the way it is. The crudeness of the tools

are a frustration, but the possibilities and the unknowability of the direction is extremely exciting. Works of fiction created our modern understanding of the ‘individual’ but VR takes this consciousness to the next level — if fiction made us aware of our subjecthood, VR lets us enact it. We shift from passive to active, not only engaging our emotions but also our bodies. It is something greater than the sum of its parts however; the temporary construction of your possible reality.

A Stanford study showed that 50% of children who swam with whales in VR felt afterwards that they could remember doing it in real life. Human memory is complex. Humans encode, store, and retrieve bits of information constantly; and the human mind can be fallible. This fallibility can be an advantage, a design intention. In a 2018 study published in Scientific Reports, domestic abuse offenders played the victim in a VR simulation, which had a significant impact in changing their perspective and allegedly changing the likelihood of reoffending in the future. The empathetic properties of the medium are clear: VR can make you believe in something that is not real and maybe even change your mind.

So how does this affect our consciousness? In the future, how will we be able to tell what is real or not? Multiple screens, storylines and characters create a fragmenting of concentration, but rather than view this as something negative, we can understand it as a new and evolved way of thinking. People can hold complex and multi-layered story strands in their minds at once, much like the multiplicity of experience that constitutes life.

This is just a continuation of history’s strive for the new. Of art’s attempt at mimesis. The Modernists with their abstracted experiments attempted to better represent our fragmented experience. Perhaps with VR and this move into a new era of storytelling the question is not, what is real or not, but what realities are on offer?

By playing with reality, breaking it down and rebuilding it, we hope to create connections between our fragmented worlds. Worlds that span the physical and the digital, allowing us to transcend the limitations of the former through the latter – and in doing so, return to the physical world with a better and broader understanding of what it means to be human.

You look down and you are not there, save for two, floating, glowing hands. These hands are representations; they are also real. What you feel in the virtual world is real. You take your headset off. Let your eyes get used to the light. It will take time. Perhaps the first thing you’ll see are your hands. If you can feel them, you can know you can do something there. What is important is what you do with that feeling, those hands, when you leave. Perhaps you reach out to someone else.

ALL REALITIES ARE IMAGINED. BUT THE ONES WE SHARE, ENDURE.

CREDITS Written by ANAGRAM and Madeleine Dunnigan Design by Will Brady GOLIATH: PLAYING WITH REALITY is a new work by ANAGRAM, coproduced with Floréal Films. It has been made with the support of Oculus VR for Good; the British Film Institute (BFI) awarding funds from the National Lottery; Creative XR, Digital Catapult and the Arts Council England; Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée; StoryFutures Academy; and developed thanks to La Biennale di Venezia — Biennale College Cinema VR and IDFA DocLab. 41

National Centre for Immersive Storytelling

�

GOLIATHVR.IO