DISPATCHES PERSPECTIVE
Journeys to the farthest reaches of interactive entertainment
Unseen hands push me down into the beanbag, making sure I’m nestled deep into its folds. Then, from the dark, a reassuring American voice. “Just relax,” it says. “You’re about to have a mushroombased experience.” I spend the next ten minutes floating through forests, tracing lines of white light with my hands, watching explosions of pudgy molecules like fireworks made of clay… before coming back down to earth. Specifically, a repurposed warehouse along the banks of the Thames – the natural home, surely, of such happenings.
Today, this warehouse is home to the London Film Festival’s Expanded programme, a collection of VR, AR, MR and other ‘immersive storytelling experiences’ that don’t neatly fit into any of those neatly initialised buckets. On one hand, there’s Forager, the aforementioned mycological VR trip; on the other, Consensus Gentium, an interactive film playing out on an iPhone suspended in front of me, with tracking technology that reads the expressions on my face and – to my horror – occasionally drops a live feed of it into the story.
Colored (Noire) uses Microsoft’s HoloLens to tell the story of Claudette Colvin, a Black civil rights activist arrested in March 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white person, in the same city but nine months before Rosa Parks doing the same sparked a movement. Things Fall Apart combines Yeats’ The Second Coming, Quest 2’s passthrough capabilities and an enormous quantity of AI-sourced art into a terrible use of 25 minutes of your life. There are also AR-guided walks around the city, although, since these require going outside, I refuse to partake.
Taken as a whole, though, I couldn’t have stumbled upon a more perfect encapsulation of what I’m hoping to achieve with this column. My predecessor in this slot reported from videogaming’s borders. I plan to set up camp at those outer reaches and look to the horizon; out to all the weirdo stuff that technically falls under those words that greet you on the magazine’s cover every month, but never seems to quite fit within its pages.
From the dark, a reassuring American voice. “Just relax,” it says. “You’re about to have a mushroom-based experience”
The ‘interactive entertainment’ part of Edge’s mission statement is a delightfully broad term, one that reaches far beyond the medium we tend to cover. To me, it simply suggests an artform that, when you poke at it, pushes back. Do boardgames fall under that umbrella? Immersive theatre? Virtual concerts? What about the Metaverse? That is what we’re going to find out together – and, in the process, hopefully discover some things we can steal and bring back to this medium we call home.
So, what can we possibly l
