Diagnosia is an immersive, non-linear environmental storytelling piece that takes you inside of a Chinese Internet Addiction Camp. In the early 2000s in China, there was a moral panic around video game use as state-run Chinese media started to declare label excessive technology use as “electronic heroin” and “spiritual opium.” Director Mengtai Zhang was bullied in school and was experiencing a stressful familial situation, which resulted in him retreating into video games, and was labeled a teenage “Internet addict” and sent off to an Internet addiction camp run by Chinese military in Beijing in 2007
Diagnosia recreated the inside of one of these Internet Addiction Camps based upon Zhang’s memories, and tells stories of his experiences as you roam around this prison-like institution and come across a diary entry recounting specific contextually-relevant memories of different locations. There’s also photos to help bridge the physical reality with the virtual representation, and the experience feels a bit like walking through a spatialized photo album that’s curated to highlight some of the most visceral and surreal moments from Zhang’s experiences there. There’s also some exquisite sound design in this piece that really transports you into this world, and co-creator and music composer Lemon Guo met Zhang in the context of doing sound design. The end result is an experience that transports you into a surreal world in a powerfully immersive way.
In the final sequence, you have a chance to get more broader socio-political context for these camps as you explore a photorealistic photogrammetry scan of Zhang’s New York City apartment. There’s a board that’s hanging on the wall with a complete timeline of the evolution of the Internet Addiction Camps in China with conspiracy-theory style red lines connecting the dots to key turning points and players in the creation of this phenomena. You can also sit down at Zhang’s computer and watch some of the archival footage of some of the official promoters of Internet Addiction, who have been warning about the risks of technology.
Both Guo & Zhang are skeptical about the deeper motivations of the Chinese government pushing this moral panic over Internet addiction, especially as they report that this is used by the authoritarian regime and repressed culture to exile taboo representations of culture ranging from romantic affairs conducted within cyberspace, men presenting feminine traits as a form of discrimination and to deny LGBT Rights in the early 2000s, or from excessive video game use that may also be within the context of a tumultuous familial situation.
There’s an article in Games and Culture in 2015 by Trent Bax titled “Internet Gaming Disorder” in China: Biomedical Sickness or Sociological Badness? that reaches a similar conclusion. Here’s the abstract of his article.
“Internet addiction” in China and elsewhere is considered a serious social problem. In China, some psychiatrists have claimed 10% of all Internet users—60 million—are potentially “addicted” to the Internet. Following on the heels of the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), this qualitative-based research article critically investigates the new concept Internet gaming disorder, a category recently included in the DSM-5 as a condition “warranting more clinical research and experience before it might be considered for inclusion in the main book as a formal disorder.” This article takes up this challenge and responds in the following way: When we investigate the social existence of online gamers labeled Internet addicts in China, and then subject their social existence to the DSM’s own definition of a mental disorder, we discover not a clearly understood mental disorder called Internet gaming disorder but more so an issue of social deviance.
There some are larger dynamics here at play when it comes to Internet Addiction, especially with the research and statistics coming from China. Lemon said that there are not a lot of first-person accounts of what it was like to go through a military-regimented schedule at one of these Internet Addiction camps, and so Diagnosia grounds this issue through the personal experiences, memories, and broader context of Zhang’s experiences there. It’s a brilliant use of environmental storytelling and immersive sound design, and helps to communicate a really surreal personal experience that has broader socio-political implications within the context of Chinese culture. Addiction to immersive technology is certainly going to be a legitimate issue for some, but it’s also important to look at these issues holistically and embedded within the larger contexts in order to avoid blaming technology for sociological taboos or inconvenient behaviors.
I had a chance to unpack this experience with Zhang and Guo on January 19th ahead of the first full day of Sundance New Frontier 2022 to get more context on their production process, as well as more context to some of these debates around Internet Addiction happening within China.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. Continuing on, on looking at some of the experiences from the Sunday Night's New Frontier 2022, today's episode is going to be diving into Diagnosia, which looks at these Chinese internet addiction camps. Apparently, these camps were created as a result of internet addiction, which is something that the Chinese government helped try to get this diagnosed as a mental disorder. But Meng Taizong is somebody who actually went through one of these camps. For him, he was dealing with a lot of familial issues and doubts whether or not he was solely addicted to the internet. It's something he was using to escape from this familial context. But these internet addiction camps, apparently, were places to send people from the Chinese culture that had a variety of different issues that ranged everything from having an affair online, playing too many video games, or expressing feminine traits, almost like a conversion therapy type of thing. Essentially, it was a catch-all for lots of different cultural taboos around people who were diagnosed with this. to send folks into what essentially was more like a military training camp than an addiction camp. So there's lots of different aspects of this. I've never heard of this, and there's not a lot of first person accounts of what it's like to be there. So Mongtai actually recreated what it was like to be inside of one of these camps and traces through some of his own memories as you're able to explore around and read these diary entries and different photos and just go through some of the different routines of the day. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Mongtai and Lemon happened on Wednesday, January 19th, 2021. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:51.012] Mengtai Zhang: Hi, I'm Mengtai Zhang. I'm the director and the developer of Diagnosia. I come from a visual art background and a sound art background. Yeah.
[00:02:02.537] Lemon Guo: Hi, my name is Lemon Guo. I am the co-creator and music composer of Diagnosia. I am mostly coming from the music background, but I also have a bit of the psychology background. And same as Montai, I have a background in sound art, which is actually where we met. We were both MFA students in sound art at Columbia University in New York. And that's when we started collaborating.
[00:02:29.951] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. It's definitely a great sound design within this piece of Diagnostia. And maybe before we start to dive into that, you could give me a bit more context as your journey into working with immersive media.
[00:02:41.231] Mengtai Zhang: That actually starts from 2018. I was working with the multi-channel video installations that contains the sort of immersive elements in there. Usually the audience was sandwiched between the multiple screen. And I started to work with the virtual reality was in 2019. I started with the web VR first. Most of them are sound installations in the virtual space. And a short exploration of this Internet addiction idea in the first place, that's a piece called Virtual Confinement. The audience can join the space in a confinement space, they can write a diary and they can communicate through a diary book they can find in the room.
[00:03:34.447] Lemon Guo: And that simulates a sort of isolation treatment that is actually used a lot in the Internet Action Center Montaille was sent into. Yeah. And my journey into the immersive media is a little different. The route is a little different. I started making immersive, more theater-like performances starting in 2016, 2017. working with vocalists and movement artists and working with theater design and installations, video projections, multi-channel sound. Montale was helping me a lot back then with the video projection actually. And I was working usually with the voice in a very embodied and visceral way. So that's kind of how I anchor myself when starting working with VR as well. That's kind of my entry point.
[00:04:39.316] Kent Bye: Yeah, I love the environmental storytelling approach that you have in this piece where you really take us into this context of one of these internet addiction centers or rehabilitation centers within China. And you are using diaries and photos and sharing your own personal story. And I just felt like You took me into a world I knew little to nothing about, and it was fascinating to see your own journey with this. And so maybe you could describe for us a little bit, Mongtai, what this topic is in terms of these internet addiction centers and your connection to them.
[00:05:14.243] Mengtai Zhang: Oh, yes. Actually, this work starts in 2018 when I saw news came out from WHO. They were saying the gaming disorder has been classified as a mental disorder at that moment. When I saw that, I was quite surprised because it's calling back my past memories about I was in one of the internet addiction camps in Beijing back to 2007. So I dig in a bit more about this topic and find the archival journals, talk about these issues and try to link with my own memories. First of all, I follow up those papers, articles that are published online or on some academia journals. on the topic of internet addiction. I found the interesting thing that this idea of internet addiction is still quite unclear in this moment. And also, for my personal stories, that was back to 2000s in China, when the internet addiction rehab center would just start around the middle of 2000s. And the media started to call the video game as an electronic heroin and a spiritual opium at that time. So, there are a few experts that jump out and are saying, oh, this is a serious issue that can cause a social disorder and sometimes a problematic use of the technologies at the time. So, they start these institutions to treat people who have been diagnosed as internet addicts. Some of them are supported by government, but most of them are private. The ones I was sent into are supported by government and run by military personnel, actually Chinese Army colonel and a therapist. His name is Tao Ran. The treatment methods in this camp are combined medical treatment, drugs, psychotherapies, isolations, and paramilitary trainings, and sometimes violence. Also, the institution often creates a culture of violence and surveillance between the patients. They're trying to use patients to monitor each other. In 2010, there were over 300 internet addiction camps in China, and it became a multi-billion industry at the time. But in these situations, many patients in this place are being ignored about their social backgrounds at the time. Take myself as an example. I was facing years of family conflicts, so at the time I was using video games as an escape from those conflicts. And also, while I was in these camps, I met many people who also have family issues, but those issues simply be ignored. They just focus on the actual problems, the problematic use of the technologies. So, yeah.
[00:08:25.270] Lemon Guo: And not all of them were there for so-called internet addiction, right? Oh, yes. You told me that there were people who were sent there for all sorts of bizarre reasons. For instance, Montai told me that there was this man who was in his 30s, and his wife and mom sent him there because he had an affair online. a cyber affair, and that had nothing to do with internet addiction. This man is one of the characters in our story. There was another younger man who was in his early 20s. He's a college student. He was also there because he got a girlfriend in college, and his parents thought that it's too early to date in college. They wanted him to focus on studying instead. And he didn't listen, so his parents put him into the camp. And this is another character in the story. He and Monta actually became friends and they were conspiring amongst themselves to feed therapists false information so they could both get released sooner. this like brief camaraderie that formed between those two. And there was a 10-year-old boy who was there because he took his pants off in class. He was imitating a very well-known, unloved Japanese anime character. The character often takes off his pants and showing his butt to people in the cartoon, so the kid was doing the same, but he did it in class, in public, and that's how he got sent in there. Then there were some people who were there for teenage dating, because teenage dating is around a pound. There were young boys who were sent there because they were showing too much feminine traits. And that's also frowned upon. So it seems like the camp was a place to correct, with quotation marks, correct different types of behaviors that the parents or society disapprove of. And just like one size fits all solution, put them into military training, give them some medicine, put them into counseling therapy. until whatever problem they had were ironed out.
[00:10:58.150] Mengtai Zhang: Yeah, those are all the major issues or the things I experienced in there, in this place. And I thought VR actually offers me a really good platform or tool to express this part of the memories as a secondhand memory transplanting to the viewers who would like to join this journey.
[00:11:22.587] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's really pretty surreal because like you were saying, it's like internet addiction is already kind of a vague term, but it sounds like a place where some folks within the Chinese culture could send people to deal with issues that they don't want to deal with, but it's probably more of the social issues rather than something that's more medical. But it sounds like a cross between like a prison and a rehabilitation camp and a very regimented place where a lot of rules and like, there was a point where you wanted to leave and you couldn't even leave. So it's like, you kind of lose your sovereignty and your ability to make your own choices and you have to almost be forced to be in this experience. And then to just walk through all these different diary entries. And then I think one of the more striking things was, you know, for you to take us to this location and the sound design just felt like, there was military training exercises going on outside all the time or people marching around, or I don't know if that's what it sounded like or what your process was of recreating that, because I think that was a distinct quality of this experience is how all the sounds that were happening sound plausible, like this is what it would sound like if you were in this place. And so Maybe you could talk about that of trying to recreate that feeling of all of these sort of regimented rules and exercises that were happening in the background. That's off screen. You can't see what's happening, but you just get the sense of what felt like kind of a military training camp in some ways.
[00:12:49.335] Mengtai Zhang: Yes, actually we are trying to use the sound as a background storytelling to describe the environments there. In both ways, a part of the feeling, how that feels in the space, but it's combined with the fun sound. Lemon, you want to talk about that?
[00:13:07.806] Lemon Guo: Yeah, so you're right because we did put a lot of military training sounds in the background because the camp, it was actually located within a larger military site. So there are other military trainings happening around it. So that's kind of like additional layer of information that is there. And also they were really training a lot, right? From what Montai told me and then also from other documentary about this camp that we saw online during our research. Montai, can you talk about your schedule? Oh, yes.
[00:13:50.638] Mengtai Zhang: While I was there, I usually should get up around five, six in the morning and we have a morning training. Usually it's like just running around for a couple hours to 7am and we will have breakfast and we'll have a short break. Then we will continue the military trainings. Sometimes we just stand, looks like those military soldiers' posture, again for a couple of hours. Sometimes we just stand there from 9 to 11. They're telling me that this will help those people who, especially for those gamers who are sitting too long, so just as a way to correct their postures. And sometimes we're going to have the therapist lecturer in the afternoon, usually from two to five. They might call it as a group therapist or collective therapist. So they organize a bunch of people sitting around or sometimes sitting in a circle. and share their own story or sometimes share their own feeling about the internet use or the gaming experience. But in a reflective way, like you should talk about how bad it is sometimes, how we spend too much time on this. forgot what a real life it is, and we shouldn't really be focused on those virtual stuff, but we should go back to the actual world. And after the dinner, we still have the trainings, but it usually take place in the buildings. Actually, people can experience it in the work in this hallway. We're doing lots of pushup in there, usually 200, somewhere like that. Yeah. After that, we're going to go to bed around nine or 10 PM. That's a daily schedule.
[00:15:49.820] Lemon Guo: So military sound is one thing, and because we only have 30 minutes in this VR experience, we were thinking of the narrative in this story as a non-linear story. And, you know, with the diaries from different dates scattered throughout the space and different events happening, I was trying to think how the sound can embody Montai's memory of the camp in a non-linear way, but like how he feels about it.
[00:16:30.467] Mengtai Zhang: and a lot of stretch about the final footage.
[00:16:33.900] Lemon Guo: Right. So not in a linear way, but his overall memory and overall impression of this space. So I had a sample, a lot of different sound bites from documentaries that actually filmed these camps, like people marching and doing military drills, singing. And I actually just used a lot of time stretch algorithms so that it becomes really long and feel like the time is stretched really long and you're just like stuck in a place forever in a kind of static and heavy way. And I think that kind of fits how it feels from my imagination when you are stuck in this sort of intense and regimented place and not knowing when you're able to get out. One interesting sound that I used, it's actually in the third scene, the running scene, I sampled this type of marching music that is heard on Monday morning by Chinese students. Because on Monday morning, we have this flag ceremony. It's how students begin the week. They enter the school, and they have this flag ceremony. And this music is, when you hear the music, you know it's time to go to that ceremony. And time stretched that sound. until it's sort of irrecognizable but still remains some of the quality of that kind of music and there that and to create a soundscape of the running scene.
[00:18:15.046] Kent Bye: Yeah, I thought that the ability to be able to move around and locomote through the space and discover these different journal entries that were spread out through, you can pick up stuff and see what's on the back of it. These interactable objects to be able to hear another part of the story as I was going through this piece. And then at the end, it's almost like a whole bonus scene where you take us back to this apartment in New York City and you can explore around and read all the books on the bookshelf, which I had a fun time seeing the mixture of different Chinese literature and philosophy books. a whole range of different topics, but also to be able to have what's essentially this conspiracy theory board. What I mean is that you have this board with red lines drawn in between, but it's really trying to tell the history of this internet addiction and some of the main characters and the evolution of this. And what I found striking was that this concept just feels kind of antiquated, like how could this ever have even been a thing But yet at the same time, apparently enough research has been coming from China for the World Health Organization to legitimize it and then to have it within the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5 is an addendum. So yeah, just having these levels of classifying this as a mental disorder, whereas it felt like an excuse to send people that people within the society didn't want to deal with rather than having any sort of deeper. I mean, I'm sure there is issues with internet addiction in terms of people not being connected to their physical lives in a way that they're in these virtual spaces and not living up to the responsibilities, but it was just striking to be able to see that mapping of that history that you did at the very end. after having your own personal story, but this was almost like taking a step back and looking at the larger dynamics of this as a story, whether this conceit of like the conspiracy board, but also to sit down in your computer and watch some different computer clips of some of the leaders of this movement. And just to hear their direct quotes about how they're talking about this. And so I felt that that helped add another layer of the context to the story above and beyond your own personal story, which I think told the gist of what the experience of it was. But then to take that experience of what it was like for you to go through that and the trauma of all that through your diary and reflections and everything else that you're giving us throughout the first two thirds, but the last part of just being able to have More information. So yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit of if that was like an extra scene or if you always plan to have that in there, if that was just what it looked like when you were working on this project and you wanted to use that as another conceit to give people like another access into this as a topic.
[00:21:01.582] Mengtai Zhang: Oh yes, definitely. I want to give people other access to these stories because, I mean, I don't want the audience hearing from my own voice. They should be hearing from a different place and they can come up with their own thought or the judgment for these issues. And mainly use my bedroom as archival research that's put my information all together on the computer screen and on that click board. The audience can pick them up and just see what's going on there and check their connections. And also as a way kind of just explore what my current living condition and why I'm getting into this trouble in the way.
[00:21:49.463] Lemon Guo: Yeah, we did a lot of background research while making this piece, and we actually had an earlier draft of this work that looked quite different. Because for Montai, it was very important to show the audience the larger picture, the cultural background, the social background, the political background. So that version, we kind of cut it more like a lot of other documentary on this subject where you have all this background information sandwiched between scenes of his memory or like as a commentary here and there but we ended up not using that because we feel like for VR it's so immersive If you go in and out of his first-person perspective, his memory could be a little jarring, so we chose to instead have the first part of the experience just focus on his memory. and that the audience to go really deep into his world and feel what he was feeling and seeing what he was seeing, experience what he experienced. And then after that, as the audience came out of that, we left all this clues and pieces, this kind of as an archive, using Monta's room as the space to host that. so the audience can decide how much they want to learn and make up their own mind about it. And yeah, I guess another challenge that we're working against was that it can be quite challenging for people who are not so comfortable with VR, like you probably do, Ken. I think you're probably quite comfortable in the VR space now. But for a lot of people who are just starting playing with this media, it can be quite dizzying or uncomfortable after a while. So having those information as an archive is also a way for the audience to decide how long they want to spend in the space. If it was uncomfortable already, they can choose to leave. But if they can still handle it, and if they want to know more about it, then they can spend time with all these photos and documents and newspapers and videos to learn more. Yeah.
[00:24:21.615] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm very curious to hear if this is a type of piece that if you tried to produce it while still living in China, if you would have been able to, or if you're able to tell part of these stories because you're no longer living in China and being able to do it, or if you feel like you still would have been able to live in China and still be able to tell this story in the same way.
[00:24:44.433] Mengtai Zhang: I think the most sensitive part, if I tell the story in China, the military part can be really sensitive in this case. Although there were lots of criticism about the Internet Addiction Rehab Center in China, But the one I went to was quite another case. People don't talk about that too much, I guess, because there is a military background and also government support stuff going on. So people are trying to just avoid that part, try to avoid getting into trouble.
[00:25:18.105] Lemon Guo: Right. The state-run medias have actually come out to criticize a lot of the other camps because I think in the late 2000s, early 2010s, news media and people online started picking up on what is really going on in a lot of these camps, like a lot of violence and some camps have been found to cause death and created a stir in the media. And so a lot of camps were shut down because they were found to have this malpractice and the government, actually, some of the footages and archives we found were directly, things are said by state-run media, criticizing the camps, saying that they don't have the credentials of education system or medical system, and they're not qualified to do this. So a lot of them were shut down, but this one is kind of untouched for reasons that Montai said. And also, because as you've seen, this camp is well connected in the global scientific community of internet addiction. It sort of established itself as a scientific authority. It has a special status. Although if you look it up, you can find a lot of anonymous posts online floating around by people who have come out of these camps and people who care about these issues. They're kind of exposing what is happening there, but it stays online. It doesn't go much further beyond that. Yeah, and you know, this is another important thing that we want to mention is that we think that this institution has certain problematic research practice, although the Dark Katara is widely published. internationally in the DSM. His diagnostic criteria was included in the appendix of DSM-5 of the American Psychiatric Association, and he was also published in the Addiction Journal in the UK and cited by lots of scholars worldwide. There's potential conflict of interest in his research because the center charges a large fee and they take in, according to himself, hundreds or thousands of people each year. But he didn't declare that when publishing his papers. And there could also be a lack of consent because he was using patients in his center as research subjects. But at least for Meng Tai and Meng Tai's parents, they don't recall signing any paper saying that they agree to have research performed on them. Yeah, so these are some ethical issues that I would think should be known. And then, yeah, the criticism of this camp are mostly online, despite that thousands, if not tens of thousands of people have been treated by this camp. I think according to himself, he says something like 15,000 people have gone through treatment in his camp. Is that number correct?
[00:28:45.232] Mengtai Zhang: somewhere around 10,000.
[00:28:47.173] Lemon Guo: Maybe 10,000 or 15,000. I don't have the number on top of my head, but somewhere around that. Despite the big number of people have been through that, you really don't hear that much about them. And when you do, it's mostly online, anonymous. I think part of it is because internet addiction is framed as mental disorder, and mental disorder is a deeply stigmatized concept in China still. For instance, a lot of people confuse that with total insanity, and for a lot of people, it's also a very shameful thing. They think that If you tell people that you were diagnosed as internet addiction at one point, whether that was a true diagnosis or not, it can affect your opportunity to get a good job or have a good marriage, things like that. So people usually stay quiet about their experience and they don't talk about it. And we don't hear from people who are labeled as internet addicts themselves at all. And we feel like the discourse of internet addiction is largely dominated by the so-called experts in the media and government officials. And that's why we think it's important to make this piece and at least have the perspective, at least tell the story from the perspective of someone on the other side, someone who was diagnosed and probably wrongfully diagnosed as internet addiction and went through treatment in those places.
[00:30:27.980] Kent Bye: Well, I think looking at all the variety of different ethical issues with virtual and augmented reality, I think people have in their minds this picture of someone with a VR headset in their corner in a very sparsely populated room with maybe a bed and they're just comatose within these VR experiences that are providing them, like you said, the spiritual opium of the masses. It's like these virtual experiences as being hyper addictive drugs that people do. And there can be a quality of that within virtual reality where people do escape. And I guess the way that I would phrase it, and maybe this is the way that it's also partly defined, is that if you're escaping into these worlds and not meeting your obligations of your relationships in your world, like you're not doing your job, you're not living up to your familial obligations or whatever that line could be that your relationships in the physical world are suffering because you are in these addictive loops escaping into virtual reality. I think that is a real potential. But yet when I watched this piece, I don't think that this solution of these Internet addiction camps are necessarily a viable solution. And having gone through that and hearing your story, it doesn't sound like it was a great experience and that it may have not really done anything other than traumatize you. And in this experience of recounting that, but still at the same time, there is the issue of people that do take it too far. And so I'm just wondering if you have any reflections on this, you know, how to address this issue. It's not like the issue doesn't exist in any context, I think it can be an issue. But I don't think that this is necessarily the solution, you know, this thing that you went through, but I'm just curious how you make sense of this as a topic after having experienced this directly.
[00:32:14.431] Lemon Guo: If I may perhaps push that back a little bit, from my perspective, I think the moral panics about technology addiction, we're seeing a pattern both in China and in the West kind of throughout history. In China, every generation has their quote-unquote spiritual opium. Like we talked about near the beginning of the piece, there was a singer, Taiwanese singer whose name is Deng Lijun. Her music was spanned in China from the 80s to 1995. It was also called spiritual opium because it was believed that her decadent voice could corrupt the revolutionary souls of the people. And young people of that generation spent lots of time listening to her music and indulging her music. And other people thought that it was bad. It was taking them away from their daily obligations and corrupted their morals. And then in the West, there was actually moral panics about the novels when it first came out, and there was moral panics about the radio, thinking that it was harming the health of kids because they were totally addicted to the radio, they were listening to the radio all the time, and it was getting into their head and getting into their health. And then more recently, there were more panics about the dungeon dragon. And then even more recently, we're seeing that violent video games are being used as a scapegoat for violent behaviors in society. But all of that are debunked by now in science. And I'm mentioning all that because I think Every time a new technology comes around, we have these waves of moral panics. What that does is when we're using addiction to this technology to explain whatever is going terribly wrong in society, whether that's mass shootings or the rise of teenage crimes or people having problems with their works and their school or with other people, I think the technology changes, but the panic's kind of similar and recurring. And I think what that does is it shifts our gaze away from the social issues and the structural issue and the cultural issues that are deeply embedded in society. And we're turning our gaze from objective or collective solutions to address these problems. And we're turning away from actually dealing with this larger society scale problems, but towards treating this so-called pathologies within the so-called addicts themselves. And I think that's a shifting of responsibility. And it's like, I feel like when people are spending too much time on internet or in VR devices in the gaming world, it's often a symptom of something else that had already gone wrong in their life. It could be problems in their family, like Meng Tai and his parents, like years of unaddressed family problems. Or actually another thing that Meng Tai hadn't mentioned is that he had been bullied in school for many years. It's something that's wrong in the education system in the school. Or I know people are quite desperate about the maybe income equality in the world or like lack of social mobility, and lots of different things could trigger a desire to escape. So I think the diagnosis of internet addiction often neglects the larger social contacts and whatever else was going on in that person's life. And if we don't address that, and if we're only treating this so-called addiction to the virtual world, then the problem will never be solved. Then they might just find another thing to escape to. It's not a virtual world. Yeah.
[00:36:49.654] Mengtai Zhang: Yeah, you said everything I just want to say. Yeah. Just thinking about that, actually, sometimes I'm thinking about especially my father and mother. For my father, he loved Deng Lijun's song in his generation when he was young. And my mother was really into the novel. So at the time, there is no computer or technologies. Sometimes I'm just wondering, in my generation, if there is no computer, would we just use novel or music as a way to escape the realities? So yeah, in that case, I thought maybe the technology usage, especially what they call the internet addiction, might be manifested the real problems that's in the society. So the people need to address what the actual problem is. Otherwise, even if there is no internet, they can use other things to escape from the reality.
[00:37:47.698] Lemon Guo: Yeah. And that is not to say that the technology is totally innocent in this. It definitely is not. And it is in the financial interest of the tech company to try to get people hooked on this. But I think what I hope to advocate is just this larger perspective of looking at this within the larger context of what is going on in the world and also not to punish the individuals for their so-called pathology. Definitely not. They're not the issues. I think they're perhaps, if anything, they're just the symptom of underlying issues.
[00:38:28.233] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling and what it might be able to enable?
[00:38:39.095] Mengtai Zhang: I think It offers a really good environment for the storytelling, especially the environmental storytelling, gives that a sense of the immersion of the audience in this space. So my personal interest or my personal view on that is how to use a space in the virtual reality combined with those immersive audios, spatial audios to tell the story.
[00:39:06.358] Lemon Guo: I think it is quite powerful because, for instance, in our case, we obviously will not be allowed to film in that camp. And it offers an opportunity for us to reconstruct the space as Mun Tai remembered, as he experienced it. and to be able to transport that experience to the audience in this sort of personal and immersive way, and let them see this thing as how Moon Tai saw it. And I think that can be quite powerful for documentary filmmakers, but also for anyone because it shifts the power dynamics of who gets to tell the story and whose story gets listened. Because, you know, like go back to this internet addiction camp, there aren't that many people who have been able to make this film because it's hard to get access to the institutions. You have to go through a lot of hoops and perhaps lots of censorship. And VR allowed us to do this. And I think it will allow a lot more people to have the opportunity to have their perspective seen and have their stories heard.
[00:40:23.281] Kent Bye: Yeah. I think that that environmental storytelling where you're creating the larger context, but then within there you have these photos. And so it's almost like a spatial photo album where you're able to place those photos of those experiences in the context of that architecture of that space, which gives you a a real deep visceral feeling of the overarching vibe of what it was like to be there and to be in the virtual space and to understand that space relative to the larger institutions that you're in, but also to ground it back into the physical reality through those photos that are connecting us back into the actual manifestation of some of these places. So I really enjoyed that as that piece. So yeah, it just provide an opportunity if there's anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community.
[00:41:10.133] Mengtai Zhang: People should keep exploring this medium. It's really, for me, a kind of open platform, especially for the individual. It offers good opportunities to reconstruct stuff, learn the boundary between the real and the unreal.
[00:41:25.176] Lemon Guo: Yeah, I would love to have people keep exploring. And also, I think it would be nice if we can somehow make the entry point a little bit more accessible. I think right now it can be quite challenging to get into it because it's expensive and it takes a lot of technical skills. You have to write codes and stuff. It will be amazing one day if it's easier to get into and more people can do this.
[00:41:59.030] Kent Bye: Well, Mengtai and Lemons, thank you so much for joining me here on the podcast and telling me a bit more about Diagnosia and your process. It's a really powerful story in terms of the use of VR to tell this type of environmental story and taking me to a place that I will never, hopefully never have to end up going there or being a part of directly, but to share a bit of your own experience there and part of the larger cultural dynamics of this topic within China. So really fascinating piece that is very multifaceted and both a personal story and a collective story all at the same time. So yeah, thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to be able to unpack it all.
[00:42:36.168] Lemon Guo: Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
[00:42:38.625] Kent Bye: So that was Mengtai Zhang. He's a director and developer of Diagnosia, as well as Limin Guo. She's a co-creator and composer of Diagnosia. So I've a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, I think this is a really strong use of virtual reality because in this piece, they're able to take me into a place that I didn't even know exist. And it's just this surreal otherworldly type of experience where It feels like you're in this prison, but it's got this military training vibe. Also, it's for people who have a variety of different conditions that are seen as culturally taboo in some sense within the Chinese culture or have helped to establish this whole internet addiction as something that was being considered for the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders. It's in there as an appendix because they're trying to gather enough information to legitimize this as a mental health condition. And so I was just struck to hear about Mongtai's experience in there and to walk through and explore around and have this environmental storytelling, which I think the sound design of this piece is absolutely incredible because it really puts you into the place like you feel like you're there just with all the different surrounding sound effects and outdoor military training exercises and whatnot. It's a pretty surreal experience overall, but also one that they realized at the end, they added all this other larger contextual, political, and cultural dimensions of the story. They found that when they tried to cut it together like a traditional documentary, and out of all those things at the same time, you're immersed into this experience as a first-person perspective, but it took you out of this experience when you started to learn about the larger context of what it meant to be there. And so, at the end, they take you into Mongtai's apartment building to give you a sense of where he was living in New York City, but also to have that conceit of the conspiracy board trope where there's this board with pictures with all these red lines connecting the dots into trying to allow you to understand the deeper history and context of this as being a thing. Some of the key players, some of the decisions, some of the events. Then you sit down at the computer and you're able to watch some actual quotes from some of the people who were responsible for finding some of these Internet addiction camps. Apparently, there's this movement of trying to get some of this legitimized within the larger DSM-5. But at the same time, Lemon was saying that there could be some conflict of interest for some of this research. First of all, some of the research could be done on people who weren't even consenting to be able to be subjects of this research. Also, there's a direct financial benefit for this research being legitimized for these camps within China. Apparently there's ones that are state-run and ones that are private, and even the state media within China was criticizing the ones that were more private-run. But apparently there's still some of the ones that are still run by the government, which becomes more sensitive to be able to discuss some of those different dimensions. It sounds like that's the type that Muang Thai was in, that was run by the government, and there's lots of different military aspects there that also make it more of a sensitive issue. So, like I said, it was a pretty surreal type of experience to go on this journey of just kind of exploring around and learning about what the culture was like to be there, and it didn't sound like that he had much agency to be able to leave, that he was kind of stuck there, and that they had to coordinate and collaborate with some of the other people that were there to be able to tell the story for them to even get out of that place. It's quite a fascinating story because this is a good example to use the medium of VR to be able to start to tell a story like this. I know that Nani de la Peña was a pioneer at the frontiers of this, trying to show what it was like for some of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay to be stuck in some of these different stress positions for an avatar within Second Life. Being able to take you into these different places that you otherwise would never be able to get into. Then, also, the lemon was mentioning that for anyone that is diagnosed with an addiction, there's either other comorbidities in terms of other mental health aspects, or there could be other aspects of a cultural or familial context that is really contributing to the behaviors. To just only blame it on the technology is to ignore all the other larger contextual dimensions of what may be going on in someone's life. With Wong Tai, as he tells a story, she said there's not a lot of first-person accounts of these stories. It's just from these experts who are declaring that this is an actual thing. But to actually listen to someone who was diagnosed with this and his personal experience, it's a little bit more nuanced than that and potentially creates all this shame and cultural taboos around people who are diagnosed with this. It's another piece that starts to show how you can connect these dots between the larger political and cultural context into someone's individual personal story. All these other domains of what's happening in the culture of China, to be able to create a situation like this, and then just to have someone's first-person perspective, You go through that through the first parts, and then at the end, you're able to connect the dots to the larger political context for how this came about and allow you to explore around for as long as you want. You could leave right as you get to that last scene within the apartment if you're fatigued from being in VR for too long. But there's also an opportunity to dig a little bit deeper and to look into a lot of the research that they did for the project that they thought they were going to be more seamlessly integrated throughout the piece. It just didn't work in terms of a first-person perspective. I had to put it there at the end for you to learn more information about this. I thought that was quite an effective way of doing that. You go through these really surreal experiences like, what is going on here? How could this have come about? Mungtai was saying, there's on the brink of getting this as a diagnosis accepted within DSM-5. What are the implications of that as we move forward? Is that going to be a way of labeling people in a way that could be offsetting other aspects that are happening within the culture? Lemon was talking about how there's been historically all these moral panics around new technology. Is this yet another moral panic around the technology and blaming the technology when there's really more to do with some of the cultural or political context of these situations that people may find themselves in? Anyway, I thought it was a really effective way of being able to explore around in a nonlinear way, to be able to tap into these memories by seeing these different diary entries and being able to see the photos and just go through a number of different contexts within one of these Internet addiction camps within China. It's called Diagnosia. Hopefully, it'll be made available so you can check it out yourself. It's really quite compelling as an experience, and I think these questions around internet addiction and just addiction in general are going to continue to come up as we move forward within all of technologies. So that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list of supported podcasts, and I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member today at patreon.com slash we severe. Thanks for listening
