Charles Melcher’s new book “The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World” was released on November 4, 2025, and I had a chance to take an early look and interview Melcher. The book is broken up into six main chapters where Melcher argues that the future of storytelling is agentic, immersive, embodied, responsive, social, and transformative.
Melcher covers over fifty different “living stories” across different genres including virtual reality stories, location-based entertainment, immersive stories, immersive theatre, immersive art, experiential brand activations, and interactive experiences. He told me that he’s had a chance to experience around 80 to 85% of the experiences that he features in his book, which most of them are site-specific and many times time-limited, immersive exhibitions that are not always easy to get into. He’s been traveling to different locations around the world with his Future of Storytelling Explorer’s Club to see many of these experiences, as well as engage with the creators behind the experiences.
In his book, he shares some brief trip reports on over 50 different experiences, as well as some very high-quality, official photo documentation of these projects. It serves to provide some documentation of many of these ephemeral projects, but also tie together some of the common elements that helps to define and elucidate what exactly is meant by “immersive.”
Melcher and I also talk about the founding of The Future of Storytelling Summit back on October 2012, as well as the start of his Future of Storytelling podcast on March 2020 that has published over 120 interviews since it started during the pandemic. Around 20% of the projects and creators that have appeared on his podcast are featured in his book as what he considers to be a canon of work that exemplifies these deeper trends of immersive storytelling and living stories.
While the book does provide a lot of valuable documentation, one complaint that I have is that it is not always easy to tell where Melcher is sourcing his quotes from project creators. The majority of quotations are coming from either private interviews that he personally conducted or from public conversations that he’s featured on his podcast. But sometimes he uses quotes of creators from other publications without full attribution. So if there’s a second edition, then I hope to see a more detailed set of footnotes and perhaps an index to make it an even more useful piece of documentation.
The way that Melcher is breaking down the different foundational qualities of immersive experiences also closely mirrors my own elemental approach, but with some slight deviations or different categorizations. His agentic qualities are equivalent to what I call active presence, his embodied is the same as my embodied presence, and his social is the same as my social presence.
I also have emotional presence and environmental presence, which he classifies as emotional and physical subsets of immersive qualities. Melcher also has a participatory subset under immersive qualities, which I consider to just be a part of active presence and what he is already classifying as agentic.
For me “immersive” is more of an umbrella term that includes all of the various qualities of presence, and Melcher proposes a sort of rating system judging the degree of immersiveness rated across the different physical, emotional, and participatory dimensions. But Melcher doesn’t list social as it’s own vector of immersiveness as he told me that he considers social to be a subsection of emotions, but I consider social qualities to be distinct from emotional ones.
Melcher also highlights the “responsive” qualities of a piece of work, which I see as both connected to ways of amplifying agency, but also something that contributes to Slater’s Plausibility Illusion of an experience or a suspension of disbelief, which I classify under mental presence.
Melcher also sees responsiveness as a key quality for personalized stories, and I appreciate his highlighting of this trend. For me, personalization is less of a quality of presence and more of a reflection of identity across various contextual domains. My experiential design framework is broken into quality, context, character, and story. So I see identity as a set of character traits across contextual domains that could be used as input for responsive stories.
Each experience we have will evoke various qualities of presence, which we will be radiating different physical, emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and social biomarkers that may also be tracked. I detail this in an article titled “Privacy Pitfalls of Contextually-Aware AI: Sensemaking Frameworks for Context and XR Data Qualities” published as a part of Existing Law and Extended Reality: An Edited Volume of the 2023 Symposium Proceedings. While this biometric data could be used to create responsive stories, it can also be used by surveillance capitalism companies to extrapolate psychographic information on us, which is something that I would have liked to also have seen a bit more critical discussion about in Melcher’s book.
The responsive chapter was also an opportunity for Melcher to explore how AI and GenAI might be used in the future to create experiences that are more reactive to whatever AI can discern about us, which also raises more privacy and ethical implications for me.
The final dimension that Melcher covers is transformative, and he cites Pine and Gillmore’s 1999 book The Experience Economy where they talk about the progression from extracting commodities to making goods to delivering services to staging experiences, and eventually to guiding transformations. Melcher says that if all of other qualities are achieved, then it could pass a threshold of becoming a transformative experience. I agree with Melcher, Pine, and Gilmore about the transformative potential of these experiences, but for me it is something that is very elusive, mysterious and certainly not something that can be orchestrated on demand.
There is also a part of me where I don’t see immersive stories as any more transformative than other forms of stories. The conditions for transformation may be more up to hearing the right story within the right context and right time. But I’ve experienced enough awe-inspiring and transformative moments in various immersive stories that I do agree that we may be headed into a future where these types of on-demand transformative experiences are much more likely.
On the whole, I really enjoyed reading through Melcher’s The Future of Storytelling book. There were a lot of experiences that were not on my radar, and it’s a great accounting of different parts of the immersive industry that I haven’t been tracking as closely. I appreciated it as a form of documentation for this era phase for these types of living stories. There is also clearly a rising demand for these types of meaningful, immersive stories, and it’s an area where I see some of the most interesting innovations and most compelling content being developed. Melcher also does a great job of summarizing many of the core affordances of this emerging fusion of various storytelling traditions, and there are bound to be many insights for folks working within the XR industry.
To hear some more of my feedback and thoughts on Melcher’s book, then be sure to tune into my conversation with him or check out the transcript down below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, I'm featuring Charlie Melcher, who is the author of a brand new book called The Future of Storytelling, which is coming out today. So back 13 years ago, Charlie started the Future of Storytelling Summit and Festival. And so he's been gathering folks from around the branding community, the storytelling community, the interactive arts, creative technologists, all these folks that are looking at ways that you can use technology to tell stories in a new way. And so over the last 13 years, he's had a chance to travel around the world and go to all these different types of immersive art installations to these immersive stories, location-based entertainment, immersive theater, brand activations, all sorts of different types of genres of immersive art and immersive entertainment, and something that he, as an umbrella term, is referring to all of them as living stories. And so in his new book, he's documenting across 45 different chapters and over 50 different experiences that he's talking about. He's bringing it up into these different qualities of presence. So he's saying that the future of storytelling is agentic, immersive, embodied, responsive, social, and transformative. And so we had a chance to talk about his journey of creating the Future of Storytelling Summit and then how that led to his podcast and then the Explorers Club that takes these trips around the world to go to these different places. His book that's now coming out is a recap of what's been happening in the immersive space. And there's a number of different virtual reality experiences that are being featured here, but also a lot of experiences that are kind of above and beyond what we would typically talk around in the XR industry, but is also part of this larger umbrella of immersive art, immersive entertainment, immersive theater, location-based entertainment, escape rooms, you know, this larger realm of interactive and participatory and immersive art and entertainment and storytelling. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Charlie happened on Wednesday, October 29th, 2025. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:15.814] Charlie Melcher: Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher. I'm the founder of the Future of Storytelling, which originally was a summit and a festival and now is a creative story studio. And so we help individuals and companies and institutions tell stories in rich and immersive ways.
[00:02:34.346] Kent Bye: Great. And maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:02:39.928] Charlie Melcher: I started my career in book publishing. I started a publishing company called Melcher Media about 30 years ago. And even then, I had this idea that books were an interactive, multisensory, immersive experience. And I wanted to reinvent the book in the digital age. Over those 30 years, we've had the great honor of working with many interesting people, whether it was Al Gore or Lin-Manuel Miranda or Oprah or Kobe Bryant, to help them tell their stories in print. And we were always looking for innovative ways to reinvent or push the boundaries of storytelling in books. We created some patents for things such as waterproof books that you could read in the bathtub. We created pop-up books for adults that would create an emotional response, almost like immersion therapy. And then eventually, we worked with some really talented young coders and we built our first app. an iOS app called Our Choice based on a book that we had done with Al Gore. And that app ended up winning Apple's award for one of the best designed apps of the year back in 2011. And it opened up my mind and my ambitions from thinking we could only tell stories in print to realizing that there was a brave new world of opportunity to tell stories with code as a canvas. And at that point, I walked into my team and I said, we're no longer in the book business. We are in the storytelling business. And from now on, we're free to work across media or we're platform agnostic. And that really opened up a whole new world of storytelling and an excitement for the most innovative and cutting edge things that were happening. And that's what ultimately led us to starting the Future of Storytelling Summit.
[00:04:27.446] Kent Bye: Yeah, so that brings us to around October of 2012, where you had a single day summit of the future of storytelling, where you created a whole organization. Maybe just give a bit more context for what was the catalyst to create the future of storytelling?
[00:04:42.797] Charlie Melcher: Okay. So back in 2010 and 2011, when we were completing this app for Al Gore, and all of a sudden we realized that we could tell stories in whole new ways. That was the moment when I felt like I needed a new community. My old colleagues in publishing were hiding under their desks, hoping this whole digital thing would blow over. And I had the passion of the newly converted. And so I was hungry for other people who were doing innovative things with technology. And I felt like I needed to find a new community. And the best way to do that was to start one. And so we decided we would hold a gathering where we'd bring people from different disciplines. I mean, that was another sort of fundamental insight from the beginning, which was that everybody was working in zeros and ones now, and we couldn't be separated any longer by these traditional media silos. I had grown up in publishing, somebody else in gaming, somebody else in music. Those silos were all crumbling because we were all dealing with exactly the same issues now. And so I wanted to create a truly multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary gathering. And so we went about finding the coolest people working in many different disciplines who were trying to innovate and tell stories in unique and new ways. And we gathered those all together and brought them to Snug Harbor. And the first year, as you mentioned, it was 300 people. It was a one-day event. I had been going to the TED conference for many years, so I knew the power of these kinds of multidisciplinary gatherings and also some of the tricks, like getting people away so you have the luxury of their attention. And we did it by private ferry boat across the Sound and took people out to this island. It happens to be Staten Island, but still most people had never been there. So it might as well have been Never Never Land. And we got them out there and we had a magical day. And that was the beginning. That was the launch of this community.
[00:06:41.867] Kent Bye: Okay. And then at some point you stopped having the Future of Storytelling summits. When was the last one that you held?
[00:06:49.335] Charlie Melcher: I believe the last one was 2018. And we did them every year. And then after a certain point, it grew from one day to two days or two and a half days. Then we added the Future Storytelling Festival, which was open to the public. And that was another three days. So we had started as a one-day event for 300. And by the time we hit our apex, we were doing a week's worth of programming for nearly 6,000 people. So it had very substantial growth in those seven years or so.
[00:07:19.364] Kent Bye: OK, because then as I was sort of tracing back the history of leading up to you writing the Future of Storytelling book, I also saw that you started your podcast on like March 19th, 2020, which is right around like the threshold of when the pandemic was sort of like, you know, South by Southwest shut down by that point. But there was still the very early beginnings of the pandemic. But what led you to then start the Future of Storytelling podcast?
[00:07:45.728] Charlie Melcher: Well, we were very much interested in building this community. And the podcast seemed like another way to be able to connect with people. Not everybody could come to New York for the summit or the festival. And so we thought this was a way to get to have conversations with the kinds of innovators and storytellers that we would invite to speak at the summit. And we might as well do that virtually virtually. as a podcast. The timing was perfect because it turned out just as we started it, we had to make the painful decision to cancel the summit and the festival, which was very scary and traumatic, honestly, because we were very in go mode and geared up. But once we then all retreated into our safe cocoons, we realized that the podcast was sort of a godsend because it let us continue to have the kinds of curious and interesting conversations with these amazing creators and technologists and marketers and thought leaders, and to be able to share that with our community. The Future of Storytelling podcast gets something in the neighborhood of 4,000 to 5,000 listens or downloads every month. And that's more than was coming to the summit, certainly. So it's been nice to do that and be able to feel like we're still contributing to the evolution of these fields and being able to celebrate the great work that people are doing.
[00:09:04.385] Kent Bye: And I also noticed at some point you started the Explorers Club, which is sort of like an immersive expeditions group where you would take people to these different locations, a lot of which you likely have featured in your book. But when did that get started? And maybe just give a bit more context for how that came about.
[00:09:20.385] Charlie Melcher: Sure. Well, again, when we were in our cocoons from COVID and we weren't able to get out and socialize, we weren't able to make new friends, we weren't able to travel at all, we sort of were missing those things. And we decided we would start a virtual Explorers Club where we would take people virtually to visit these amazing creators and see their creations. and have it be Zoomed into a private Zoom. So we were literally picking up camera people in Tokyo and Italy and London and all over the United States, and they would go to a place like Meow Wolf or Team Lab, and they would walk through with the creators, and that would be streamed to our private membership community. And then we would have this interactive conversation through Zoom with the creator after we'd gotten the tour. And we were literally doing one a month. through 2020, 2021, 2022. I guess by 2022, we were starting to go out into the world. So the first couple of years, they were all virtual. And then when people started to come out of COVID, we realized, well, the things we're seeing are actually much better to experience in person, and so we should actually take people there. And so the Future of Storytelling Explorers Club, which is an annual membership community, we started to have people sign up for the year, and then we would organize these trips. two to four day trips, depending on where we were going. And we do five or six a year. We've actually just come back from New Zealand. We had an extraordinary one visiting with Sir Richard Taylor and Weta Workshop and Hobbiton and the Te Papa. museum and a bunch of Maori culture. Anyway, so we go all over the world. We meet the same kinds of people we used to invite to come to the summit. Now we go to them and we get to physically experience their extraordinary world building and storytelling and technologies and get these private tours from the masters themselves. It's extraordinarily fun.
[00:11:18.624] Kent Bye: Yeah, a lot of my coverage on the Voices of VR, I've been able to go to Sundance, South by Southwest, Tribeca Immersive, Venice Immersive, IFA Doc Lab. I go to one place and I see like 20 to 30 experiences. But I just happened to be in Santa Fe this past month and had a chance to finally see the Meow Wolf House of Return to Return. And so I know that there's a lot of these very site-specific locations and experiences that... are not necessarily like on my normal path of where I'm going. They're kind of like destination locations where you have to deliberately go there to see it. And I see your book as kind of like an aggregation of a lot of these different types of immersive experiences, living stories, and exhibitions and featuring around 45 or so chapters, but like probably more than 50 different types of these experiences. And so one question I have is like, how many of these that you're featuring in your book, like what percentage would you say, have you had an opportunity to actually do a site visit and have a direct experience for yourself?
[00:12:18.017] Charlie Melcher: I think it's probably 80, 85%. I mean, the vast majority of them I've been to myself, and that's why I chose them. This is the selection. I personally refer to them as kind of the canons. I think about this book on many levels, but one of the levels is that it is a record of the birth of this medium. This is the early days of cinema, and the book gets to capture... the extraordinary work of these early creators. And so I took seriously the decisions that I made about who to include and what to include, both because of how they support the thesis in the book, but also because of their place in history. And so, yes, and I could only speak to that if I had actually done them. So yeah, I think all of them are things I would encourage people to do. Unfortunately, a number of them are already gone. And so I guess that's part of the historic perspective, right? A lot of this kind of work has its course. It runs its course. It comes, sometimes it comes for a few months, sometimes a few years. But then it's gone. And the amount of effort, the extraordinary creativity, the talented acting, storytelling, set design, costume, like all of that work then gets lost to the winds. And so I'm really pleased that amongst many layers, one of the levels of this book is that it is a record of extraordinary work in the early days of the birth of this medium.
[00:13:45.937] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. The word that comes to mind is like a trip report where you're giving your accounting of it. There's a lot of photos in this book as well, which I really appreciate because there's so much of what you're talking around that if there were no photos at all, you would be missing over half of what the experience even was. And so I noticed that there's quite a lot of big photos and photo spreads and maybe just talk around that process of gathering up all the visual documentation and Cause they're very high quality photos and they look like you were collaborating with a lot of these sites to get like the best visual representation of what these projects were.
[00:14:21.598] Charlie Melcher: Yes, that's absolutely right. I have, as I've mentioned, a real history in making books. So I have an appreciation for good photography, good production, good design, and was excited to be able to use my own taste and the skills of my team. And I have an amazing bookmaking team that I get to work with every day at Melcher Media to apply those skills to our own book this time. But yes, most of the photography in the book, and there's a tremendous amount of it, over 300 images, comes from the sources, from the productions themselves, and was very heavily and carefully edited by us to make sure that we were choosing things that represented that show, that helped to make it visually amazing. I honestly think some people will buy the book as a reference, a visual reference guide. They'll want to just see the incredible set design, costume design, production design that these creators have created or employed to make the worlds that we share in the book. And I should say not just physical, but digital, because there are many digital examples here as well. But it is visually fun. And One of my goals, Kent, was to make the book have many paths through it. I'm aware of the conflict or the irony of making a print book about the future of storytelling where I make the case that it's immersive and three-dimensional and agentic and embodied and all these things. One of the ways to address that was to try to make the book have not just one linear path, but be able to allow you to move through it in different ways. There are the breakouts and you can read about these individual projects. There are chapters. You can read those chapters. We even broke the chapters into pieces. There's lots of captions. There's infographics. So there's a lot of different ways. Some people sit down and read right through all 320 some odd pages and other people will just dip in and out and find their own path through the content.
[00:16:25.031] Kent Bye: Yeah, I ended up reading straight through. And what was interesting around that process of reading it straight through is that you're talking about all the different qualities of experience and presence that are involved in these. And a lot of these have multiple things that are going on. And so, you know, you have to, in some ways, choose a path that you're going to kind of lay out this larger argument for the paradigmatic examples of each of these different aspects from agentic and immersive and embodied experiences responsive and social and transformative and so each of these sections you're choosing the different experiences to feature within that although each of those experiences are also cross-referencing other aspects as well so just curious what that process was like for you to take this bucket of 50 odd experiences and then choose what order you were going to put them into the book
[00:17:18.809] Charlie Melcher: Yes. So we did come up first with the chapters. So the basic concept, which is a philosophy about immersive experience that I've developed or learned over all these years of curating the future of storytelling. But once we had those chapters, then we were trying to take our favorite experiences and see which ones sort of naturally fit under that rubric, under that chapter. It's not a rigid rule. They don't necessarily, as you say, fit perfectly, or they could fit in numerous chapters, honestly, for many of them. So then there was also a question of general flow, not having things that were very similar sitting next to each other, you know, just some good basic thoughts about creating a topography for the reader. that went into it. And you'd asked about the photography selection. I mean, in some cases, there were projects that we wanted to feature and there was no photography or no good photography. I mean, a good example is Carne Arena. There's very little photography for that. So in that case, we ended up telling the story of that more than showing it. So we were also making choices between what were the assets that we had or how did these stories lend themselves to being told?
[00:18:34.827] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of the other things that I noticed is there's still in the immersive industry, like a sorting out of the exact language that we're gonna be calling this or that. I noticed that you tended to refer to any of these immersive experiences as living stories. Which I thought was interesting just because for me, a living story is kind of like a very high bar of like, you know, it's like a live action role play. For me, to really live into a true living story, it has to have a lot of conditions. But for you, you seem to be using living stories to be representing of all of these immersive experiences. So just curious to hear a little bit more elaboration on the living stories and how you start to think about what that is.
[00:19:16.758] Charlie Melcher: I think it's a great point that you make, which is that there's a range, and some of these examples that are in the book only cover a few of the elements. They don't have all of them. And maybe I should just back up so that our listener can understand. This book, in my mind, is about this coming renaissance in storytelling, where we're moving from media that is flat, fixed, passive, and antisocial, to stories that are immersive, agentic, embodied, responsive, social, and because of all those things, transformative. And if you have all of those elements, immersive, agentic, embodied, responsive, social, and hopefully transformative, then you truly have a living story. I agree with you that many of the examples might fall short of that full definition. But one of the things that I wanted to do was to show how people are struggling with or solving those different elements. And also wanted to make the point that these are all part of the early days of this new form. And just because there's an example and it doesn't have a great embodied component, but it is social and responsive and agentic. I mean, Wolves in the Wall is a good example of that. And I'm sure you've spent a lot of time on your podcast talking about that. You are recognized by the character and you do have a role to play and you do get lost in the story. It meets a lot of them, but it doesn't meet all of them, right? Because it's not really as... Embodied maybe as you'd like, although there is some of that as well. So my point is I'm trying to make the interconnections between all these so that people realize that this coming renaissance is not just about immersive theater, or it's not just about LARPing, that actually all of these other examples of these best of class VR experiences or projection mapping art experiences... Or even some of the competitive socializing F&B experiences. They're all struggling with this same basic human desire to get off the couch and into the action. And so I intentionally was generous with the term living stories to help our reader see the connectivity between all of them.
[00:21:34.539] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And also, as I was reading through the book, there was some things that were experiences that were directly connected to a brand or other like promotion of another event. And so there's this whole concept of experiential marketing that I think has been a trend for a number of years, I think predates the XR industry quite a bit. You know, you cite the Pine and Gilmore, the experience economy back in like 1999, where they really nailed this progression moving from extracting commodities to making goods to delivering services to staging experiences and then guiding transformations, which I feel like has been a real guiding reference for me as well. And to see this progression that we're moving into this kind of more experiential age. And, you know, there is like emerging media Emmys that are for immersive storytelling. There's very specific rules that they have that they're not allowing marketing campaigns and ancillary video content intended only to promote the show unless they represent true programming content and extend themselves into the storylines or program and vice versa. And that they're not also including programs that only provide a passive linear viewing experience without interactivity. I think even within the Emmys, they're trying to set the boundaries for what this kind of emerging media are. And also if it's going to be something that is just promoting something else or something that is going to be an experience that stands on its own legs and also has narrative innovations. So it seemed like most of the experiences probably fit into that, but there might be some that are just purely a vehicle to kind of raise awareness around like the main movie or show. I guess it brings me back to how the future of storytelling audiences include a lot of folks who are in this kind of experiential marketing or branding or seeing how these different types of immersive experiences might be able to create a vehicle to get attention for this other show that they're doing or provide something that kind of stands on its own. So just curious to hear some of your reflections on the people from the industry that are coming in and are interested in what is happening with immersive.
[00:23:41.525] Charlie Melcher: At Future of Storytelling, we've always had a very broad tent. We've always used storytelling very liberally, and we've wanted to bring the best people. We're not sort of precious about it. We don't think storytelling is just fine literature or just auteur-driven cinema. We really think there's incredible stories told in advertising, in branding, in marketing. We're looking for people doing innovative and creative work. wherever it is. And actually, I think it's one of the things that people loved about the summit was that they weren't coming and just hanging out with a bunch of filmmakers or coming and just hanging out with a bunch of, like going to Cannes and just seeing a bunch of people in advertising. It really was for many, many different tents or many different industries. So I did the same for the book here. For example, the Giant Spoon Westworld activation, which was purely a marketing budget thing for the HBO show Westworld, was a brilliant world-building, multi-storyline, immersive living story that only popped up for a week at South by Southwest, but is going to live on in the history of branding, but also, I think, in the history of immersive storytelling because, well, they had a huge budget. Like actually, because it was a marketing thing, they were able to talk HBO into spending the whole budget on that, basically the year's budget or a huge amount of it. And they were able to do something that showed the potential for this kind of world building immersive storytelling. So, yeah. So if there's innovation happening in marketing. corporate or marketing or branding or advertising, then I think that's great. I mean, look at the Airbnb icon examples. I mean, who doesn't want to sleep up in the uphouse in the air, literally up in the air? Like, it's insane. So I have to take my hat off to some of the companies that have the vision to be able to create these kinds of things and often they can go farther because they have bigger budgets than some of my dearest friends in the theater world who are scraping two pennies together or dumpster diving to be able to build their sets.
[00:25:49.301] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I want to dive through each of the different chapters and unpack a little bit of the insights. But before that, I want to kind of bring in virtual reality into the mix, because as the future of storytelling was getting really kicked off in 2012, that January of 2012 is when Nani de la Peña had her piece, Hunger in L.A., that was... at Sundance New Frontier for the first time. And then later, the Oculus Dev Kits started to get launched in 2013. And I listened to a little bit of the interview you did with Felix and Paul, and I heard you say that it opened up your mind for what was possible with Strangers with Patrick Watson. And so just curious to hear, as you were looking at this nascent birth of the virtual reality industry and XR, spatial computing, coming onto the scene, how the future of storytelling was already there, starting to curate some of these different types of experiences. And just curious to hear how you see the overlap between what's happening with these types of virtual reality experiences and this broader idea of experiential design and immersive storytelling.
[00:26:48.286] Charlie Melcher: I think they're both coming from the same place, which is that human beings are having higher expectations for how they want to interact with their content and their media. And so VR obviously takes you from outside and puts you inside, right? That was the amazing thing. There I was in that studio in Montreal with Patrick and his dog and totally lost in that moment with what we all talked about then, which was the sense of presence, of being there. But even in those early days of VR, and I was just as enthralled by it as anyone, and we were fortunate to be able to feature a lot of the great early work, I had this sense right away that it was still not being used correctly. That just like in the early days of cinema, when people invented the motion picture camera, what did they do? They put it on a tripod and they filmed a play and it was static. And it took them 20 or 30 years to figure out the language of cinema, montage and pans and cuts. And I had that immediate sensation that... we're using this VR camera or cameras in a way that is more still informed by cinema as opposed to the real potential of where this is headed. And by that, what I meant immediately was I still didn't think it was meant to be passive, that you were about to just sit there and look. I didn't think you were supposed to be disembodied. I didn't think you were supposed to be powerless. I thought you are supposed to have agency. And I didn't think it was meant to be lonely. I thought it should be social. And so that was like instantly I was now curating for the people who were adding those components to VR. I wanted to find those people and give them a platform so that they could inspire everyone else. So as soon as you start to build your hands or as soon as you start to be able to have multiple people in there, like those are the projects we were looking to bring because I just knew that it still wasn't celebrating what is distinctly human. that is sitting in a way that's disembodied, passive, and without any agency. That's just not how we operate in the real world. That's not how we evolved as a species. The potential here was to be able to go from third person to first person, but not still as a passive voyeur, but as an active participant. Get me in and let me take some control here of what's going to happen. So I still believe that VR is an incredibly powerful medium. But the examples that I love are the ones where I can be immersed, I can have agency, it is embodied, I can be social, and it can be responsive or personalized. That now is an experience that I'm hungry for. And I'm not getting that watching even the best shows streamed to me on television or at an IMAX theater.
[00:29:39.717] Kent Bye: Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying in terms of like, maybe that's like the peak of a living story that includes all those things. But I think that there's also value in, say, something like Cosm, which is very much grounded in the cinematic tradition where there is no agency at all. There's a social dimension that they're adding, but it's more of a collective experience. So I think that there will be things like The Sphere and like Cosm that are leaning more upon the cinematic tradition of film where there is no agency, no interactivity. And that's fine that there will be ways that the grammar and language of these other modalities are being ported over to say Apple immersive video or these Cosm or Dome experiences. And I don't necessarily think that it's a precondition that every experience has to be like full agency. So I think, yeah, just curious to hear your thoughts.
[00:30:29.264] Charlie Melcher: I totally agree with you. Look, I don't think just because we created radio and television that no one reads books, right? I mean, we still even go to talks, going all the way back to the oral tradition. So I don't believe that the invention of new forms automatically gets rid of the others. If anything, I think it makes them hone into what's special and unique about them. So I think that there are people who will always want to sit and have a passive conversation well-made passive viewing experience. And some of those people will enjoy it even more if it's a little more immersive with a bigger screen, or they can have dinner while they're watching it with their friends. But I do think that these are still part of a set of steps moving towards a certain goal. These things don't get, as we've talked about, it takes a long time to figure out the full flowering of new media and how to use it to its best and even for the technology to evolve and for the audience to co-evolve with them. I mean, I think a great example are the projection mapping art shows. Like Van Gogh, which has made hundreds of millions of dollars if you look at the culture spaces and the numerous knockoffs of it. I mean, incredibly financially successful, which I also just want to make that point because I think some people think I'm talking about something that's going to be in the real future. And there are a lot of examples today of people making money. tons of money with these now but going back to that type of experience well what is it it's breaking art out of the confines of the frame and letting that art take over the entire space so you are surrounded by the art and it has motion and it has music But truthfully, the only agency you have is how you walk through the space. And sometimes it's not even particularly comfortable because after a while you want to sit down and there's no seats or there's not enough seats. And so to me, that's almost like a training wheel to show the audience that they can get up out of their seats and walk around. and be surrounded by the film or the animation. And I think it's important for people to get comfortable with these changes as they take place. And already, I think some of those shows are losing their luster, if you will, or losing their audience because I think people have gotten acclimated to it. But nevertheless, I think that something like that's an important step on the evolution towards more participatory, immersive storytelling where the audience, or as often referred to in the book, and as I use, and I didn't create this, this term comes from NYU professor Jay Rosen, which is, you know, the people formerly known as the audience. And that was the way I described audience for years, because I knew that traditional audience meant passivity. It meant sitting back and watching and hear that's not what you do in these kinds of living stories. You have a role to play.
[00:33:30.467] Kent Bye: Hmm.
[00:33:31.408] Charlie Melcher: Anyway, so which is why I ultimately have come up with a new term, which is the actience. And I think the audience has its origins in Latin words for listening. And the kind of interactions that our audiences are doing now are not just listening. They are actually participating or having action. And so I've renamed the audience the actience. And so the actience needs to evolve and get more comfortable with its role which is a much more active and has much more challenge, right? It's very easy to just sit passively and watch. It's much more complicated to help work an escape room or interact in a LARP or have a role to play with an AI character in a VR experience or in a gaming world. So the audience needs to learn how to become enactients.
[00:34:25.438] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think this is a phrase that even within the computer realm, calling people users is something that they want to have other words for who the audience is, if they're participants, if they're gamers, etc. You had mentioned Hamlet on the holodeck. Janet Murray's Interactors, which is something that I like just philosophically, just because it's interactivity and it's actors and it's interactors. And so it feels like a nice mouthfeel. I'm hesitant to adopt neologisms in some ways, like Acteans, just because it can be alienating. So I'm just curious to hear, you know, as you are using this term of Acteans, if you hope this takes off and Words tend to be kind of democratically voted by the public rather than any one person. But of course, just curious to hear if you hope that this word of actience really takes off.
[00:35:19.628] Charlie Melcher: Sure. I think that would be great. I have no complaints with that. As I said, I struggled for a word for years and I did like interactor, but I think it's also a little clunky. Personally, I used player because it has both the gaming and the Shakespearean references, but it also has... a kind of sleazy Vegas kind of gambling tone as well, you know, to be a player. So I think the actience is a accurate term for this type of participant or consumer or audience member. But as you say, it's up to other people whether they like to use it or not.
[00:35:54.514] Kent Bye: Hmm. So let's get into the different chapters because we've been talking around agency and you decide to start the whole book with agentic or agency or interactivity participation. So maybe just give a little bit more context for why begin the future of storytelling with agentic.
[00:36:14.096] Charlie Melcher: I guess I felt that agency is one of the primary defining shifts from a world of passive consumption to participation. And it's one of the things that really sort of separates. It's almost like a line in the sand between the old world of storytelling and this new world that I'm exploring or describing in the book. And so it also led me to be able to start with a story that I thought was a powerful one about my experience in Carne Irena, which was a beautiful piece, which you know very well. And in fact, did you, I don't know, did you have an episode with Alejandro González Inarritu?
[00:36:55.746] Kent Bye: No, I never had a chance to actually see it just because it was, you know, showing in Los Angeles. And it was one of those things where when I was in LA, I didn't make a trip out to the museum. And it's, you know, I know that FI up in Montreal has been exhibiting it and distributing it, but I just have never been in the same place. It's like one of those things where I go to these film festivals, but it was never at a film festival that I was at. I think it showed at Cannes, but I wasn't there. So anyway, I never had a chance to see it, but I did see that you had a chance to talk to Alejandro in your episode 100, which is really great to see and to hear that as a marker for your own coverage. But I really appreciated hearing what he had to say and also that conversation that you had with him on your 100th episode.
[00:37:37.426] Charlie Melcher: I was very honored and excited to have him on. And it was just so fun to talk to him about it. And I find that it's a very symbolic and important example because it really showed the shift from both the user or the Actian side and from the creator side. Right here, he even talks about this idea of escaping the tyranny of the frame. As a filmmaker, he's always stuck inside this box or the rectangle that's the magic keyhole, if you will. His coming to realize that in creating this immersive virtual reality experience, that he needed to let go of that frame. And in fact, in a way that was liberating, of course, also created huge challenges. And he needed to understand that he was designing now for many possibilities as opposed to a singular path. And of course, it happens in the sand. You are literally wandering in the desert and you take your shoes off. So you feel that sand, that dirt in your toes and you're wearing a VR headset. And there's this moment, it's kind of dawn in the desert and when the piece starts and it's quite beautiful and serene. And then you hear these people coming out of the darkness and they've been traveling and they are tired and exhausted and some of them have lost their shoes and they're carrying things and there's mother and children and some guys. And clearly they've been making this very long trip across the border. And then just as soon as they come around you and you realize that they don't really see you, but you can kind of listen in on their various conversations. And of course, it's using spatial audio. So depending on where you walk, you're hearing different things if you're close to different characters. And then all of a sudden you start to hear the chopper and then you feel the wind of the chopper and then you see the spotlights and then these jeeps pull up and military people jump out, border guards with big guns and they start screaming and get down and everyone's getting down and Where's the coyote? And they're looking for the leader. And again, through this all happening, you kind of think that even though you see it happening all around you and you're feeling the wind and you're feeling the sand, you still think that you're at that safe distance of as if you're in the audience, right? You're maybe surrounded by it, but you still have that safety of, I'm watching this. And then all of a sudden the border guard turns to you, looks you right in the eye, points his gun right at your head and says, get down. And you're no longer anonymous. Like he now has seen you and you feel the fear of having a gun in your face and being screamed at by that border guard. And you are forced to make a decision. Are you going to defy him or, and then I'm in the ground. Like I am literally down in the dirt. And I realized at that moment that I have crossed this line. I was no longer safe in my couch or in the audience. I was now an actor in this story, or I was not even an actor. My response was a fear response. I was me getting the hell down because I didn't want to get shot. And so it was very symbolic for that shift from passive consumption to active participation, a moral dilemma or decision that I had to make that had consequences. And a realization that I was now in a whole new world and I was actually walking in other people's shoes, or in this case, lack thereof. And anyway, it represents, it was very symbolic and it was a great story. One of the early stories in the book to show that we were no longer in Kansas anymore, Toto, that this kind of storytelling was going to demand tremendous amount from both me, the consumer of it or the audience member, and from the creator, who was going to have to design and create in a completely new way from everything he had learned to do as an artist.
[00:41:38.772] Kent Bye: Yeah, beautiful. Thanks for sharing a little bit more of that context. And I've heard other glimmers of what's happened in it, and it's been highly influential in there. And hopefully, if it's still being distributed by file, I'll have a chance to be in the same place to get a chance to see it myself. But in this concept of agency, I feel like agency goes across different vectors in terms of like you talked around, like the freedom to move your body around the space and look around. But I think, you know, at some levels, there's agency where your choices are actually impacting the narrative, where you're a character and it has consequence. And so you have more narrative agency in that sense. And so I feel like there's different vectors of agency where narrative agency is probably the most difficult agency. where most of these types of experiences are pretty much on rails and maybe slight choices that you're making. So I think there's a connection to agency and the responsive chapter where you talk around responsiveness as another vector. And to me, they're very much hand in hand in terms of you take action and the responsiveness of the experience responding to you actually reinforces the experience of you having true agency because it is responding to you. If it didn't respond, then how much agency do you really have? But there's also, from Mel Slater, he talks around this concept of plausibility illusion, where you are believing what is happening that's around you. And so when things are responding to you, it's also adding to that level of plausibility that you're embedded within an ecosystem of causal influence where you can make choices and you see the consequences of those actions. So for me, I see a very tight coupling between agency and responsiveness, but there's also other aspects of responsiveness that get more into like tracking your biometrics and responding to your physiology and things that go beyond your conscious behaviors and your actions into more of like your responses of what's happening in your body that lean into more of like the future of different, um, surveillance or AI tracks tied into narratives. But curious to hear some of your thoughts on the connection between agency and responsiveness.
[00:43:40.040] Charlie Melcher: So I agree with that connection, that there is definitely a link there. I think that the basic level of agency is there is that perception of agency versus having real agency. So first of all, let me start there. I mean, you read a choosing your own adventure book and you have that perception of agency, right? Because you get to choose which path you make. But of course, you very quickly realize like all of the paths have been written by the author and, you know, you're just choosing one and, you know, really your choice is still quite limited and pre-ordained, right? By the creator. And so... There is a kind of agency that I would call light or the perception of agency. I mean, the same with Bandersnatch, for example. You got to choose left or right in that Black Mirror episode, and you feel like you're helping to drive the narrative, but in fact, you're not. There's just a series of preordained decisions that were made by the creators. So real agency, though, I think goes to another level, right? Goes to that level where you are actually co-creating it. where the decisions you make are changing the evolution of the story or the narrative or your experience within it. And I am a big believer that this type of living story is in part an outgrowth of our years of gaming. and the popularity of gaming and the agency that gaming gave us. Before that, all of our media, it really was on a fixed linear path. I mean, you could listen to music, you could read the newspaper, you could watch television, but you didn't have the ability to have any impact on the outcome with any of those forms of media. And then along came games, digital games. And all of a sudden, Your skills mattered. Your decisions mattered and you had some real control. And I was one of those. I mean, I am of the age where I literally was one of the first people to be able to buy Pong and play it at home. The very first video game. And I played it first in a bar in a pizza parlor as a little kid. So I was an early generation gamer. And then I graduated up to Space Invaders. And if gaming was a sport in my day, I would have been an Olympian because I could turn Star Wars over twice on a quarter, the whole machine over twice. Well, actually, one of the few times I really impressed my dad was he stood there and watched me do it. Anyway, my point being, people realized that there was the opportunity to use their skills and their creativity and their abilities to be able to impact how the story, and at first those games didn't really have story, but they've gotten more and more complicated. And so I think that what we're seeing now is the desire to be able to use your skills, to have agency, to be able to impact the narrative, actually meeting the traditions of storytelling. Character development, true narrative, rich worlds, all of that kind of thing. And these two trends are coming together into the kinds of work that you and I love and that is celebrated in this book. And so again, I go back to this. I think that the technologies and the stories are responding to something that's innately human. which is that we want to have a role to play. We didn't evolve as a species to sit passively on a rock and listen to somebody else play music or tell a story. We participated in all of that from time immortal. And so it really wasn't until the invention of the alphabet and the evolution and dominance of the printed word and the written word that people started to fix their stories and have them be non-responsive. And I... I love having read that Socrates was anti-reading and writing because, and I think you and I have talked about this before, because he thought it was dead language. He literally said, once you write it down, it can't speak anymore for itself. So you're going to misinterpret it or worse, intentionally misuse it. And so I think about living stories sometimes in response to Socrates' reference to written word as dead language. we're going from that and all of the other media that evolved from it which continued to be linear and fixed and non-responsive with no agency to an age where we have living stories that are responsive and they do adapt to us we have agency in them and they are also social and embodied so i'm not sure if i'm answering your question but but i this is a big part of the book at least
[00:48:17.489] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think just to kind of tease out the responsiveness a little bit more, because some of the different experiences that you listed were like the Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser, Yumi Bum Bum Train, which is basically one of those experiences where you essentially have to like win a lottery to see it, or like Baldur's Gate 3. So these video games where you are making choices throughout the course of the piece, but some of the choices you make in Act 1 may be rippling out and changing things in Act 3, and that there's a real responsiveness to the agency. Whereas most physical-based immersive theater, it's really difficult to, say, trace someone's individual actions and then have it change the story so dramatically. I think the Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser was trying to do little bits of tracking different parts and then maybe shifting things that you maybe get an invitation to go see something or not. So they're hitting a threshold to get invited to, like, an event that's happening, but that there's... a group of other people, or even like a punch drunk, having like a one-on-one types of experiences, which when I saw Sleep No More, I had a chance to have like a little one-on-one type of encounter, which I know you've talked around that. But this whole idea of responsiveness, I think has a couple of vectors of both like increasing the amount of agency and the experience of agency. But also I think there's another aspect of the responsiveness, which is like the kind of know you enough to tailor something specific to you, which I think is a kind of different level that maybe is more around your identity and responding to your identity and being more contextually aware that goes beyond just kind of the agency part.
[00:49:53.099] Charlie Melcher: It's personalization. Agency just means you can do something. Personalization in responsiveness means that it reacts and understands something about you. it's actually responding to who you are to the decisions you're making at that time perhaps to as you mentioned your biometrics maybe it even understands something about you that's more profound than you understand about yourself or from some sort of historical record of data or experience so that is really where the stories are headed and and by the way that is what again is part of human interaction Some of the most powerful stories are when you sit down with a friend and you have an intimate exchange and you are not just sharing information, but you are sharing emotion. You see me being sad when I talk about my parents being gone and your response to me is empathetic. You go, oh, and I see you care. There are all these nuances that happen every day in just basic human interactions that have been lost in our stories when they became fixed and set and non-responsive. What do we want? We want someone to understand us. What are stories for? We evolved as story animals because they help us understand the world. They help us connect to each other. They help us understand ourselves. And so the best stories are ones that we can relate to. Now, historically, that's, you know, oh, it's a topic that I sort of see myself in. But what if it actually really sees me? What if it's seeing me in the moment? Like, oh, I'm excited when we're going on this adventure. Or, oh, I'm really moved by this tragedy that's happened. Or, boy, I know that as a history, you really love science fiction. And so this is the story I'm going to feed up to you. And what I'm excited about in terms of where this is all going is that we are going to be able to have a level of personalization and with that, a kind of intimacy. that is very hard to get unless you're literally one-on-one with a trained punch-drunk actress or actor. And it's been one of the real challenges for immersive storytelling, for living stories, which is how do I get intimacy at scale? It's one thing to do it for one actor with one guest, or maybe that actor can do three or four people a night, but there's no business model around that really. It's a hell of a tough one. And so it's been one of the things keeping this from taking off. I mean, just imagine if every story that you got to experience was one that engaged people you fully as a human being, where you had the ability to express yourself, to bring your creativity, to bring your values and your passions. And through that, you were met and seen and heard and felt like you were part of something that recognized you as an individual. I don't think you'd ever go back to watching a sitcom on television. I think you would want to do that every evening. And that's part of the reason why I'm so bullish on this kind of storytelling becoming the future of storytelling. When we can unlock that opportunity to have truly responsive stories, then they will be all that much more meaningful to us. And we will not just love them, we will grow from them. We will evolve because of them in beautiful ways, I really believe. And so I'm hoping that this book is a call to action, a challenge to creators to keep pushing to get to that place where we can stop having fixed, flat, linear, passive, antisocial stories and start creating the kinds of stories that we get to participate in and make us feel that joy and excitement of being alive.
[00:54:00.675] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah, and I feel like as you're going through the different chapters and defining each of these, I feel like immersive is one of the terms that is the most nebulous in terms of people have their own experience of what that means, but immersive can be misused or abused of calling something immersive when it's not. And so it was interesting to me to see this kind of recursive definition of immersive where you're kind of referencing other things like physical, emotional, and participatory, where I see the physical is also connected to the embodied and the participatory is connected to the agency. And social is not in there, but I would sort of also include it. For me, as I think around immersive qualities, I think of like active presence from like the tradition of the video games or mental and social presence that come from like the puzzle and the ideas, but also the social dynamics from social media, emotional presence from the cinematic tradition, or the embodied and environmental presence from more theater or architecture or the spatial dimensions. So when I think around immersive, I think of all those different qualities of presence as a kind of umbrella term. So just curious to hear you elaborate on immersive qualities as being the subsections of both physical, emotional, and participatory.
[00:55:13.487] Charlie Melcher: So immersive is a word that's so overused that I think it's starting to lose any real meaning. And so I wanted to try to give a simple definition for it or a way to help people, almost like a rating system was really what I was hoping that this might evolve into, where you could understand like, oh, that's immersive light or, oh, That's immersive, but only in the physical sense of immersive. It's not participatory or emotional. So I sort of broke it down. And I agree, there are more nuances to it. But for me, I sort of felt like I could bucket it all under philosophy. physical immersive, so I'm surrounded by something, there's some level of physical immersion. Participatory, which is the agency, like I get to have a role, I get to play, I get to be doing something. And then emotional, like my decisions have consequences or I am in it with other people. I sort of thought in a way of social being under emotional as well. And I just created these five steps from passive, light, moderate, intense, and total for each of those three components. And in my fantasy or and I don't think I fully accomplished this by any means but like I feel like we could use a rating system for immersion and so you could see okay well it's it's a three you know this is a three for physical and it's only a one for participatory and emotional okay there it's a it's a five and you could kind of come up with a rating system anyway I think it's a rough guide for people to start thinking and really also what I'm hoping is that they will realize that they need to be working on all of these levels and Like that the best living stories are actually aspiring to be fully immersive on a physical, participatory and emotional level. So I again, I realize that there are more shades and we could get much more complicated, but I felt like it might be. We created a graphic in the book to just give people a sort of simple way to tease out some of the layers of immersion and thus maybe help differentiate between different people using that word so loosely.
[00:57:22.300] Kent Bye: Yeah, the way I phrase it is that there's like a center of gravity oftentimes where like the main part of this is about the world or it's about the story. It's around the interactive parts. And so when I talk to creators, I often will ask them, where did you start? And sometimes if they're starting from like the video game tradition, then it's going to be. a center of gravity around agency and that's going to be like the main experience. So my rating system is more of like, you know, what's the top center of gravity? And then what are the other things that are, it's more of a thumbs up or thumbs down of like, if it gets like a emphasis of having like strong world building or something, then I'll add it in there. Cause I feel like the paradox is that every experience has every dimension. It's just on a spectrum. And so how do you communicate where they're at on the spectrum to get a sense of how they're together? And sometimes I've also found that if they just pick one lane and that's all they do, but they do it brilliantly, then if they have zeros in the other ones, then it could actually still be like a very powerful experience. So it's difficult to say just because it doesn't have all the components that it may actually be the perfect mix for what they're trying to do.
[00:58:25.729] Charlie Melcher: Absolutely. I mean, we've all gone to movies that were incredibly powerful, found ourselves crying, and all there was was kind of an emotional level, right? There was no physical, there was no participatory, but it was still a very powerful story. So I agree with you. It doesn't mean that one form is better at storytelling. It was also just an attempt to try to give a definition to living stories. To me, the best living stories actually are... aspiring or accomplishing some degree of all three of those.
[00:58:58.555] Kent Bye: And a lot of emphasis on world building in that chapter, some great quotes from Alex McDowell, they're really appreciated. And as you go into the next chapter of embodiment, there was a author, Annie Murphy Paul, that wrote The Extended Mind, seemed to be a really big influence of connecting the dots of embodied cognition and how the neuroscience of embodied cognition is really giving a lot of insights for kind of the neuroscience basis for the deeper trends of what's happening in immersive entertainment, immersive stories. And so just curious to hear some comments on this aspect of embodiment and the full multi-sensory experiences that a lot of these different types of experiences are really focusing on and this connection to the neuroscience of embodied cognition.
[00:59:42.392] Charlie Melcher: So I'm a big fan of Annie Murphy Paul's and that book. She did not write that book for our community, for the world of storytellers. It was more probably for business people and how they show up in their physical environments. But when I read it, I thought she was providing the scientific basis for the things that I had intuitively understood for a very long time. And my understanding of that actually has its origins in having been dyslexic. and learning to read and write through multisensory reinforcement, literally having to draw letters in a tray of sand with my finger and say the words and the sounds. And so I'd always thought of learning as this embodied thing. But now I understood that, in fact, the science shows that when you reinforce something with the different senses, it's more memorable, more, and by the way, more emotionally powerful. I mean, part of what she shares is the science that shows that many of our emotions originate our bodies as opposed to in our brains and so if you can understand how the body processes and originates emotions you have the ability to create more emotionally powerful things and when you step back and think that almost all of the stories that we've been consuming for hundreds of years have come through literally two senses right through our eyes and our ears and And everyone knows the five senses, but some science suggests there might be as many as 30 different types of senses, things that help us understand where we are in space or hearing our own heart rate or your sense of acceleration in space. So none of that is in our conscious mind, but actually we are able to read those things if we hone in on them. Well, what if all of a sudden as storytellers, instead of having a color palette of two, We had a color palette of 20. And just think about how much more rich the stories would be. But we don't really have that language yet. I mean, there are some people who do. And that's one of the reasons why I've always been so fascinated by things like dance or improv. where you've got a group of people physically interacting with each other because they are using so many more of their senses as places for inspiration. But the point being that as storytellers, if we can start to unlock the power of a much larger sensorial palette, we're going to be able to create much more powerful stories that are both emotionally intense and very memorable. And that's, again, all the science that supports that is there and in Annie's book. And so I feel like every immersive experience storyteller should read that book because it's the wake up call to realize that we need a language of storytelling to the body.
[01:02:28.089] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And also the different experiences that you share are also ways that people are embodying characters or having multi-sensory types of experiences. And the final quality of presence that kind of then eventually leads to transformation, which we'll end with, but The last one is like the social dimensions. And so, you know, mentioning things like Pokemon Go from Niantic, but also Escape Rooms, a very collaborative social problem solving. Also Cosm, which I've had a chance to go to five or six different experiences now and see different ways that you could watch a dome experience, but do it with other people and really encouraging more of a shared reality experience there. But curious to hear some of the dimensions of the social because we are creating these collective experiences and I find a lot of the different compelling experiences that I am seeing on the film festival circuit are trying to cultivate very specific emergent social dynamics of the smartphone orchestra as an example that tries to create unique connections by everybody connecting through their phone in unique ways. or other just kind of like grief rituals or things that are more of a collective social dimension that more and more I'm seeing that as a trend of trying to create these collective group experiences. But curious to hear some of your thoughts on the social dimension of immersive storytelling.
[01:03:45.562] Charlie Melcher: Well, we are social animals. We evolved in groups. And so we want to be social. We are happier as social beings. And yet so much of our technology has isolated us. It has led to us being more lonely, more polarized, more anxious. We all know this. And it was first identified by Putnam with his book Bowling Alone, which is what, 20, 25 years ago now. And he was really talking about the explosion of television and watching television and how that was inversely correlated to social activities like church picnics or bowling leagues, and that people were spending more time watching television alone in their bedrooms instead of out being social with others. And then, of course, that trend just accelerated with social media and phones and mobile phones. And so we are a species that is hungry for social interaction. And one of the things that I'm very hopeful about with living stories, with this next generation of participatory immersive storytelling, is that it feeds or has the potential to feed that social need. So you look at gaming. There are all sorts of examples of people playing games as tribes, as troops, and they're out there succeeding together, not just alone. Or we look at escape rooms that are literally designed to not be playable alone. You can't do it alone. You can only participate with others. And it teaches communication and teamwork and team building skills. So we see these examples that are coming all over. Or LARPs too. You can't do a LARP alone. If you're going to do a live action role playing game, it's about the social interactions with the other characters and how you interact with each other and how you learn from one another. the right kind of living stories or with correct design for living stories, they build in the benefits and joy of collaboration, team building, communication. You know, I feel like we're all over-indexed to the hero's journey and this idea that the hero is a solo hero, as if Joseph Campbell created this. He didn't obviously create it. He discovered it from other great works, but that the lone hero goes off on this adventure to succeed. And in fact, that's never how anything really happens in the world. It's always a group of people working together to make anything really successful. So I'm hopeful and I believe that many of the examples in the book do present a kind of design and a kind of social storytelling that actually has the exact opposite effect of the alienation, polarization, loneliness that's driven by so much of our social media. I believe that stories are going to become an action verb. We're going to story together instead of watch a story alone. And with that, we will rediscover the benefits of communal interaction and feeling part of something with other people.
[01:06:48.281] Kent Bye: Hmm. Nice. And you had alluded to earlier that if you have all these qualities, then it could lead up to the potential of having transformative experiences, which as we talked about in Pine and Gilmore of this going from staging experiences into guiding transformations. And I really liked what Abraham Berkison had said in terms of creating the conditions for experience so that you can't give it someone an experience. And I feel like it's very similar here in the sense that you can't, I mean, maybe we'll get to a point of having transformation on demand. That would be pretty amazing to live in a society where that would be even possible. But, you know, it seems like something like Odyssey works where they're like doing months long of research into who you are and doing something very specific to what's happening in your life. Maybe that'll be able to be scalable at some point, or maybe not. It'll require a communal effort of people to really come together to do that. Very similar to like the you, me, bum, bum train of, bringing together lots of volunteers to even stage some of these different transformative types of experiences but i think this is probably where things are ultimately headed in the long term but you know maybe bringing in other young in depth psychological like what are the things that are going to really transform your psyche as a direct remedial ritual that is being created in a very similar fashion to odyssey works and what they've been doing but just curious to hear any of your reflections on this ultimate pathway towards the future of storytelling leading to these awe-inspiring and transformative experiences.
[01:08:14.389] Charlie Melcher: When you get to get out of the couch and the seat and get into the story, and you get to have a meaningful, like really profoundly meaningful experience playing a role, something happens in that, can happen in that role where you discover new things about yourself, where you discover that your own sense of identity is in fact a role that A set of stories you've told yourself about who you are. And so when you get to play this other role, you can discover that, in fact, you can be something different, that you might have other qualities that you didn't realize that you have. And those might come through in that story. And if they are powerful, you might then realize when you leave the story that those things are still there in you and that they might bleed out of that story world into your real life and you might become something different. Transformation is about an experience that changes you in a way that has permanence, that stays with you. And as I've said several times in this discussion already, stories are that way that we learn about the world, we learn about other people, we learn about ourselves. This type of storytelling is so powerful that it can supercharge the self-awareness, the self-learning. And that's why, in part, I think it's going to revolutionize education. We all know that sitting, taking notes while there's some boring lecture is a completely different way of learning than being immersed in French culture and trying to learn French. I couldn't learn French in school. I learned French in France. by being immersed, by having a living story of being in France and trying to date and get around and eat and all those things. That's a kind of metaphor for what living stories are. They're recreating the experience of putting yourself into an uncomfortable situation and the forced discovery that comes from that. I don't mean uncomfortable as in dangerous. In fact, I mean just the opposite, right? Like in the idea of living stories and for that kind of transformation really to take place, you actually do have to feel kind of safe. You don't want to design something that someone really feels like they're going to die in. Anyway, those are just some principles we talk about, about good immersive design experience for LARPing, for example. But being in that safe space and still being able to explore different ways to show up in the world can help you to understand the different ways that you can permanently show up in the world. And that's the kind of transformation that we're talking about in the book as the holy grail or the outcome of really, really great living stories, immersive experiences.
[01:11:01.372] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, as I like to ask all my different interviewees around where this is all headed, you've got a whole book that's called The Future of Storytelling. So I'm just curious to hear from you what you think the ultimate potential of storytelling and these types of immersive experiences might be and what they might be able to enable.
[01:11:19.565] Charlie Melcher: thing that I came to understand as I was thinking and writing this book is that we've all spent our entire lives consuming our stories in this passive way, right? We've never been able to impact the narrative, really. I mean, maybe a little bit in the gaming world, but you're watching television, reading books, listening to records, or streaming music. So if you spend your whole life where all the stories that were meaningful and formative for you, your relationship to them was to passively consume them. When you then step out into your real life, into the world, how do you think you show up? What is the message that that kind of media has instilled in you? it leaves you feeling passive. It leaves you feeling maybe a little impotent, a little like, I can't really make much of a difference here. The stories are the stories. The world is the world. Now just imagine that every formative story you experienced from early childhood was one in which you and your family and your friends had these adventures, and together you were able to succeed or make a huge impact or change the way the outcome of those stories played out. If every story like that left you, first of all, training you to do that, and second, leaving you feeling that sense of, hey, we did it, we took the hill, we killed the bad guy, whatever it was. When you leave your story worlds, the way you're going to show up, I believe, in the real world is to feel like you have agency and you can make a difference. And I think part of our problem in the world right now is that people feel like they are hopeless and they don't have the power to make a difference. And I believe that Living Stories is going to create a generation or future generations of people who are going to show up and take on the challenges of the world like heroes.
[01:13:15.455] Kent Bye: Beautiful. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to share with the broader immersive community?
[01:13:21.829] Charlie Melcher: I see the book as a celebration of the immersive community and the extraordinary work that these pioneers are doing. I've tried to draw from the many conversations and experiences that I've gotten to have and how I've been blown away and inspired and humbled by the work of so many talented people, both content creators and technologists and thought leaders. And so I just hope that people will come to the book to be inspired in that same way by the people who've so influenced me and that their work and their ideas will inspire that next generation of people who are going to take it even farther and really help fulfill the potential of this burgeoning field.
[01:14:07.901] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Chari, congratulations on what feels like a bit of a magnum opus of a distillation of all this work that you've been doing with the future of storytelling, of really going on all these adventures around the world. Like I said, a lot of these places are not easy to get to. They're very site-specific. You have to go there, and it's not easy to see a lot of these types of experiences. It's a real great accounting of what's been happening in this realm of immersive storytelling and living stories and these different types of site-specific experiences. And so I really appreciated the recounting and the trip reports that you're able to put together, the beautiful photos and documentation that is really kind of a reflection of what's been happening in this broader ecosystem, even if you're in the XR industry, there may be a lot of stuff that you've never even heard of. And so I think you've done a great job of scouring the world for all these different types of experiences and synthesizing it all in the book and trying to weave together the larger story, which is these different qualities of presence, ranging from the agentic, the immersive, the embodied, responsive, the social and transformative dimensions of all these experiences. And so I Really enjoyed getting an early look. And yeah, just congratulations again, because I think it's a real great piece of documentation for what's been happening in this community. And thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.
[01:15:24.231] Charlie Melcher: Ken, thank you. And I just want to say, I appreciate all that you've done for this community. You were one of the earliest promoters. You've been out there having the conversations and giving voice to so many people for so long. I mean, how many episodes are you up to here?
[01:15:41.701] Kent Bye: I just published a bunch. Let's see. I just published 1,677. It's about 2.4 episodes per week for the last 11 and a half years or so.
[01:15:54.026] Charlie Melcher: It's extraordinary. I mean, first of all, just that's Herculean on a physical level. But the influence that you've had and the ability that you've had to foster these kind of conversations, it's made a huge difference to so many of us. So thank you for the work you do.
[01:16:10.287] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I'd recommend folks pick up this book. It's a great coffee table book. There's a lot of great photos and it's nice to be able to just dip into as well. Just like you said, there's lots of ways that you can get into it. And we didn't mention that there's actually 12 different covers. So you can choose the cover that you want as well. So yeah, I'd highly recommend folks pick it up because I think it's a great piece of documentation of what's been happening in the industry and kind of mirrors a lot of my similar thoughts of what I've been seeing as well. So it's hitting a lot of the same major points that I've been trying to cover on the podcast over the years. And yeah and also your your podcast is a great collection of a lot of these voices as well because you're featuring them in the book and you're also having more long-form half-hour conversations very bite-sized to kind of get a flavor for some of these other ones so you can go through and read the book and then also go through the backlog of some of the different previous episodes and hear a little bit more context for these different amazing creators that you've been cultivating and curating for the last five and a half years on your podcast and over 13 years on your future of storytelling so Again, thanks again for joining me on the podcast and good luck for the launch of the book. Thank you, Kent.
[01:17:13.700] Charlie Melcher: Story on.
[01:17:16.161] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of 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 part of podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
