John Bucher wrote a book titled “Storytelling for Virtual Reality: Methods and Principles for Crafting Immersive Narratives” where he includes interviews with dozens of VR experience designers and the major insights into immersive storytelling. Bucher is also receiving a Ph.D. in depth psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, and so he has a very historical and mythological perspective about how VR can help us go inward, reflect upon our lives, and to find deeper understanding and meaning about ourselves. I talked with Bucher at the SIGGRAPH conference in August about the influence of immersive theater on VR storytelling, historical insights into ritual cultures and oral storytelling traditions, James Hillman’s insights into the transformational potential of underworld mythologies, and how VR storytelling can serve as a mirror for us to learn more about ourselves.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So storytelling and virtual reality is providing all these new affordances of what's possible to bring together the best parts of storytelling and film and interactive video games and immersive theater. And it's sort of like this combination of all of these different dimensions, and it creates this new possibility for how we tell stories and make meaning. So John Booker has written a book called Storytelling for Virtual Reality, which it's very early still in terms of what is possible in VR, but he talks to a whole wide range of different people, does these interviews, and then takes the big takeaways from those conversations. And he's also getting his PhD in depth psychology, which is really looking at how do we find deeper meaning within our lives and these new emerging philosophies and worldviews when it comes to what is the nature of reality and how to approach thinking about virtual reality. For me personally, I have a huge interest in depth psychology as well in terms of thinking about the deeper mythological and archetypal dimensions of reality and how those are kind of playing out within the realm of virtual reality. It's creating all these new opportunities of synthesizing human experience. And what are the underlying philosophical frameworks that you're going to use in order to design these experiences? And in some sense, Experiential design is coming up with a model of reality so that you can replicate all those critical parts of an experience within the context of a virtual world or within a immersive theater piece. So we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with John happened on Tuesday, August 1st, 2017 at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:57.774] John Bucher: My name is John Booker. I'm a writer, I'm a mythologist, and I'm a VR producer who is really interested in the intersection of art and technology, and especially emerging technologies that allow us new ways to tell stories in the world.
[00:02:15.665] Kent Bye: So you just have a book that you've written about storytelling and virtuality. And so maybe you could tell me your take of storytelling in VR. What's new and different, or what are some of the metaphors that you use to help describe storytelling in VR?
[00:02:28.690] John Bucher: Yeah, I was very cautious about writing a book, especially this early on in the progress of this technology. So I say right at the beginning of the book, the book is not meant to serve as a guideline or list of here's the ways to tell the best stories in VR. I tried to design the book as a receptacle for some of the best methods and approaches and lenses that I'm seeing being used from a narrative perspective in VR. Because I have a mythological background, I sort of returned to the Greek tragedicians as they were figuring out how to immerse people in narratives in Greek theaters. I looked at specifically the work of Euripides, who was the individual who introduced this idea of a Greek chorus to help tell stories. And I began to ask myself, is there a way that we can guide viewers through an experience through sort of a digital greek chorus where people feel like they're being led through some sort of narrative experience but there is a sense of presence there is a sense of immersion in agency the way that the Greeks experience theater is much different than the way that we experience theater because it was a part usually of rituals. There was a certain amount of participation in agency and this feeling that you were interacting with the art and so I felt like we had a lot to learn from the beginnings of the Greek theatrical movement as we look at how to move forward with narratives in VR.
[00:04:07.847] Kent Bye: Yeah, in a lot of ways, story and storytelling is an ancient form of being able to communicate the life experience of humans. And so, in a lot of ways, there's things that are just always going to be the same when it comes to character and story and plot. I do see that the one medium that's out there that's probably the closest to storytelling and virtual reality is immersive theater. So it's kind of breaking down that fourth wall and being able to actually participate. So I know that you talked a little bit about immersive theater movement within your book. So I'm curious to hear your perspective of that overlap in terms of the explorations of immersive theater and how some of those lessons are going to be feeding into virtual reality.
[00:04:47.798] John Bucher: You know, when I first began interviewing people for the book, I would ask, are there other disciplines that we can learn from as we begin to approach telling stories in virtual reality? Without fail, every creator that I talked to said, immersive theater, immersive theater, immersive theater. So, I'd always had an interest in immersive theater and had seen quite a bit of it here in Los Angeles. I determined to begin to really talk to the creators of immersive theater about how they approach bringing an audience into a story where an audience member has this sort of agency that they have in immersive theater. And I learned a lot. There's a significant chunk of the book that actually deals with immersive theater techniques and approaches and lenses. And I interviewed some of the creators and some of the actors who are part of immersive theater. I think from a philosophical perspective, one thing that is important to remember that immersive theater I think really has a good handle on is when we talk about storytelling, there's sort of two pieces. There is this idea of the story. And then there's this idea of narrative discourse, which is the way that a story is told. And a story is only made known from someone else through narrative discourse. The only pure story is the one that exists inside my head. Anytime I'm going to express that to you or someone else is going to express a story to me, it's going to be through words or cinematography or writing. It's going to be through some form of narrative discourse. So I really appreciated the way that immersive theater automatically holds this space for the difference between story crafting and creation and storytelling. And while there may be intent behind immersive theaters story that they're trying to convey they leave space for the telling of that story to take a lot of different forms and I think that's something that we can learn a lot from in crafting stories in virtual reality is leaving space for for the crafting of a story inside someone's head that may be different from the narrative discourse that's been handed to that audience member or viewer, whatever term you want to use. So I think that's a key component that we can learn from that community.
[00:07:11.582] Kent Bye: Yeah, and some of the models that I use when I'm thinking about the interactive storytelling is on a spectrum from authored story to generative story. So on one extreme of the authored story is the traditional three-act structure. It's just like any movie that you see. And then as you start to get into more and more of the generative, extreme of the polarity you start to have a little bit more branching narratives we make choices but you know they may not be of consequence or you may have choose your own adventure where you're actually having significant branches or then you start to get into more of an open sandbox where the narrative structure starts to go away and it becomes more about you exploring a world and And then at the extreme, it's almost like a conversation where you're able to be completely in control and be in dialogue with somebody, but the narrative structure then becomes very weak at that extreme. And so I think this is the tension that you see between film and video games, such that you have What Eric Darnell told me is that there's a bit of a time-based constraint within the narrative, such that you have to create that tension within that boundedness of time, and that once you let go of that, then you're allowing the audience member to express their agency and make choices and exert their will, and then it becomes more about, well, what is the extent to which they can interact and exert their will? And you start to lose a little bit of that narrative tension, which I think is kind of the crux of the challenge of interactive narrative of this spectrum between authored narrative and generative narrative. So just curious to hear some of your thoughts on that.
[00:08:37.537] John Bucher: You know, in the book, one of the interviews that really touches on this, I talked to Chris Milk at length about this. And we talked to especially about branching narratives in the place that they have in any sort of authored experience. Branching narratives in order to truly create the sort of experience that I think VR producers want to create, it's going to require so much artificial intelligence in order to craft those branching narratives that at what point can it even be an authored experience anymore? This is, I think, goes back to this idea of storytelling and the idea of narrative discourse is I think at the very core philosophy is what is the intent? What is the intent of the creator? Is it to create a certain emotion within the person that experiences their creation? Is it to tell a certain sequence of events that creates a certain experience? So how nuanced and detailed is the intent of the creator? I think that's where creators have to really have thought through what they're trying to accomplish when they create these pieces. And this is a difficult thing to do because at this point with the technology, there's a lot of value to just throwing paint on the wall and seeing what sticks. At the same time, we'll learn a certain amount through doing that, but I think we'll learn the most through really intentional design, narrative design specifically, And when we are very intentional about the sort of emotion that we want to create within the audience member, because to me that's the key. It's not so much about being intentional in trying to direct a participant through an experience and say, I really want them to open this door. To me, that starts to lose the point. For me, story really is about creating certain feelings and emotions inside of people. And so getting away from having to be too specific about directing the actions of the viewer and really staying with an emotional through line. What I'm doing right now is I'm consulting for a lot of different VR narrative pieces, is we're taking the script and we're creating sort of an emotional map that goes through the script. Rather than trying to be too stuck to the narrative events that happen, we really are trying to map out the emotional experience that we want to occur and let that drive what narrative events happen. That to me is sort of that third way middle ground between the crafted experience that a creator constructs and leaving the space for the generative story that you mentioned to take place in someone's mind. To me it's sort of a third way middle approach.
[00:11:33.297] Kent Bye: Yeah, and on that extreme of the generative, I think it does require artificial intelligence and it becomes much more about designing a personality of a character or a probability space of possibilities. And so I kind of also see the metaphor of the complementary nature of a wave particle. At one end of the authored story is the collapsing of the wave function and the particle, and then On the other extreme is this wave of possibilities and probabilities that becomes the space that you get to explore and you make the choices to then collapse that wave function and to see what narrative that you have. And I think that probably one of the best metaphors that really describe that balance is probably Westworld that has these AI characters, they have personalities, but yet at the same time they also have narratives. But you have the ability for any participant to go through that experience and then kind of change the narrative or interact with it and be able to direct it or have this true combination of local and global agency, which I think is this gold standard that we're going towards, but you know, we haven't necessarily achieved that high level yet. So I know that you are on a podcast about Westworld. So I'm just curious to hear, you know, what, what can we learn from Westworld when it comes to the future of these interactive narratives?
[00:12:46.281] John Bucher: Yeah, I write about Westworld in the book and I was particularly interested in the issues that Westworld raises even before, you know, HBO released that show. But for me, Westworld not only speaks to sort of the logistics of the narrative experience in a virtual environment, but it also speaks greatly, I think, to forethinking the ethics of these things because to me that's one of the most interesting discussions that happens in the Westworld context that I don't hear enough discussion among VR creators. I've deeply appreciated your concern and being very vocal about privacy issues among VR companies because I think there is a certain amount of discussion about consent and things like this that we often hear, but I don't think we've went far enough down the rabbit hole of thinking through the end product of some of what is possible through VR or through AI or any of these other technologies. And if we don't ask some of those hard questions in advance, it's not that I want to slow technology or us avoid things, but I think there is a certain wisdom to at least having certain hard questions be a part of the discussion of what does it mean to be human, which is, I think, what that show, Westworld, really gets at the heart of, is what does it mean to be human? Again, I go back to mythology. Plutarch talked about the ship of Theseus, and sort of the theory there is if you take a ship and you take a plank off the ship, plank by plank, and replace it with a new plank, once you've replaced every plank on the ship, is it still the same ship? I think we can ask that question about human beings. If we replace every part of a human being with some sort of digital or virtual piece, is that still a human being? We can ask that about stories. If we allow an individual in an experience to replace every part of that experience with their own choice, is it still your story as a creator? So I think that sort of mythological lens, as we look at shows like Westworld, is very important I believe that a show like Westworld being a part of the cultural discussion right now is not by accident. I think this has sort of come up through the creative unconscious of things we need to be thinking about because our technology is at a point that We're honestly getting to a point technologically, we really need to ask some of these questions. In the book, I interview Paul Dubevik, who I know you've talked to before as well. And some of the work that Paul is doing seems like some of the most out there science fiction we could even dream up, but it's a reality. And so being a part of the VR community, I feel like one of the things I really want to do is help instigate the dialogue. And I think Shows like Westworld help give sort of a platform for some of these more difficult discussions about this technology and what we can do with it.
[00:15:57.022] Kent Bye: Well, one of the other aspects of Westworld that shares with something like Sleep No More is that there is a cyclical nature of the narrative that's unfolding. In Westworld, the narrative is kind of unfolding over the course of a day. And then, you know, I can imagine in that context where a story might unfold over a course of a week. But in Sleep No More you have the same narrative of Macbeth repeating like two and a half times. So you have this space where you have a hundred rooms and this narrative that's repeating such that you have the agency to be able to go around and almost like capture fragments of that narrative and you have to piece it together. And I know Then She Fell is another approach where it's more of a clockwork where they have a very fixed narrative, but it's fragmented up into different ways such that each individual experiences those fragments in different orders. And so they're getting the same thing, or maybe there's slight variations, but more or less they get the same arc of a story, but it's just all jumbled up into different order depending on when you see it. And so I see this kind of different approaches of how you're starting to cut up the narrative and then either choose some sort of narrative fragmented approach or some sort of cyclical approach where you're able to Come back and see other parts of it. So I'm just curious to hear your thought on that level
[00:17:11.114] John Bucher: Yeah, I think that the cyclical approach is sort of the next place in the natural progression. I'm even more interested in what I call a narrative shard approach. And that's where you take all these narrative shards that are pieces of traditional storytelling, whether they be the way that we approach archetypes, or the way that we approach characters, or the way that we do environmental storytelling. We have all these narrative shards, and then we begin to create mosaics out of these narrative shards. For me, that feels most organic to where virtual reality is going. I think the cyclical approach is fun, it's novel, I think it can work very well, but I do think there's some limitations to the cyclical approach that a more mosaic approach using narrative shards It's going to open up more freedom for creators and allow the audience to have an experience, I think, that is more suited for what people are wanting right now. Which I think is a big part of this discussion is, are we designing VR experiences based on what we have a sense that people are wanting, you know, in the culture or in the space? Or are we just creating things, throwing it out there and seeing if anyone wants it? And I think that is an important discussion to begin having. You know, the first few years in VR, I think, yeah, we create all these sorts of things, we throw it out there, see if anyone likes it. But I think we have to start asking that question of what are people looking for? What do people want? Too often that question gets framed in what will be the first killer app for VR that people just have to have. And that's a good question. But I think it's a more interesting question to get at what are people craving, what are people desiring. And this goes back to immersive theater because I think one thing people are craving is this idea of experience. There's some really interesting studies that have been done recently on wonder and awe and what sparks wonder and awe within people who spend eight to ten hours a day staring into a screen. And I think that has to be a part of the discussion, is what can we offer people in a VR experience that they're not getting anywhere else? And I think we all know we can't compete with the experience of, I'll give you an example. A few weeks ago, I live here in LA, I was out at the beach, at the ocean, and I was noticing it's full, and I didn't see a single person on their phone. because the ocean and the beach is hard to compete with. There's something very natural and organic that draws us as human beings to say, I am here, I'm present in this moment. So I don't think, I personally don't have an interest in trying to compete with the beach, with the ocean. But I have a great interest in trying to explore the journey inward in human beings and maybe creating experiences that couldn't be had in real time. I'm always interested in narrative experiences that take us into different genres, into different times in human history, to feel what was it like to be fully present and there in the Middle Ages, in the Old West. back to Westworld, I think that is one of the places that VR has the most space to offer people something is what are the experiences that we cannot offer people in the present space of culture.
[00:20:41.366] Kent Bye: Yeah, and in the process of me talking to different people who are working in this realm of interactive narrative, one person that comes to mind is Sascha Unseld of the former Oculus Story Studio. So he took a very strong stand towards authored stories. So if you have many different endings or branches, then you start to get in this area where what Sascha would say is that the creator is not really sure what they really want to say. And so at that extreme of the authored story, you have a very clear statement from that director. And then at the other extreme, you have the generative story, which I think has the potential to be malleable enough to serve a story that would be exactly what that person needs to be able to deal with whatever they're dealing with. And so it's a little bit more of a depth psychological approach of whatever internal trauma or turmoil that you're going through, maybe you'll receive a story that is directly addressing that. So you get into this realm of personalized narrative. But that requires all sorts of either big data or a top-down archetypal approach of being able to discern what that story is and how do you tell it. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that spectrum between that authored side but also a personalized narrative that is giving people exactly what they need.
[00:21:52.375] John Bucher: I am very excited about the potential of allowing people a very personal experience. One of the individuals that I interviewed in the book gave this example that if you ask the average person what was one of the best days of your life, they're going to tell you about a time that they went to the beach with their friends and went water skiing. They're going to tell you that story, but it's not really going to be a great story. But it was super meaningful for that person. So, again back to Chris Milk, he said in our interview that he believes when we're able to offer people the experience of going back and reliving their 8th grade birthday party, that sort of narrative and story that's very personalized for someone will probably be something that takes VR over the top because people will want that. That is something that we innately crave that's universal. We have a sense of nostalgia that recalls us to that. I do think there are some other interesting perspectives on what the value of a narrated story versus the value of some sort of branching narrative or some sort of story that is created and personalized in the mind of the participant. Ted Shilowitz did the foreword for the book. Ted Shilowitz was the futurist over at 20th Century Fox, is now over at Paramount. And Ted has a theory I think that's really interesting along this lines of agency and how many decisions or how personalized the experience should be. And Ted's theory is that it greatly divides along the lines of age. So Ted believes that people who are in high school all day long are being told by teachers, go here, do this, do this homework, do this, and they don't have any decisions of their own. So when they get home, all they want to do is make their own decisions, have agency, and be able to construct their own worlds. Adults who are working out in the real world, they have to make decisions all day long. Their agency is never ending throughout the day. So Ted's theory is when people get home from work, when adults get home from work, the last thing they want to do is have to make a lot of decisions. They really want a story told to them. They want a story to just be able to wash over them and in a sense just get into the lazy river and float down. And I think there's a lot of value to that. I think what we don't know is this generation that's coming up right now that's been raised being used to making these decisions 24-7. As they enter the workforce, as they become financially able to be the ones paying for their entertainment experiences, their narrative experiences, what will they want? Because I think We don't know that yet and we can theorize and we can guess but I think that's going to drive a lot of what is successful in the future with VR narratives will be what sorts of decisions and how many decisions do the people want to make who right now are in high school. I'm very curious about that crowd.
[00:25:02.436] Kent Bye: Yeah, I would disagree that it's about age, and I would say it's more about temperament and personality. Because I think that the temperament of somebody changes over time, that could be true, but it's also independent of age. I have my elemental theory of presence that helps make sense of these different dynamics, and I would cast it into different elements. So the air element being a mental or social presence. So if you want to have experiences where you're engaging with other people, or if you're learning or really stimulating your mind in some way, that would be something that would be an experience that would be focusing on either mental or social presence. Active presence is where you're making a lot of decisions and actually moving around a lot, or you're expressing your will, or you're exploring an area in some way. So with that active presence and the mental and social presence, I think video games are very biased towards that fire and air element, so that you're making choices and taking action and expressing your will within an experience, and that's very high agency in a lot of ways. But on the other side, you have the water element, which is emotional presence, which is much more about that passively receiving a story that other people are telling you. And it's not about you expressing your will, it's about you empathizing with other people and just receiving that level of emotional engagement through the structure of that plot character, music, color, ambiance, all the things that go into visual storytelling within film that's been refined over the last 100 plus years. That level of emotional presence is still there and people want to have that. And I think the thing that is new about virtual reality is the earth element. You actually have your body in the experience. You have all of your sensory motor contingencies activated. You're able to hack your perceptions both from the visual and auditory. soon more haptic experiences, especially with digital out-of-home experiences. So having new ways of you feeling like your body is there, you have an avatar representation, your identity is expressed, you feel like you have an actual embodiment within the experience. And I think that's something that immersive theater is starting to bring in with you being either a ghost or a character within that story. So for me, it's less about age and more about these four elements of the mental and social presence, the active presence, the emotional presence, and embodied presence.
[00:27:11.658] John Bucher: I really agree. I think your theory of presence is spot on, to be honest, with all the people I've talked to in the virtual reality space and the experiences I've had, the experiences I've been a part of creating. I think it's spot on. I really want to pick up on what you're saying with embodiment because I think that is a really, really important discussion right now in the VR space. I'm amazed at how many people are still sort of working out Cartesian dualism, you know, even in our day and age. Going back to mythology again, Stanley Kellman and Joseph Campbell co-authored a book together called The Myth as Body, and it is the idea that our myths are lived out through our body, and there's a certain connection between the idea of narrative and the body. And I do think that it's a mistake to approach designing VR splitting the mind and the body. It's very important, I think, as we create experiences to look at a person as a whole person and to take a holistic approach. And not just because we've given people the tools to be able to move their hands and feet in virtual reality space, but also the entire approach and lens that we're looking at the narrative through, remembering that that person has a body and what is the role of the body in VR space. This is something that I don't think got enough discussion when the discussion was all about whether an experience was room scale or not. We didn't talk enough about do people want to be sitting or standing in an experience. That sounds really simplistic, but honestly, I think that is an important factor in discussing, you know, what is the role of the body in room-scale experiences? Not just from a physiological standpoint, but from a mythic standpoint. How do people feel about their body's participation in virtual space? This again is why I think mythology and depth psychology are so important because for centuries and centuries theatrical experiences were connected to ritual. There was a body experience. All the senses were engaged ritualistically in theatrical experiences. And so this is why I think it's so important that VR creators go back to looking at the centuries and millennia of theatrical experiences and how narrative has been played out in those environments throughout the course of history.
[00:29:48.703] Kent Bye: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I'm also here at SIGGRAPH later today giving a talk about the philosophical implications of VR. So I was just looking and trying to map the different ontologies of metaphysics of what are the different assumptions and driving the decisions. And my talk at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference, I talked about Cartesian dualism, which I think that a lot of people still use as a framework to distinguish between the objective aspects of the technology and the subjective aspects of creating a narrative. And so as a framework for experiential design, I think that works. But in terms of a framework for the basis of reality, I think there's a lot of things where that mind-body interaction are breaking down. So then you go to monism, which is looking at all these different types. So you're making the decision of whether or not mind is greater than matter, and that is basically the physicalism and materialism that our mainstream paradigm is. The other extreme of that is using idealism, which is like mind is primary and everything comes from mind, which I think you get to a lot of these different wisdom traditions and different religions that have that philosophy. And then there's this like more natural monism, which is maybe there's a third substance like consciousness that is different than mind and matter and that that is perhaps either in a realm of something that is either Consciousness is fundamental or consciousness is universal and so we have these other ideas of either pain psychism or something like Neoplatonism and the concept of the anima mundi in the world soul And so it seems like going back to the Greeks and the mythology they were in this sort of pre-modern worldviews that had a more holistic way of looking that at these things which is part of the my inspiration of going back to the elements is to to have these primary metaphors that are having philosophically a little bit more of a holistic approach to it. So just curious because you've looked at myth and mythology and these Neoplatonic type of ideas. I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on that.
[00:31:44.345] John Bucher: Well, and I do want to say, while I believe we have so much to learn from Greek mythology specifically, there is just as much to learn from the Buddhist traditions, from Hindu traditions and Hindu mythology. When you start to look at Hinduism and the way that they understood consciousness and avatars specifically, man, it will send chills up and down your spine to start to look at Hindu avatars and the way that deities were expressed through avatars in Hinduism. So I don't think that the Greeks had a corner on the market on this understanding. I really do believe that the other wisdom traditions, the other mythological traditions, were just coming at this from different ways. I think one of the things that's helpful with Greek mythology is it's a bit of a shortcut because so many people, especially in the tech world, have maybe some degree of familiarity with some of the Greek myths, Prometheus familiarity, at least they've seen maybe Wonder Woman and know who Ares is, you know, at this point. But I also think some of the lesser known Greek myths have a lot to offer us, especially from a philosophical standpoint. One of the myths I talk about in the book that I think is an extremely important myth when we look at VR is the myth of Demeter and Precipice. And this is a myth about someone who is taken to the underworld or goes to the underworld to live for a part of each year. And there is, in my opinion, a real connection between myths that involve trips to the underworld, especially as psychologist James Hillman discussed the underworld of Psyche. I think there's a lot for us to learn about VR experiences being an underworld experience. Not just because we're closing out the light and some of the very obvious things, but also psychologically, because there can be an element of escapism. But there also can be an element of risk, of transformation, all these things that the underworld was meant to embody in mythological narratives. I think we see a lot of connections to those things in VR experiences, which is something I talk about in the book. This is something that I think we ignore to our own peril because people are still going into VR experiences with the same hundreds of thousands of years of biological muscle memory in the embodiment that we have as human beings has not greatly changed in a long, long, long time. So if we just focus on where people are at mentally in their cultural placement, I think we're only getting a small part of the story in what someone actually experiences in the depths of their psyche when they go into a VR experience. Again, I can't recommend the work of James Hillman strongly enough if you're interested in especially this idea of the underworld and psychologically what the underworld has to offer us as far as meaning human beings find in underworld experiences.
[00:35:05.210] Kent Bye: And because you are getting your PhD in depth psychology, I'm curious if there's any other insights that you think that the field of depth psychology can provide to virtual reality.
[00:35:15.180] John Bucher: I am every day amazed at actually how many connections I'm finding between the discussions in depth psychology and the discussions in the virtual reality community. I think at the core of depth psychology, people are looking for meaning. People are trying to construct some idea of meaning around their lives. And I think the best virtual reality experiences are not trying to provide answers to that, But I think a good virtual reality experience asks excellent questions, but it doesn't necessarily provide excellent answers. I think everyone in our day and age is very weary of being told what the answer is about anything. We're jaded as to being given answers. But I think we love to engage really thoughtful and provoking questions. And so, in-depth psychology, that is sort of the approach that's always given. A good psychologist is never going to tell you exactly what you need to do in your life. They're going to ask you questions. They're going to try and help guide you to an inner place within yourself. Not that you have answers for yourself, but again, going back to some of the wisdom traditions, that you come to a place of acceptance within yourself and that you come to a place of, for lack of a better term, peace with the world around you. And I think while it's very easy to get wrapped up in the technology of virtual reality, I think at the end of the day we have to remember these are human beings having these experiences and these are the universal questions that all of us long for. So the last thing I'll say about it is Depth psychology really is concerned about the universal connections between all of us, the universal questions that all of us hold. And I think that is sort of the concept that we would all do well to pin up on the wall in front of us as we're creating. virtual reality experiences or telling stories in virtual reality is what is the universal question I'm getting at? What is the universal lens that I'm offering? And how can this experience or story that I'm telling get us closer to a better understanding of what it means to be a human being and what maybe we're supposed to be doing while we're here as human beings?
[00:37:46.330] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:37:54.922] John Bucher: I believe the ultimate potential of virtual reality is to return us to a place where we have our priorities through a better lens than we do right now. I think our lives have very much become prioritized around what's happening on our phones and what's happening on television and films. My life revolves around television and films and virtual reality and I love these things. But I think my greatest hope for virtual reality is that that screen becomes a mirror and that we actually are able to see ourselves in truth, in beauty, and with the sort of clarity that we make the world a better place and we become better human beings to serve and be a part of the lives of those around us.
[00:38:46.555] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:38:50.205] John Bucher: I just want to encourage those working in this space. I do think that it's easy to feel like, I know recently a lot of people have been concerned, oh, maybe VR is dead, and maybe this event happens, or this company closes down, and maybe this is all signals that this is going to mean that all this work we've put into this space is for naught. I just want to encourage anyone in the VR community that this work is important, that this work is going somewhere, that this work is creating meaning in people's lives. And get up tomorrow and work just as hard as you did today because this will all be worth it and we're moving towards something. even if we don't see what it is. Sometimes you stand on one mountain and you see the mountain next to you and it looks like you could reach out and touch it, but what you don't see is the 300 miles of valley between you and that mountain. And I think we all see that mountain and feel like, why are we not there? And we easily don't give a lot of discussion to that hundreds of miles of valley between us and that next mountain. Stay encouraged. This is good work. It's meaningful work. And I'm proud of everyone who's a part of this space.
[00:40:05.455] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:40:06.878] John Bucher: Thank you.
[00:40:07.339] Kent Bye: It's good to be with you. So that was John Booker. He's the author of storytelling and virtual reality, and he's getting his PhD in depth psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, right now, I see that we're moving from the information age to the experiential age. And so we're going to be putting much more value on these experiences that we're having. But after a certain point, after you've had a whole wide range of experiences, you're not going to just want any old experience. You're going to want a transformational experience. you're going to have an experience that actually changes you in some way. And in order to get to that point, that's where you have to really have some sort of model or framework that is going to allow you to go into the depths of your psyche and go into virtual reality with what John sort of considers is like this underworld mythological place where you're actually diving deep and you're using this virtual reality as a medium that is kind of like a mirror that you're able to actually see yourself better as you come out of it. And also how, you know, within the ancient times that storytelling and theater was mixed in with these rituals and rituals are things that people do together. And it's something that they are deeply connected into their own inner experience of their own meaning of what's happening within the context of their lives. So John talks about this split between the story and the narrative discourse. So the narrative discourse is kind of the technical aspects for how the story is told in mundane reality and that the story is sort of the deeper arc. It's almost in this transcendent realm that is sort of like this eternal realm of mythology that we all have these common patterns of stories that play out in our lives and when we are able to tap into those deeper patterns, then we're able to project ourselves into the story. And so that's what Colin Nightingale was talking about within Sleep No More. It's part of the reason why you wear a mask is that you're not looking at other people's facial expressions when you're going through an experience like Sleep No More. So it's putting more of an emphasis and a focus of your own internal subjective experience. And I think that is a huge insight for immersive theater. But in virtual reality, you're also unveiled where a lot of your facial expressions are being hidden from other people. And at this point, it's much more of an inner noetic experience, which is about your own subjectivity. You go through an experience where there's these different symbols and metaphors that you're kind of projecting your life onto. And so it's this process of capturing these narrative shards, and then you create these mosaics of narrative shards that are related to your own inner story. So there is a story that's unfolding, but it's also, at the end of the day, really kind of reflecting back into what's happening inside of yourself. And I love how John was bringing up this Cartesian dualism. This is something that I've been talking about a lot in terms of, you know, this split between mind and body was something that happened during the Enlightenment. And I think this is the point now where our subjectivity is getting refused and reconnected with our objectivity. And I think this is kind of what we're seeing in all dimensions of our society right now is that we're in this shift from the information age to the experiential age. And there's all these deeper questions of like, what is truth? What is reality? And that's playing out in our political systems. But in terms of technology, you have this direct experience within virtual reality, where you are having these experiences. And these experiences that are virtualized, are just as meaningful, or visceral or real as experiences that you have in the real life. And so you're having these mediated experiences that feel just as real. And so it's just like making us question like, what is the nature of reality? Is consciousness fundamental, or is it universal? Or is it something that's actually just emergent from our neurology and our bodies, and all this qualia of experience is just an illusion that's being synthesized within the constructs of material reductionism? And so at the SIGGRAPH conference, I did a talk about the philosophical implications about virtual reality, because I do think that VR brings up some of these different questions about the nature of consciousness. Is it emergent, or is it fundamental and universal? That's the biggest open question. And I also just got back from a math conference of all things. I went to the joint mathematics meeting. Because the deeper that I've looked into virtual reality, the deeper I get to these questions of what is the ultimate nature of base reality. And if you look at deep enough, there could be some layer of mathematics, some of this symbolic layer of math that is sort of the underlying patterns that is driving all of reality. And so within the philosophy of math, mathematicians have a couple of range of different perspectives of what is the fundamental foundation of this mathematical reality. And so I was asking lots of mathematicians whether or not they believe that mathematics was discovered or invented. And when you talk to mathematicians, they have this feeling that they're actually discovering these objects and that these are real actual objects. And it's less of a mental construction that they're creating them, but that they're finding them. And then once they find them, they're discovering that they have all of these applications into the real world before they even have any utility at all. There's like this realm of pure math that is just mathematicians exploring and discovering things just for the sake of discovery. And then at some point, they have all these surprises in terms of some of these pure mathematics will be applied into making models of reality. And so there's a couple of like ideas of like, well, if it's invented, then maybe mathematics is just something that is constructed. And it's a fictional mathematical reality that's totally made by humans. And there's nothing else special going on. But if there is something that is discovered, then that sort of implies this transcendent realm of ideal forms, which is a platonic idea. And so there's a lot of mathematical plateness. Well over half or maybe three quarters of the mathematicians I talk to just have this gut feeling that what they're doing is actually discovering something in this transcendent realm. And that sort of is way different than the philosophy of science, which is all about having conditional models for reality up until the point that something is discovered that falsifies it. You can never fully prove something is true in reality. You can only say, conditionally, this is what we believe. We have a lot of evidence for this. And as we have more evidence, we believe it more and more. But sometimes you have paradigm shifts where there's an anomaly that is presented that can't be fully explained by the existing worldviews. And it kind of takes a crisis point where the anomaly is so huge that you have to kind of throw out the entire previous paradigms before you can actually integrate that into your worldview. And that's sort of what Kuhn talked about in the structure of scientific revolutions, that there's these different paradigm shifts that happen. And I would say that consciousness is kind of this anomaly that is out there and it's demanding that we try to figure out some way to integrate it within our different worldviews. And I think that actually like the philosophy of math actually has a lot of huge insights about the nature of how do you interface with these transcendent ideal realms and what is the epistemology by which you have this mathematical intuition to be able to kind of interface and make discoveries about these objects that may actually exist in other realms. But the philosophy of mathematics doesn't have any philosophy of mind. The mind isn't taken into consideration and there's no embodiment. But at the same time, what's happening in the math world is that you have this huge revolution in creating math education that's much more embodied much more active, much more participatory, much more using things like inquiry-based learning, where you're using this kratik method to ask people questions and have these dialogues, and it's a living story where people are actually co-creating the story of learning together. And this is a huge shift in mathematics education. And so this shift is, I think, kind of reflecting what is happening in all dimensions of our society, of moving much more towards embodiment, towards engagement, towards social and mental presence, towards What is the deeper story and the motivations that's driving this forward? And so I'm going to be starting a separate math and philosophy podcast at some point on top of the Voices of AI podcast, which has had a soft launch. It's out and available. The first episode's there. You can go check it out. And once I get back from Sundance, I'm going to be kind of properly launching all these podcasts. But just quickly, I just say that there's a lot of connection points between these ideas of depth psychology, the concept of Jungian archetypes and platonic ideal forms. And that in some ways, virtual reality as a phrase kind of implies that it's a fake or not real reality. And I would say VR is much more akin to maybe an archetypal reality or a symbolic reality such that Rather than trying to go towards this dream of one-to-one copying the nature of reality Which honestly I think is gonna be a long time before we're ever gonna be able to like Replicate all of reality down to the quantum level I mean, I just think that our models are always gonna be imperfect And so it's a little bit better to think about going into a virtual reality experience is less about it's like a replication of reality one-to-one but more of a a model or an archetypal representation or a symbolic representation of reality. And so what does it mean for you to walk into a symbolic representation of reality and what other deeper dimensions of yourself are you able to tap into? And I think that's what John was saying is that there's a huge opportunity for narratives and stories for allow us to take us on this inner journey and that there's some huge opportunities with virtual reality here and that It's more about using virtual reality as a mirror to ourselves, such that when you go into virtual reality, you're able to see reflections of yourself, and that when you come out, then you're more present to yourself, you know yourself better, and you're able to use your gifts to make the world a better place. 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 donor. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon your gracious donations in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
