Rite and Wrong

Thoughts on the Purpose and Peril of VR

Note: The opinions in this essay are those of the author, and don’t reflect the official positions or priorities of Google.

The Billion-Dollar Genre

So I was listening to Kent Bye’s “Voices of VR” podcast, as I do whenever I’m in the mood for grad-school earnest hosts who start every sentence with the word “so”. This one was an interview with Google colleagues Jamie Byrne and Julia Hamilton Trost about YouTube VR’s Quest for the Next Billion-Dollar Genre. Because it was conducted at a convention (Sundance), the interview featured more enthusiasm than substance. There’s a genre, it’s waiting to be discovered, and when it is discovered it will generate a billion dollars, was the main take-away. Beyond that, the subjects ventured only the most tentative opinions, to wit: the genre will likely involve “visiting places you don’t get to go to in real life”.

It’s up to the great army of YouTube creators to pay off on this hunch. This has always been Google’s strategy for success: let a thousand flowers bloom, and when one of the flowers grows to the size of a skyscraper and starts eating the others you know you’re onto something. After all, as Byrne remarked, who would have predicted three or four years ago that makeover videos would become a dominant genre?

So. Is it true that we’re destined to be surprised by the “killer VR genre” when it emerges, or can we make some guesses based on current trends and the inherent strengths of the medium? Ruminating on this question, I had a sudden epiphany: I know what the “killer genre” is, and I owe it to my colleagues in the field to clue them in.

Yet I hesitate to do so. The knowledge brings me no pleasure, and the downside of revealing it may be greater than the upside. VR professionals might misunderstand; they might mock or dismiss my prediction, or lash out in righteous indignation. Worse, it may give unsavory types dangerous ideas. Even so, I’ve got to spill the beans. It’s information. Google’s mission is to make the world’s information “universally accessible and useful”, and information is neither accessible nor useful until it’s expressed, right? So here goes:

The “killer genre” is Recruitment Propaganda for Isis.

Reading that sentence over, I suspect already that I’m being misunderstood. It comes across as a tasteless attempt at humor. Actually, though, I have a serious point to make — maybe more than one. But before I go into my exegesis, I should issue a few caveats:

• I hope and pray that Isis propaganda does not in reality become the “killer genre” in VR.
• I understand that YouTube policy strictly prohibits videos intended to recruit for terrorist causes, and I trust that the company will quickly take down any VR content that violates this policy.
• I haven’t actually watched any Isis propaganda videos. I have a weak-stomach for images of real-life violence, and I’m forbidden to search for them anyhow. My partner Ron is convinced that googling the term “Isis” will immediately trigger an NSA raid. Everything I know about such videos comes from third-party reports, which may or may not be accurate.

All that being said, I remain convinced that Isis recruiting is an uncannily perfect genre for VR. It capitalizes on every strength of the medium, every quality that sets it apart from other media, and it brings each of those qualities to a point, as it were.

Some readers will have grasped this truth immediately. Others will need to be convinced. So, later this essay, I’ll go into detail about these qualities, and how they might work together to lethal effect. Ultimately I’ll attempt to harness the lessons of this use-case to inform more positive, less evil genres.

Fresh insights! Newly-harvested ideas for those planning to pioneer billion-dollar genres. That’s the promise, the hook to keep you reading to the end. But first we have to prepare the ground, so let’s talk about VR’s most over-discussed aspect.

2. The Point of Presence

It’s that elusive something extra, the magic quality that makes VR qualitatively different from other media…what Trust is to the politician, or Allure to fashion. It’s usually capitalized in print-based discussions. Merely invoke the word at a VR gathering and heads start wagging. If it’s missing, we worry about generating it. If it’s weak, we worry about strengthening it. If it’s strong, we worry about breaking it. The aforementioned Kent Bye has classified it into four categories — Active Presence, Embodied Presence, Social Presence and Emotional Presence — and correlated these to the four primal elements of classical metaphysics: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. An interesting and worthwhile line of inquiry. But there’s one aspect of presence I haven’t yet heard discussed: what’s it for?

To hear industry professionals talk, you’d think Presence was an unquestioned good, a sort of universal enhancer, like monosodium glutamate. Yet creators in other mediums don’t give it a thought. The producers of Dancing With the Stars don’t sit around worrying that what the show really needs to do is trick viewers’ lizard brains into believing their bodies are literally dancing with stars. Every creator wants to hold his or her audience’s attention. Every creator wants to move his or her audience in some way. But not every creator wants — or should want — to invoke Presence in service of this goal. So the question is: which goal is best served by invoking Presence?

“Empathy,” comes the answer from some of you. You’ve heard Chris Milk call VR “the ultimate empathy machine” in some TED talk or other, and the phrase has been amplified in the trade press to the point where it’s become a truism, so now you’re unthinkingly parroting it back to me. But Chris Milk is wrong, so the joke’s on you. The “ultimate empathy machine” is, and always has been, literature. Literature has the ability to cut through surface details and go right to the mind of its subject. VR, by its nature, has to put the focus on surface detail. VR can give you a wonderfully visceral experience of the last moments in the life of a Golden Gate Bridge jumper. But to really understand what drove him to that point, read his Confession.

I probably ought to qualify my assertion. There are plenty of objections you and Chris Milk might raise to counter it, but let’s move on, shall we? The point isn’t that VR experiences lack the ability to trigger empathy — clearly they can — but that empathy is not the special super-power of VR, not the point of Presence. So then, what is?

Let me propose a schema. It’s rough, it’s oversimplified, but it works as a starting point for discussion:

• If your primary purpose is to alter your audience’s understanding, choose a word-based medium: produce a book, a play or a podcast.
• If your primary purpose is to alter your audience’s emotions, choose an image-based medium — like a painting or a movie — or make music.
• If your primary purpose is to alter your audience’s identity, choose VR.

3. Rites of Passage

I’m hardly the first observer to comment that the original virtual reality experiences occurred at sites of worship. The Initiate who entered the caves at Lascaux was transported from the sunlit world into an alternate reality, frozen hieratic animal figures illuminated by fire. He shed his identity as that goofball Og of the Swamp People…and became Most Venerable Og, protector of the Sacred Flame. Likewise, the great Medieval Cathedrals were masterpieces of immersive design; every stone figure and pane of stained glass contributed to a single effect: to make the worshipper aware that she was a part of the Great Chain of Being connecting all created things to their Source. Though Modernity has effaced some of the lines of connection, the use of ritual remains the same today.

I write these lines shortly after Easter. Catholics who want the full Easter Experience observe what’s called Triduum, a single liturgy spanning three days and culminating in the wee hours of Easter morn. It’s by far the most elaborate ritual in the church calendar, engaging the full body and all five senses. There’s alternating firelit darkness and dazzling light, standing and kneeling and processing, washing of feet, prostration before the cross, sprinkling of water, swinging of incense (full disclosure: I was the incense swinger at my local parish this year)…and of course the bread and wine of the Eucharist. I highly encourage VRX designers to participate in Triduum next time it rolls around — it’s an object lesson in the effective deployment of Presence, in all four of its Kent-Bye-defined manifestations.

All this sensory stimulation isn’t there just for the sake of aesthetics. It’s intentionally designed to move worshippers out of one dimension and into another, from Chronos time (secular, linear, mechanical) to Kairos time (sacred, cyclical, organic). In doing so, it alters our relationships to one another. We step out of our everyday personas and take on new roles, as actors in that primal human drama that is the Passion and Resurrection story. The distinctive sights, sounds and smells aren’t intended to evoke that drama literally (thankfully) but metaphorically. They instantly evoke last year’s celebration of the same ritual, and the one before that, and the one before that, extrapolating back across two millennia.

The wisdom that’s encoded in this and all other rituals: what you do is more fundamental to your identity than what you think or feel. If your strategy is to first convince Og to stop being a goofball and become worthy of respect, guess what? He’ll never make Protector of the Sacred Flame. But if you start by initiating him into the rites of flame protection, he’ll become venerable and dignified by osmosis.

B.J. Fogg, of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, has developed this wisdom in the secular sphere. Fogg is a pioneer in the use of computers to facilitate habit formation. Behavior change, he likes to say, is a function of two factors, motivation and ability. You can adjust either factor in order to impell your subject to take action, but a small adjustment to the ability axis — making it slightly easier for the subject to perform the desired action — will yield greater benefits than a large adjustment to the motivation axis.

In other words, if you want people to give money to your Save the Squirrels charity, your time is better spent building a mechanism for people to donate via text message than it would be producing a heart-tugging video of sad-eyed squirrels.

Or, if you want to encourage a couch potato to get in shape, don’t evangelize him on the gospel of fitness. Get him to do a single push-up every morning for a week, give him positive feedback with each pushup, then build on that base. Eventually he’ll begin to think of himself as the kind of person who does pushups in the morning; only then is he ready to internalize ideas about the benefits of healthy diet and exercise. Once the feedback loop is in place, it’s simply a matter of time before he’s doing Crossfit and talking loudly about it at work.

4. A New Me

This is the core strength of VR: it’s the most powerful medium yet for tweaking the ability axis. It allows me to try on a new persona risk-free. I can step out and take the kind of actions I would never take in real life, because they don’t correspond to my real life persona — those roles that my family, friends and coworkers (who don’t really understand me) have saddled me with. I can see those actions reflected back at me, in my virtual environment, or in the eyes of my virtual peers.

Games, of course, are also about tweaking the ability axis — empowering actions and delivering feedback. As they’ve grown more sophisticated, video games have evolved feedback loops to encourage and develop patterns of behavior. These can be harnessed to promote real-life change…at least, that’s the thesis behind the Serious Games movement. But because non-VR games lack the quality of presence, the actions I perform don’t insinuate themselves directly into my nervous system. I must consciously bridge the gap between my Recycling Hero avatar, who single-handedly cleaned up the wetlands and racked up 375,000 green points, and the real me, who just threw a coke can into the trash.

A video-game is something I work at; a VR experience is something that works on me. It’s something bigger than me, something I yield myself to in the expectation of being reshaped, re-formed into someone different. But just temporarily, just for kicks…right?

Our Entertainment Industrial Complex is predicated on the thesis that every experience can be reduced and repackaged into a diversion, something I can consume in my leisure time. It might inspire me, make me cry or make me think, but it won’t seriously affect my friendships, my marriage or my work life. It won’t change who I am on a fundamental level.

But recall that the Entertainment Industrial Complex has its roots in church. Dramatized call-and-response liturgy in the Middle Ages evolved into the Corpus Christi cycles, in which village guilds took turns enacting Mystery Plays. This in turn evolved into Shakespearean comedy and tragedy, which eventually became domesticated into the bourgeois melodramas and boulevard farces of the Victorian era. Movies interposed a screen between the audience and the action, the screen became smaller in the TV era, and now you can hold it in the palm of your hand.

See the pattern? At first there’s no distinction between the audience and the experience. With each step in the progression, the distinction becomes a little crisper. The viewer is more and more removed from the story. She’s taking it in from the comfort of her seat, then she’s controlling it with a remote, then she’s literally putting it in her pocket. All this goes hand in hand with the development of what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “buffered self.” This is the modern notion that our identities are a product of forces inside us — genes or chemicals or complexes — rather than forces outside us — angels, demons and family curses. The self as an autonomous rational agent, freely choosing according to the dictates of her will, impervious to spooky forces outside her control (except for drugs, and advertising).

Now along comes VR to undo five hundred years of Modernity. Collapsing the distance between viewer and story, mixing her right back into the “liturgy”. Here she is, the viewer, looking down at her phone from on high. She’s laughing at the antics of a monkey chasing a puppy. Enter VR: suddenly the viewer IS the puppy, and this nightmarish creature is chasing her, and she only has seconds to live! All that buffering melts away; the borders of our identities are once more porous, and here comes Papa Legba to ride his Horse. The cold dead universe is once more alive with spirits, pregnant with wonder and terror.

VR is different from other media. It doesn’t simply continue the logic of the Entertainment Industrial Complex, colonizing every spare moment of our lives with little diversions to jolly us along and distract us from the otherwise unbearable tedium of our meaningless existence. At least, it doesn’t have to follow that logic. It can cut deeper. It can be a tool to re-enchant the Universe. It can re-instill meaning, re-ignite passion, re-shape identity. Or, to be a bit less Promethean and a bit more Catholic: VR can cut through the noise to reveal the signal — the meaning, passion and identity that animate the Universe but are so easily overlooked.

Is that overstating the case? I don’t think I’m the only practitioner who’s drawn to VR for this reason. Kent Bye often makes gestures in this direction; despite his grad-school earnestness, he’s got a mystical side. And witness all the acid-droppers and Burning-Man-goers in the field: they’d say the same thing, if they were sober enough to articulate it.

5. A Computing System Named Desire

The power to reshape identity isn’t absolute. It never was, even in the days before the “buffered self”. The spirits can’t invade a host who doesn’t on some level invite them in. Any hypnotist will tell you that he can’t make his subject act against her will — she must be willing to be guided. The same is true for identity crafting in VR: the identity on offer must be one that, on some level, inspires desire in the user.

It should be a little bit out-of-reach, of course, a little bit exotic. You might get the clerk at Rite-Aid to try a VR experience about being manager at Rite-Aid, but there are simpler ways of facilitating that imaginative leap. At the same time, a successful VR identity shouldn’t be entirely foreign. It may be fun for me, a middle-aged man, to inhabit the role of Prima Ballerina at the Bolshoi, but there’s not enough connective tissue for the fantasy persona to exert a pull on the real-life persona. So ultimately it’s just a diversion; I’m not compelled to return again and again.

The ideal VR identity is one that speaks to something latent in me. A little voice that cries out to be acknowledged. The desire I’ve been stifling for years, because the circumstances of my life seem to have foreclosed the possibility of acting on it. The role I play only in daydreams. VR can give shape and form to those daydreams, it’s a safe forum for acting on my desires and experiencing the results of those actions. In the best, most powerful cases, the experience will leave indelible traces on my real-life identity. I’ll begin to view myself slightly differently, like the couch potato who begins to think of himself as “the kind of person who does push-ups.” This positive shift in my self-image will in turn drive me back to the experience, which will shift my identity further in the direction of my newly-expressed desires, until the two merge, and I’m a different, more fully-integrated, human being.

Your mind immediately went to sex, so let’s acknowledge that dimension. Of course, lots of people can, and will, explore sexual personae and fetishes that would have remained in the latent realm in the BVR era: too weird, too dangerous, or anatomically impossible. Repeated exposure will assimilate them into these roles, and before long they’ll identify with them completely and fight for public recognition and approval. The already-elastic category of sexual identities will explode. Get ready! It’s going to be interesting.

But that’s a deep rabbit-hole, and not the main topic of this essay, so let’s get back into PG territory. There’s tremendous potential for social benefit here! The terminally shy wallflower can experience the joy of being the life of the party; her self-image can be mended, and she can gain the confidence to approach others and build friendships. The dead-ender who idly toys with the idea of quitting his job and volunteering to be an aid worker in an earthquake zone can experience himself in that role, and perhaps be nudged over the border from contemplation to action.

There’s also a tremendous potential for social harm, which brings us back to the deliberately provocative statement that kicked off this discussion.

6. The Seduction of the Innocent

Consider the boy who’s drawn to visit the Isis website. The first time he visits, it’s more with the attitude of the tourist rather than the hardcore jihadi. He’s curious; Islamic State propaganda has the allure of something dangerous and forbidden, and perhaps it carries a certain clout in his peer group. It’s fodder for daydreams, a no-risk no-commitment forum for trying on a new identity. In contrast to his day-to-day persona as a teenaged nobody, this fantasy persona is animated by adventure, camaraderie and shared purpose.

The job of the Isis propagandists is to convert him from a tourist to a jihadi. They have several techniques for reeling him in. They reach out to acknowledge him via email or social media. They create a virtual community that affirms him in his tentative new identity. They catechize him: keep him coming back for new lessons, each of which builds on and fills in the conspiratorial worldview at the heart of the system. And they cajole him into taking small actions — like putting out tweets or Facebook postings — that commit him to the path.

But websites, videos, Facebook feeds — these are all several levels of abstraction removed from real life. There’s a conceptual chasm to be traversed before the teenaged dabbler can be transformed into an Islamist militant, and it’s safe to assume that most never make the leap.

Consider how the equation changes when Presence is factored in. The curious teenager now has a way to viscerally experience life in an Isis encampment, surrounded by supportive comrades — the sensation of communal purpose that’s so central to the draw of Isis. He can participate bodily in drills and indoctrination sessions. And he can practice virtually the sorts of murderous acts he’s ultimately being groomed to commit.

And consider how improvements to VR all strengthen the lethal effectiveness of the program. Live feeds with eye-tracking will allow our target to visually connect with his recruiters. 6dof controllers will allow him to handle virtual guns, knives and explosives. By the time it happens, the physical journey to the Islamic State will be just a formality; the recruit will have been a virtual resident for some time.

Of course, all of these strategies have their analogues in the more benign use-cases mentioned above. The course in self-confidence will derive its effectiveness from putting users in face-to-face conversation with virtual others. The Aid-Worker Sim will give users practice administering medicines and care-packets. And the fetish programs will give users all kinds of opportunities to “participate bodily.”

But this hypothetical Isis recruiting program possesses one additional feature: the use of Presence for the purpose of Initiation.

The gory executions that are the organization’s video calling card serve several functions. They inspire fear and loathing in its enemies, justifying and reinforcing its us-against-the-world narrative. They cowe and terrorize captive populations. And they serve as click-bait for a certain kind of audience, one that’s looking for a transgressive thrill. For those who participate in them, the executions serve the function of a hazing ritual: you’ve got to kill to prove publically that you’re a real jihadi.

As with any hazing ritual, the “benefit” doesn’t just accrue to the person committing the act. Everyone who witnesses it is complicit in the crime. It’s the shared complicity, paradoxically, that creates the bond of brotherhood that unites the group. In other words, the mere act of watching confirms you into a certain group identity.

Does witnessing an Isis execution on YouTube, after-the-fact, yield the same effect? Not really. One might feel somewhat dirty after seeing the thing — it might be a difficult image to shake — but it is, after all, just an image on a screen in my hand. The Observer is distinct and removed from the Story. If it bothers me, I can pull up the monkey-chasing-the-puppy video and divert myself with that.

How different is the effect if I’m experiencing it in VR — if I’m immersed in it? If my body is convinced it’s there with the executioner — or even that it’s wielding the knife? Is it possible that the viewer can be made to feel complicit in the crime? Might he go into the VR experience a dabbler, a tourist…and come out an initiate?

Talk about tweaking the ability axis.

7. Wanna Be a Member? Wanna Be a Member?

I’m raising these questions not to be a doom-monger — not to question the promise of the VR revolution — but to start a serious conversation about the unique power of this new artform. I define this as the power to mold users’ identities by orchestrating their actions. There’s a word for this phenomenon: “ritual.”

In our culture, we tend to associate ritual with inauthenticity, the mindless repetition of ancient, obscure formulas. For several generations, we’ve elevated the spontaneous and casual over the studied and formal. In a way, this has been America’s mission from the beginning.

Yet ritual is an artform. From the Japanese Tea Ceremony to the Quadrille to the Bris, each “play pattern” is created by designers, to express an idea through action and relationship. And as a matter of fact, there was a time when America was particularly well-known for its talent in this sphere. A time when our restless energies were focused on innovating new micro-societies, each with its own closely-guarded rites of initiation and membership.

Here’s Tocqueville, the French observer who exhaustively analyzed our developing country 180 years ago:

“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.”

This quality of American life lasted well into the 20th century. It’s preserved today in old sitcoms and musical comedies, with Dad strapping on his fez and his ceremonial sword to attend the weekly meeting of the Drowsy Venus Chapter of the Mystical Brotherhood of the Sacred Stars of the Milky Way, while Mom prepares the house to welcome the Auxiliary Committee of the Ladies Concerned About Rising Hemlines Society. These types of associations still persist in places, but volunteerism is in steep decline (you may be very proud of your membership in the Safeway Rewards Club, but really — it’s not the same thing). The reasons for this decline are complex and hotly debated by the two sides in our culture war. Consumer technology undoubtedly bears some of the blame.

What I’m suggesting, though, is that consumer technology can also play a part in its renaissance. Indeed, social media has already begun the task. Web-organized meetups represent a new form of voluntary society. Kickstarter and Change.org are, in their own ways, forums for spontaneous organization. But existing forms of social media are only good for creating “thin” connections between people. These platforms lack the solidity that comes from rites of initiation and belonging, so the organizations they engender are fated to come and go with the wind.

But VR, with its power for channeling action into form, is a different story. When the social dimension of VR is fully understood and embraced, it will be seen as a medium for bringing people together. And not just to chat, play games and hook up — worthy as those goals might be — but to advance political programs, promote spiritual development, learn new trades, start international dance crazes, and other weighty and important projects. We’ll do this by scripting behavior patterns that enable new skills, foster new networks of relationship and acculturate users into new identities — or add new facets to their existing identities.

VR-based organizations won’t look like the old sects, lodges and voluntary committees. They’ll be affinity-based, not location-based, and the rites themselves will be freed from constraints imposed by the physical world. The relatively frictionless nature of virtual social interactions will make for a much different ecosystem than the one that obtained in the golden age of volunteerism. Users will have exponentially more options to choose from. Organizers will have more flexibility to try out new rites of membership, substituting, discarding, tweaking until they get the formula right. Yet, as with all forms of society worthy of the name, member will need to have “skin in the game.” The rituals that define the organization must pull new seekers over the threshold of initiation, impel them to identify with the organization, identify with the Cause and rally to protect and advance it.

If we can lay the foundations of this infrastructure, we will have performed a great service. We will have facilitated the reinvigoration of our culture, renewed the bonds of community that have become dangerously frayed. This is the greatest power, and the greatest promise, of VR. It’s a power that can and will be used for evil, as sketched in the Isis use-case above. But consider: what’s the precondition that would make their hypothetical VR recruiting program effective? The target must first be alienated, disconnected from the supportive relationships that would allow him to envision a structure for positive growth.

Our world is suffering through a plague of alienation, and many observers see the development of VR as another symptom of that plague. But perhaps it’s actually a medicine to alleviate it. New forms of ritual, cultivated and nursed into bloom within the metaverse, can provide the structure and facilitate those relationships. Scripted patterns of behavior, designed with imagination and care, can be powerful tools for personal growth. They can transform users from passive consumers into active, fully-integrated participants in culture-creation. This, ultimately, is our best hope for rejuvenating our society and protecting against the demagogues, fanatics and other snake-oil salesmen.

Intrigued? Interested in joining the Cause? We’re organizing down at the Secret Headquarters. Look for the tall man with the black scarf, and tell him “the orchids need watering”…