I love this article from the standpoint of a fellow film lover (and wannabe filmmaker, in my case). I can see your point — there is just no way to have the viewer sit passively for a linear narrative to unfold when they have so much agency within the story setting. It is indeed going to be an interesting challenge for traditional cinema.

The history of computer games has already mapped out a pretty solid solution for the challenge of linear storytelling in an interactive world. (I’m not a huge gamer anymore, but I was there to see if firsthand in the early days as a CG animator/art director for games in the 1990's). Perhaps the most obvious direction for VR storytelling is to delve into the same premise of the interactive “choose your own adventure” books, later adapted by computer games, that were popular in the 80's. (By the way, we thought the advent of games with high-resolution visuals were going to challenge, if not replace, traditional cinema as well).

Pioneering PC games Myst and Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands come to mind when you describe the VR environments above. In both games there was an elaborate and visually-stunning setting to explore solo with the object of finding clues to solve a mystery. The narrative was told in little vignettes as each puzzle was solved and there was no way to ensure the player would unpack the story bits in a particular order. However the full story could not be revealed or understood until the player completed all of the puzzles. It was an immersive experience, yet it could be picked up and put down as a player’s time or interest permitted. It also gave value and entertainment for a much longer span of time than a feature-length film. Would one enjoy a Wes Anderson film presented in this format just as well? That’s really interesting to ponder. If I was still a game artist, I would be all over taking a stab at that project!

With the advent of the massively multi-player online role-playing game, a brand new dimension has been added — there is still a story premise and a plot arch with a few “non-player characters” who are pre-scripted to drive the narrative, but the majority of the experience is driven by interactions with other players. It’s suddenly a story full of wild cards, and they are real people. It is completely up to the online player community how closely to adhere to the story cannon. And as in real life, players make friends and foes and sometimes fall in love. As with the internet at large, there’s plenty of debate as to whether games are building real connections and empathy, or reinforcing isolationism by lulling people into a sense of connectedness without the mess of being vulnerable or needing to build social skills. I see potential for both effects.

I’ll add that MMORPGs and other first-person game genres have been primed to evolve into the VR format for years, or I should probably say decades. Game developers have been striving to create or otherwise obtain consumer-grade VR hardware to deliver their content since way before smart phones existed.

I am sure traditional film-makers will take on this new technology as a story-telling platform, as will other types of visual artists. The question is, can they deliver something that is interactive yet different enough from a computer game that it can still be called a film? I’m really looking forward to seeing what results!