The Act of Listening in “The Space We Hold”

Of the catalogue of interactive experiences offered by the National Film Board site I chose the ones I wanted to test based on title alone. While this led me through multifarious compelling stories, I feel that “The Space We Hold” stood out because it was the cleverest in how it used its interactive mechanics towards conveying its narrative theme; that mechanic being the space bar as an allegory for the act of listening.

My favourite type of immersion is elicited by ‘game feel’, which occurs when a game’s mechanics and control scheme are cohesive with and reflect the narrative story, mood or actions and make the player feel as if the distinction between player console and player character is removed. A simple example is screen shake, where top-down RPG’s shake the screen when you shoot and hit an enemy to make your inputs feel palpable and powerful. However, I enjoy more complicated means of immersion through game feel; where the message or feeling the game wants to elicit is cohesive with your actions both inside and outside of the virtual space. An example might be the tangle your fingers get into on the controller when trying to sort your tentacles out as you play an octopus posing as a human in Octodad — an intentionally awkward control scheme meant to mimic the awkward action inside the screen.

“The Space We Hold,” while not a game, uses the space bar in the same way.

“The Space We Hold” by Tiffany Hsiung, Chris Kang and Patricia Lee is a short interactive documentary that tells the story of three of the ‘comfort women’, women who were captured by the Japanese Imperial Army and forced into sexual slavery during World War II— otherwise known as Grandmothers. The experience opens on a smattering of orbs before the title fades in and you are required to scroll down to begin the experience. After a brief intro video explaining the history of ‘comfort women’ and the narrator’s experience meeting the three separate women in the narrative (Grandma Gil, Grandma Chao and Grandma Adela), you are then presented with a clickable choice:

Despite being sensitive and hesitant towards the topic, I decided that yes, I was going to listen. Just before you think a video is about to play…

…you are prompted to hold down the space bar to listen. When you do, the video plays. Upon letting go of the space bar, the video stops and you are given the option to either hold the space bar again to continue or stop listening.

With the space bar as a mechanic used to listen and continue listening the experience emphasizes the ‘act’ of listening that the narrator later comments is changing form because of the landscape of the internet.

By turning a usually passive action into one that demands constant input to experience new content, “The Space We Hold” (which now makes much more sense as a title) turns engaging with these women’s stories into a ‘lean-forward’ act. This is the point of the experience. However, my personal experience with this narrative and the set of systems attached to it went one step farther, and elicited a very emotional response from me. The moment where the two different languages aligned perfectly to say the same thing was when, at one point, I had zoned out — more absorbed in the texture of the grandmother’s voice than what she was saying — and accidentally let pressure off the space bar. Suddenly the story stopped. I’d stopped listening.

It was so easy to stop listening.

Oh… u-um… hmm.

This was probably not the exact intended experience that the creators were going for when they were creating this project. Having to rely on participants accidentally interacting with the mechanics in a specific way is probably not a good design plan. Still, the mechanics illustrated the same point either way: I can choose to ignore or intentionally opt out of participating due to my own discomfort, or even get distracted and accidentally stop engaging with these women’s experiences, but they can never escape from them.

When we stop listening to victims of rape and sexual violence it invites a culture of victim shaming and a cyclical routine of inaction. The core interactive mechanic in “The Space We Hold” re-contextualizes how we listen while also demonstrating how important it is to lend an ear… by holding a space bar.