How to talk like a machine

“That’s not me making that noise, it’s the mask!”

Candace Payne, the Chewbacca Mom

1. The arrival of Virtual Reality as a mainstream storytelling medium raised all kinds of questions. Most of them were and continue to be asked about the internet in general, and about games and interactive fiction in particular — they have to do with depth, formats, tone, perspective, the definition and the role of the audience and what it can do with or in the story. VR was but the latest addition to this on-going and possibly never-ending debate about how we immerse ourselves in fiction.

Any creator’s dream is to be able to make a story so powerful that it can become indistinguishable from “the real world” — right? Writers have dealt with this the longest. Then movie directors, game designers, web designers, journalists, marketers, and then VR and Augmented Reality people joined this noble army of experience manufacturers in search of the ultimate language with which to build better and more complex worlds.

It’s obviously not easy. The constraints and specifics of each medium — and each audience — dictate which stories work best, and the universality of software moves many of these challenges up the stack, liberating them from the technical aspects and putting the focus on the subtleties of design, tone and perspective.