I want to preface this article by saying that I am formally a student of experience design and informally of human psychology. My perspective is purely observational and perhaps immature due to inexperience, but I’ve learned that emerging perspectives can be valuable. So in the spirit of exploration, here are my observations on physical immersive experiences and how human psychology factors into them.
Ever since the introduction of the walkman and portable phones, the lines of the real and digital world have been increasingly blended at an exponentially higher rate than ever before. With the rise of mixed reality, or any new technology for that matter, interesting and truly difficult ethical questions arise and get more complicated with the advancement of said technology. For example, societally we've come to accept and expect portable phones and high speed internet, but at one point in time some critics argued phones gave users brain cancer. Such thought processes are still arising as seen through the popular belief that 5G causes cancer. Whatever the case may be, this all highlights a truth that newer technologies are never fully understood or trusted and should be examined thoroughly. It is not then farfetched to assume there are a plethora of ethical questions that need to be considered when thinking about newer technologies such as mixed reality and physical immersive experiences. Specifically when it comes to physical immersive experiences, there is interesting psychological work at play that may not even be fully understood yet by the participants or the creators.
When we think about virtual immersive experiences, like those found in a VR headset, there is something less personal to them and it’s easier to recognize that something is not “real”. No doubt, humans understand the “otherness” of them due to the clunkiness of our current technological capabilities, the experience quality, as well as the ability to disconnect from the experience. However, when it comes to physical immersive experiences, there is an unprecedented blurring of reality that comes with being in a physical space where the social norms we’ve come to accept in society are changed to fit the need of whatever narrative is being told. The HBO show Westworld was a direct example of this when they built out Sweetwater, a fictitious, old western city, in full scale at SXSW with 66 actors total embedded throughout the experience. In this “fake” real world, SXSW attendees were given cowboy hats to blend into the Sweetwater society, optional missions which they could carry out, buildings they could explore, and real people they could interact with. The project was a huge success and won the SXSW 2018 Creative Experience “Arrow” Award for the Best Immersive Experience.
The Experimental Storytelling class of the Texas Immersive Program had the great opportunity of speaking with Allister Hercus, the lead strategist for the Westworld Experience and current Chief Story Officer for Emursive Productions, where he spoke about the processes and challenges of designing for physical immersive experiences. While he gave students like me invaluable insights into the Westworld production, I found myself curious about how the participants interacted with this experience. Allister gave us a few anecdotes on this subject that stood out to me in particular.
One of the tasks audience members could receive was to dig up something buried in the town's graveyard. However, if one person dug up the item before the scene was reset, other participants, unbeknownst to them, were left empty handed. Allister recounted that at the end of the day, they were left with a significantly deeper hole in the ground than expected because participants kept digging to find the object and complete the task. The other anecdotes revolved around the more dubious natures of humanity where one audience member attempted to grab an actors’ prop gun and that some actors would be verbally harassed simply because of their character’s role in Sweetwater.
From my perspective, physical immersive experiences are serious playgrounds for how humans interact with roles, anonymity, and obedience. These experiences can be classified on a small to large spectrum of interactive theater, games, larps, simulations, or some combination thereof where the participant is encouraged to fall into the world and its narrative. Experiences like Westworld’s Sweetwater actively change the reality we accept as normal into something else, thus changing the social contract we generally abide by. In the case of the audience member who tried grabbing the prop gun, were they so immersed in the world that they felt it was their “role” to do so? Did they see that actor as an equal? Authoritative figure? Enemy? If Sweetwater was real, its social construct may have deemed that action appropriate, but because we are blending the imagined and real, these judgments become more difficult to define. Furthermore, what part does responsibility and obedience play in all of this?
According to American Psychologist Stanley Milgram, “it is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action. The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions”(The Perils of Obedience, Milgram). Furthermore, Milgram asserts that “the problem of obedience is not wholly psychological. The form and shape of society and the way it is developing have much to do with it”. When it pertains to ethics, I postulate there are 4 main umbrella types of responsibility that exist in the real world: Self, Collective, Authority, and Deity. Extending these to mixed spaces can prove difficult because people come in with their real world conceptions, their preconceptions of the story world, and finally the fusion and reality of the physical space they enter. These factors combined make for an interesting amalgamation of behaviors and social contracts from the real and imagined world that live together in a unified space. And it is this gray area that is fundamental to making these physical immersive spaces work because the audience must have creative agency to act within the boundaries of the blended world as they do the real world.
To conclude, immersive experiences are wonderful testaments to human nature and it is our job as emerging technologists to push the boundaries of what is possible and realistic; however I am speaking to this topic to serve as a caution that we must tread carefully and integrate what we do know about human behavior and thought into our experiences as best we can for the protection of all parties. This new and exciting field has a lot to offer but should be scrutinized from a moral and psychological perspective on what these blended worlds offer and imprint upon us as social creatures.
*Thank you to Erin Reilly and Allister Hercus for sharing their perspective and knowledge on this topic*
