Hacker Cinema
Sleep No More
2018 · Film · 91 min
Directed by Phillip Guzman
It's 1986 and a group of grad students are close to discovering what happens to the human brain after staying awake for 200 hours, but something goes terribly wrong with a test subject. After their department is shut down, the team moves forward in secret - only this time on themselves.
2 positivefrom 2 commenters
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2 comments on Hacker News
Sleep No More is one of my usual touchstones when talking about narrative in VR. (Speaking as a VR dev here.)
In general, narrative in VR has to be approached VERY differently to film. It's not just that the viewpoint's moving or that it's 360 degrees, it's also that the viewpoint has its own agency within the environment.
Of all the comparisons I've come up with, actually, pen-and-paper roleplaying games seem to be the most useful ones when discussing how to fit narrative into a VR context. There's a commonality of simulated world and tension between experience and narrative there that doesn't really exist anywhere else.
> We're winning because we offer something better than art. We offer Experience...Stop using the word 'art'. Erase it from your dictionary. It's too weak a word. I want nothing less than to compel you. I am coming to consume all your thoughts, all your attention. I want to absorb you to the point where it threatens your marriage and your livelihood.
Not all art is passive though. There has been performance and interactive art that can be pretty engaging. "Sleep No More", for instance. So I think the OP needlessly argues about the popular connotations of the word "art"
That said I completely agree with him that games such as "Last of Us" are not the ideal when it comes to video game as art. Just because a game's cutscenes can compete with a feature film in terms of theatrical quality does not mean it's great art as a video game. Nor does lacking cinematic quality disqualify a game from being art.
So far my favorite artistic epiphany from a game, not including games that shoot for being "art" more than being a playable game, came from the original "Portal".
There's a segment late in the game where you're asked to kill a inanimate object that you've been carrying around for most of the game. You know that it's inanimate. Yet as the narrator taunts you, I was tense the entire way because I was almost convinced it was a living breathing thing, solely because of the length of time I had been interacting with it. I half expected it to scream when I killed it. When nothing happened (I think) I laughed out of sheer relief. It was a feeling much more intense than watching a horror movie, and the only reason it was so intense was because of the interactive role I had -- both in carrying it and then killing it. That's the kind of unique artistic experience that a game can have that's not easily replicated in other mediums, certainly not film or books.