Ken Liu, Writer

Author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie

thinking

Bad VR PSAs

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Cherlynn Low, writing for Engadget in “Johnnie Walker’s drunk-driving VR experience lacks subtlety”

The heavy-handedness of the video gets especially extreme at the end of the clip. As you look on at the victims of the crash, you start floating in the air, as if you were the spirit of someone who had just died. I know it’s supposed to be poignant, this moment where you’re thinking about the people who were just killed. But it was ultimately distracting and cheesy.

The idea of using VR to give the interactor a visceral experience of the consequences of drunk driving is potentially a good use of VR, a kind of story that only VR can tell. This implementation falls short, but it’s worth analyzing why.

Inventing the Medium

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Janet Murray (Inventing the Medium):

  1. There is a tension between film and games as the model for VR.
  2. Since the interactor’s experience of agency is always the most important design value for digital environments, games are a more productive starting point.
  3. Hand controllers are key to success because they give us a presence in the virtual role, functioning as “threshold objects” when they mimic two-handed operations we can see.
  4. Virtual vehicles are a promising approach to constraining and empowering interaction.
  5. Documentary film approaches may work, shaping interaction as a visit (as I describe in Chapter 4 Immersion in Hamlet on the Holodeck). To be successful, designers need to invent:
    1. interaction conventions for navigating the space,
    2. cues to entice us to navigate,
    3. dramatic composition of the experience to rewards us for being in one place rather than another,
    4. a fourth wall equivalent to make clear what we can and cannot do.

If you’re at all interested in the narratology of VR, you need to read everything Janet Murray has written.

I’m An Artist (Sort Of)!

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It’s not often that a writer gets to do something with contemporary visual art. But I had the good luck of being invited to participate as part of an exhibition by the amazing Singaporean artist Heman Chong for the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai.

Chong’s exhibition, called “Ifs, And, or Buts,” “investigates spaces between text and images, producing new ways of relating the two through 7 new works commissioned specifically by Rockbund Art Museum.”

The show has 7 new works, ranging from video installation to light show to monumental sculpture to performance art. It’s a thought-provoking and multi-layered collection of pieces in conversation with each other and with contemporary culture.

The piece that Chong asked me to prepare is called “Legal Bookshop,” for which I was responsible for curating the books that would be sold in a temporary bookshop to help readers navigate the Chinese legal system. I was asked to interpret the concept of “law” in a non-literal manner.

Rockbund Art Museum

So, I thought about laws (both man-made and natural), code (moral, ethical, and even machine-based), rules (including the trivial, such as games, and the non-trivial, such as government regulations), customs, principles, and so on. I made liberal use of puns and free association. The resulting selection is only tangentially related to “the legal system” of China, as that term is commonly understood, and yet, I think, may provide more helpful guidance than books literally about laws in China.

I also wrote a new story just for the exhibition (it’s in the catalog) which explores the ideas and metaphors behind “books” and “law.”

The exhibition will be running from Jan 23, 2016 through May 3, 2016. If you’re in Shanghai and get a chance to check it out, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Right to Move

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Nicholas Schmidle writing for The New Yorker:

Once his wife arrived, they would have children and he would raise them as Swedes. He didn’t care if his kids spoke Arabic. He added, in broken English, “I worship Sweden.”

…

‘In Syria, there’s a hundred-per-cent chance that you’re going to die. If the chance of making it to Europe is even one per cent, then that means there is a one-per-cent chance of your leading an actual life.’

The right to free movement through borders and to live wherever one wished is a fundamental human right.

Steve Jobs, the Movie

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From The Hollywood Reporter:

“Since the very beginning, Laurene Jobs has been trying to kill this movie, OK?” (Laurene’s character does not figure in the film, while Jobs’ daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from another relationship, plays a prominent part.) “Laurene Jobs called Leo DiCaprio and said, ‘Don’t do it.’ Laurene Jobs called Christian Bale and said, ‘Don’t [do it].’ “

Reps for Bale and DiCaprio were unable to verify that, and Laurene Jobs did not return calls. A Sony executive confirms, however, that: “She reached out; she had a strong desire not to have the movie made. But we said, ‘We’re going to move forward.’ My understanding is, she did call one or two of the actors.” Another source says that Laurene lobbied each major studio in an attempt to kill the project.

I haven’t seen the film, but many who knew Jobs have said that it fails to capture what was most interesting about the man, and it’s understandable that Laurene Jobs would be pained by a project that seems to trade off her late husband’s fame while rejecting the principles that bind a biographer. It’s no secret that Sorkin has said that “Art is not about what happened”. This is a sentiment that I’m generally somewhat sympathetic to, though with deep reservations in this case.

While it is true that most of us approach most art with an understanding that the rhetorical mode on offer is not about “facts” but “Truth” — emotional or metaphorical — a film like Steve Jobs is different. The reason many (if not most) viewers are going to see this film is because they’re fascinated by the real Steve Jobs, and it seems odd to claim that the art on offer has no responsibility at all toward the facts.

Writers wrestle with this problem all the time — especially those of us who write fictionalized accounts of historical events. When I wrote “The Man Who Ended History,” I felt the heavy weight of responsibility to the victims of the mass atrocities. In that case, the art was definitely about what happened because it was the reason why I was interested in writing about it in the first place.

I don’t have a good answer for how much fictionalization is “too much.” Like most questions of this sort, the “right” answer(s) vary by subject, by the subject’s distance (temporal and physical) from the audience, by the politics of the real world, and so on. Personally, I hew to the principle that I should try to minimize suffering — I don’t always succeed, but I try.