Everyone should take an improvisational acting class.
I know what you’re probably thinking: ‘you’re wrong, that seems like a silly waste of time’
I know that you’re probably thinking that because I’m sure past-Conor would think the same thing if future-Conor told him this; however, present-Conor can confirm that past-Conor would have been wrong to think that.
Randy Pausch and the other faculty of the ETC have called the mandatory first-year Improvisational Acting course we take the “special sauce” of our program that makes our first semester so immersive and impactful. Aside from giving us two hours to run around and not listen to lectures, Improv gives us a chance to be creative without an consequences and build confidence in that creativity. All of our different games and activities force off-the-cuff creativity and teamwork by putting us in strange situations that we would not be put in otherwise, like having to sell an imaginary toaster that does your taxes or telling a story about a balloon monster one word at a time. This form of practice each week has made a noticeable impact on my ability to brainstorm, work in teams, understand other people and their thought processes, and grow in creative independence and expression.
I bring all of this up because Improv hits on one of the central tenets of the ETC, and of the theme of our latest “Building Virtual Worlds” prompt: storytelling. Storytelling is an innately human idea; we love to tell stories and we love to be told stories. In this “back to our regularly programmed” schedule of building a virtual world in two weeks (for all of those keeping score at home, you’re not wrong, we did have a week off after our last round of work so it has been three weeks since the last post), we were asked to design and build a 2-3 minute interactive story experience.
After three rounds of BVW, I thought this story thing would be a piece of cake. I mean, we’ve made three other worlds and they’ve had stories and now we are back to having two weeks instead of one? No problem.
Spoiler: There were problems.
Once our team was assigned the HTC Vive VR platform system, we began to brainstorm what kinds of stories we could start to tell. We talked about bank robberies and re-telling nursery rhymes from different perspectives and more before eventually settling on a theme of “family nostalgia”. Our group wanted to tug at emotional heartstrings and examine the relationship between a parent that has passed on and a child that does not remember them fondly. We hoped to build a story where the guest would act as the child, rummaging through their old house and uncovering different secrets of their parent that was gone that would eventually make them change their mind about their parent’s legacy. With that idea in mind, we all went home to think more about the details.
When we all came back the next day, we realized a few things: 1. Nostalgia is a hard feeling to create in another person, 2. Nostalgia is a really hard feeling to create in another person in 2-3 minutes, 3. Nostalgia is a really really hard feeling to create in another person in 2-3 minutes when you’re not Steven Spielberg, 4. Nostalgia is a really really really hard feeling to create in another person in 2-3 minutes when you’re not Steven Spielberg and you only have two weeks.
So… back to the drawing board. We agreed to try and stick to the parent-child relationship just because we all thought that was a really powerful bond that most guests could bring some of their own emotions into by simply hearing “mom” or “dad” and inevitably thinking of their own parents and memories. We struggled and struggled trying to reorganize our experience in a house and then a bedroom because the sheer volume of activities and experiences we had to squeeze into the 2-3 minutes in order to elicit the strong sense of nostalgic emotion we wanted.
To use a line we learned in Improv, we were trying to swallow too many swords. Our Improv instructor, Brenda, told us a story of when she was holding auditions for different entertainment acts for a fair. She said the most memorable act was a sword-swallower; he brought 20 different kinds of swords on-stage and proceeded to swallow them one after another. While impressive, she said that, more than anything, it was a jarring performance because there was too much happening just one after another. The way the swallower systematically breezed through his set made her feel sick and uncomfortable and overwhelmed because it was too much at once. She then told him, and eventually us, that if you have a twenty minute set on stage, you need to tell a nineteen minute story (bringing guests in and building suspense) and then swallow one sword. Boom. One sword is all you need.
We were trying to swallow 100 flaming swords in 2-3 minutes and that was going to make a for a painful experience for the guests and the creators (aka us). With that in mind, we resolved to cut down a lot of the extra stuff and focus on one simple storyline.
That simple storyline came to us in the form of a former Oscar-winning short film called Father and Daughter. This story elicited the same nostalgic, family feeling we wanted from a simple bike-riding story. After watching that, we synthesized its simplicity with the final feeling we wanted (read: childhood independence and confidence instilled by a parent’s trust) and developed a VR bike-riding world where the guest climbs onto a real bike and follows their mom for a ride until they get separated from each other and the guest has to find their way back.
Selfishly, I really enjoyed working through this project because I have wanted to build something physical and big and kind-of-crazy since day one and because I have been sitting on a VR-vehicle riding game for a few rounds now and it was really cool to see all of it come together. Unlike some of our other rounds, we got a lot of the actual mechanisms and technology of our world figured out in the first week, which gave us the luxury of the second week to fine-tune those mechanisms as well as make more detail-oriented decisions (like weather, colors and more within the world itself) in order to drive the narrative home.
So, in a long-winded way (this is what happens when you take an extra week off, you get out of practice), that is why everyone should take an Improv class and that is what I will take away from this round: you only need to swallow one sword. Whether you are building a roller coaster or designing a video game or giving a presentation, there should be one concrete and specific and unmistakable feeling or emotion that each of those experiences should create for their guest or user and then every other smaller decision in the experience should be pointing the narrative towards that feeling. It’s the subtle things that reinforce the world or experience (like having something be the right color or a parent’s animated reaction to a kid’s pride being lifelike) that really make the finale powerful and meaningful because the stakes have been driven so high and the guests are ready for the experience to follow through.
This round was hard, there is no way around it. There seemed like times throughout these two weeks where it felt like we really were trying to swallow a sword and things just were not going our way and we felt a lot like the child in the beginning of our game: like we were on our own and we really had no idea which way to go next. At a certain point, we decided we could not longer be stagnant and wait around for the perfect idea and we had to start going somewhere if we wanted to get anywhere. So we started to pedal, and thanks to inertia, and sure we took some wrong turns and went down some paths that were dead ends, all of that made it all the better when we finally found our mom and our own confidence.