Last week I went to theNight of Philosophy and Ideas在纽约布鲁克林公共图书馆。One of the experiences on offer was a short CGI virtual-reality film calledBattleScar.

I haven’t had many virtual reality (VR) experiences before. I’m new to this. But I know at least that there is a real difference between those VR experiences you are meant to interact with extensively—like a video game—and those you are not. This was one of the latter. “This is mostly a standing experience,” the person helping me with my headset explained. “You can take a couple of steps, but you won’t have to go very far.” We were in a small back room on the second floor. Four of us were watching BattleScar at the same time with individual headsets. Our minders kept watch over us while we were immersed in this alternate world, making sure we didn’t clumsily run into tables or trip over wires.

《battlelescar》最吸引人的地方(比它的情节更吸引人，我将在此讨论)是它运用你的视角的方式。它充分利用了三维空间，让你发现自己是一个观众。有时你会站在地面上，看着两个主角在你头顶和周围互动。有时你会被戏剧性地提升，把场景转换成微型的立体模型。

You are, as a viewer, implicated in the same physical space as the characters in the film. That doesn’t mean you’re fooled into really believing you are no longer in the actual world. It just means that, in some sense, you feel yourself to have a position in the space of the fictional story. So if other things in that virtual space look smaller, you yourself feel correspondingly larger (and vice versa).

For a couple days after seeing BattleScar I thought that this phenomenon presented a new formal problem for those who want to create successful VR fiction. The feeling of being physically present in the virtual space is so compelling that that there isn’t really a clear break between the real world and the fictional one. It’s not a matter of breaking “the fourth wall”—that is, some clear boundary between the space of the fiction and the space of the real world. It’s rather that it often doesn’tfeel就像你的世界和虚拟现实之间存在这样的描述，即使你很清楚这两者并不相同。

这很大程度上与你的行为和观看体验之间的联系有关。当你移动时，你在视觉和听觉上对场景的角度也会改变。在我看来，这与你在普通电影中所采取的立场截然不同。You don’t ordinarily feelyourselfto be physically where the camera is. (That is true except in some rare cases when a filmmaker chooses to draw attention to the physical location of the camera; think of that moment in12 Years a Slavewhen Solomon Northup—or is it Chiwetel Ejiofor?—gazes directly into the camera lens, thus making you feel as though he is looking right into your eyes).

以下是我对VR小说中的形式问题的看法。如果你是一个VR电影制作人，你会面临一个两难的境地。你是否选择忽略观众在小说中存在的感觉?或者你是明确地指出她的存在，把她当作戏剧中的一个角色——或者至少是一个观察者，在观察的目光下，她的目光与角色如何行动的选择相互作用?选择第一个选项似乎是不真诚的和回避的，它冒着使观众的感觉她的存在只是分心的风险。(为什么不制作一部2D电影呢?)采取第二种选择可能非常老套;just think ofDora the Explorerwaiting blankly for her viewers to answer the question she has just posed. Moreover, trying to incorporate the viewer into the story might (as a logistical matter) have to ignore most of what the viewer actually chooses to do—look away, close her eyes, sneeze, etc.

As I said, I thought this way for a few days. But then it dawned on me that there isn’t really a fundamentally different formal problem here for VR fiction that doesn’t exist for fictions presented in other media that use space to represent space—e.g. theater, pictures, and regular old 2D films. Each such presentation of a fictional event presents itfroma particular location in the fictional space. You ‘witness’ the events represented in a film from a certain point in space (around where the camera would be if the camera existed in the virtual space of the fiction). You take in the drama of an opera from an angle partly determined by your real, physical location in the audience. Sometimes the ‘presence’ of the consumer is explicitly addressed, as when an act of a drama opens with a direct address to the audience. Sometimes it is simply not acknowledged.

(For more on the ways in which pictures can implicate and interact with their beholders, I highly recommend Michael Fried’sAbsorption and Theatricality.)

Often, the fluidity of this perspective itself works to break down the sense that the actual consumer has that she herself is “in” the story in some sense: the shot cuts to a new perspective on the scene, or the stage set rumbles into place to transform the angle the audience gets on what’s happening. This switching was not absent from BattleScar, and it did dis-orient me a little bit. The fact that I might change perspective at any time went some distance to break the uncomfortable feeling that I was “really” standing in the same space as the two protagonists. But even after each switch the pull of this illusory self-location in a virtual space still seemed much more irresistible than it ever does for me while I’m watching a “regular” movie, or reading a book.

Maybe regular interaction with this kind of VR format in fiction might help me ignore my own presence in the space of a VR fiction. Perhaps we will all get used to it, just as we all got used to the transporting ‘magic’ of movies, and then the problematic relationship of viewer to drama viewed can fade into the background of our viewing experiences. But I’m not sure. Perhaps the irresistible feeling that you areina fictional VR world will shape the stories that get told in this medium—or sink the medium at the outset, in favor of cheaper and less formally problematic media we already know and love. It is difficult to say which of these will happen.