Ken’s Blog

Today marks the start of the second cycle of our Future Reality Lab blog. Two weeks ago we agreed that fourteen members of our lab would collectively maintain a daily blog, with each person posting once every two weeks.

Now that everyone has written their first post, I can see several distinct topic threads emerging. Some talk about language, others about telling stories with VR, still others about spatial audio or interactive animated characters or simply the philosophy underlying our Lab’s collective vision for the future.

As each lab member develops their theme, it will be fascinating to observe how these discussions influence one another. In the weeks to come, I look forward to seeing these narrative threads weave together, to create a beautiful fabric of new thoughts and ideas.

Because I keep a daily blog, I often find myself, over the course of my day, thinking of ideas for things I might want to write about. For the great majority of these ideas, an hour later I cannot recall them at all. Alas, they have fallen into that great “Pit of Forever Forgotten Fleeting Thoughts” (PFFFT) where they are destined for all eternity to remain.

Sure, I could have taken out a pen and paper and scribbled something down, or grabbed my SmartPhone and dictated my thoughts into it. But depending on where I am and what I am doing, such actions are often not an option.

But one can imagine some variant of augmented reality, perhaps involving wearables and subvocal speech, in which as soon as you get a thought in your head, you can instantly record it. In such a scenario, you could record such transient thoughts without the need for any real task switching that might interrupt whatever you are already doing.

So there is the potential there for many more ideas — the ones that spring spontaneously out of our heads in response to whatever is happening in the moment — to actually make it out into the world. Fewer ideas would end up going PFFFT, and more would end up in the intellectual space between us.

That can’t be a bad thing, can it?

It has been said that a culture defines itself by the stories it tells. I was reminded of this last night as I started to watch The Power of Myth, the miniseries from 1988, now on streaming Netflix, in which Bill Moyers interviews Joseph Campbell.

Campbell, who wrote many influential books including “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” discusses his theories about the journey of the archetypal hero found in the mythologies of all cultures. I’m only a bit into the first episode, and already I am hooked.

And it got me thinking again about the relationship between stories and games. Many people use stories centered on a hero’s journey as a cultural and psychological touchstone, whether that hero be Hamlet, Luke Skywalker or Elizabeth Bennet.

Unlike stories, where one can only experience that journey vicariously, computer games allow the player to be the hero, directly making choices that effect the outcome. Yet in the general culture, Gordon Freeman, the Master Chief or Nathan Drake have not enjoyed the outsized recognition of, say, Huckleberry Finn or Emma Bovary or Katniss Everdeen.

One game character in particular, Lara Croft, has certainly entered the consciousness of the larger culture. Yet her outsize visibility is arguably related to the films starring Angelina Jolie, which brings us back to linear narrative.

Theoretically, a medium that allows us to walk the path of the hero’s journey for ourselves should have great power, as compared with a medium that merely asks us to watch. So why do linear narratives seem to be so much more influential than games in this regard?

Suppose we accept as a hypothesis that a culture defines itself through its versions of the hero’s journey. Why do stories of a hero’s journey seem to capture the imagination of the culture more effectively than games on the same theme?

Is this disparity simply due to the newness of the computer game as a cultural medium? And if so, should we expect this imbalance to change over time?

I was walking up Fifth Avenue this week, and when I got to around 10th Street I saw this. So I snapped a picture.

It looks a lot like what I saw when I visited the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Different species of trees, but similar feeling.

It is good to know that there are still places in this urban jungle where you can see something that looks for all the world like, well, a jungle.

If you were to discover that the person inside the Mickey Mouse costume at Disney World was actually a robot, would that make a difference to you? Would you feel less comfortable with such a non-human “actor” posing for a photo with your child?

I imagine many people would start out by saying “Yes, of course it would make a difference!” When we think we are faced with a real human being, but then find we are dealing with a simulacrum, we tend to feel betrayed, at the very least.

Yet there is a subtlety here. That real live human inside the Mickey Suit is also a simulacrum. He or she has simply been hired to play a gig.

The actor in question does not necessary feel any actual emotional bond with your child. It’s all really a business transaction: A suit is worn, photos are taken, and at the end of the week an actor is paid.

So in this sense, might it not be more honest to have a robot portray Mickey? That would spare everybody involved the oddness of a situation whereby a total stranger goes through the pretense of caring about your child, only for the sake of a paycheck.

I realize this sounds cynical, but I’m not trying to be cynical. I’m genuinely trying to understand a difficult question about human nature:

Do we still prefer interaction with real humans rather than fake humans, even when that interaction is based on deception? And if so, why?

Hollywood news bulletin, June 2018:

Audiences often assume that filmmakers use special effects to create the illusion of reality. Which is why this reporter was fascinated to learn, in a tweet this week from the President of the United States, that when Robert De Niro played Jake LaMotta in the film Raging Bull, actual professional boxers were employed to repeatedly slam their powerful gloved fists into Mr. De Niro’s head, rattling his brain and causing lasting brain damage.

It would be interesting to learn what sort of insurance was required to cover such a production decision, given the high probability of permanent tissue damage or even death to the highly paid movie star. So this reporter did a little investigating, to uncover to what extent other Hollywood productions have employed “real life” techniques behind the scenes.

I soon learned that this was not an isolated case. For example, in the film Chinatown, Roman Polanski used a real knife to slice open Jack Nicholson’s nose. Similarly, in preparation for filming Forrest Gump, actor Gary Sinise agreed to have both of his legs amputated (the legs were later re-attached).

Also, in the film The Shape of Water, the male lead was played by a genuine amphibious creature with magical healing powers. Perhaps most surprising of all, this reporter discovered that the actor Chris Hemsworth, the star of Thor, is in real life the actual God of Thunder.

I reached out to Mr. Hemsworth to ask what he thought about the fact that it took the President of the United States to uncover the truth about Hollywood production practices. Unfortunately, the actor was unavailable for comment, as he is currently vacationing on Asgard.

I don’t usually discuss politics these days. But I was intrigued when White House trade advisor Peter Navarro started a criticism of the Canadian Prime Minister with the words “There is a special place in hell.”

I’m surprised that hell would care about something as mundane as a political speech. One would think that the Eternal Place of Torment operates on a different plane entirely.

Yet suppose the statement is true, and hell actually does care about what people say in their political pronouncements. Does that mean there is a special place in hell for people who make political statements that begin with the words “there is a special place in hell?”

Interesting question, but I feel I need to tread with caution here. What if there is a special place in hell for people who say there is a special place in hell for people who make political statements that begin with the words “there is a special place in hell.”

It may be safer if we avoid the topic entirely. After all, we might stumble upon this special place in hell for people who discuss the recursive nature of special places in hell.

One of the more notable performances at the Hear Now Festival was by Marjorie Van Halteren, this year’s Norman Corwin Award winner. She augmented her brilliant live spoken word performance by numerous ambient sound effects that she triggered from her notebook computer.

The effect was spectacular, and it got me thinking. At some point in the near future, when SmartPhones have been supplanted in everyday life by wearables, we will all have the ability to pepper our conversation with interactive sonic landscapes.

Of course this could be very bad, but then a lot of good things start out being very bad, before people really understand them. For example, in the early days of the Web, websites were peppered with flashing banner ads.

Those annoying ads soon went away, mainly because everybody hated them. Web sites still have ads, but now they tend to be unobtrusive — yet still clearly sufficiently effective that you don’t need to pay a fee to use Google.

So, thinking past a possible “annoying sound effects that nobody wants to hear” phase, how might our every day conversation be augmented in an interesting way to a mutually interesting sonic landscape? How might we modulate that landscape in the course of our conversation, as a natural part of our speech?

Maybe those ambient sounds will serve as a sort of sonic equivalent of hand gestures. Maybe we will literally use hand gestures to invoke them.

I don’t know the answers, but I do think this is something worth playing with. It could very well turn out to be a sound idea.

Continuing yesterday’s post, I will describe the “rules of engagement” of the contest I witnessed at the Hear Now Festival. In each round of “ShakesRumble”, two voice actors face off against each other, to do battle one on one.

The actors face one another from a distance of about six feet. Each contestant recites a one minute speech from one of the Bard’s plays, while staring directly into the eyes of the other actor. The first actor who stumbles over the words or looks away loses the round.

Because these are top professionals, both contestants often sail through this first battle round. At that point, the referee adds a “rub” (just as Hamlet might have called it).

The rub is in the form of an extra constraint. For example, in this second round, the contestant may be required to recite their monologue “with an American southern accent”, or “like a Millennial”, or “in the style of a 1940s movie star”, or “as a Martian”, or “as a chicken”, or “while dancing”.

The really great voice actors pass these more difficult tests with ease. And so in the later rounds, when the only contestants standing are the best of the best, the referee keeps adding additional constraints.

The final round consisted of a face off between PJ Ochlan and Julia Whelan, two of the most talented voice actors in the biz. They were both so good that they kept going at it for multiple rounds, with the ref adding on another rub each time.

By the final face-off, they were each performing with five such constraints at once. For example, Julia ended up reciting Puck’s “If we shadows have offended” epilogue to Midsummer Night’s Dream as a Millennial Martian chicken with an American southern accent, in the style of a 1940s movie star.

Like her opponent, she was able to do all of this without breaking eye contact with the other actor, or stumbling over the words. Eventually one of them looked away, but in my mind everyone was a winner.

The whole thing was funny as hell and also comnpletely awe inspiring. Sort of the comic acting equivalent of watching Michael Jordan play a pick-up game of basketball.

O brave new world that has such people in ‘t!

This evening at the closing night of the Hear Now Festival I saw the top voice talents in the English-speaking world do battle with one another, with Shakespeare as their weapon.

I realize that this may not make much sense, and I need some time to digest it myself. It was one of the most astonishing things I have ever witnessed.

By tomorrow, after I have recovered from my feelings of shock and awe, I think I will be ready to describe this amazing experience more completely.