Sometimes An Immersive Newsletter Is Really A Newsletter
This week there are only two listings, but there's plenty of newsletter to be had.
2024 #41
So this week we don't have a whole lot of listings for you, in fact there are only two. One of which is Bulgaria because, hey, they went to the trouble of making an EI post and I'm going to honor that. Also: we had a moderately busy week at the site, even if we didn't get everything out that we aimed to. Check "On the Site & Podcast" to catch up with all of that.
That also means we're going to have a VERY BUSY week at the site next week.
Now it doesn't surprise me that there aren't a lot of new listings, because I know a lot of folks in the creative community are feeling the same way I do: which is a combination of angry, shocked, and just deeply disappointed in the outcome. "Disappointed" isn't strong enough of a word, but I try to keep the newsletter PG even if the pod isn't.
I'm not going to get into that here. I get into it a little in the podcast, but I don't make my politics the focus here. If I did that I'd never shut up about them.
But what I do want to take a moment to talk about is COMMUNITY. Because I've been feeling the need for that, mostly isolated for days on end each week thanks to my eldercare duties, and I got a good taste of it when I went to go teach up at CalArts for our class this week.
8 of my 10 students showed up, on Wednesday of all days, and not only was I proud of those young folks persistence even as you could see things weighing on them in how they carried themselves, they also summoned some fantastic work out of the junk we had in the room. Sometimes I think my class is "kindergarten for MFAs" but by the maker I needed some of that.
And in that I found that they needed me and I needed them. The MFA student who isn't in my class who approached me in the hall asked about volunteering at The Next Stage was a different kind of reminder.
So too are the number of people who we've never met before who are picking up tickets to the meetup we have on Monday in LA. We need each other. In truth it's all we've ever really had.
Immersive work is about making meaning and creating spaces where others can find and make their own meaning. It's about recognizing the agency we each have in our own lives and finding the power in that agency to reshape the narratives we're in. That doesn't change no matter who would be king.
Okay. Off my soapbox. But don't dash away quite yet because there are gathering points for you.
BLUESKY
There's been a big old exodus from Twitter, and to a lesser extent from Threads this week.
People recognize that relying on Twitter, sorry "X", for their news maybe isn't so hot given who owns the place. Threads is also very antagonistic to news & information thanks to its algorithm.
Now Bluesky isn't perfect, but it's got an energy that reminds me of pre-Arab Spring Twitter. You know, back when we thought the world was going to change for the better? As of yesterday it also has Flavor Flav, which means something to the over 40 set.
It also has a growing XR and themed entertainment community and THIS immersive community needs to show up and embrace it. It's one of our best tools going forward for building a sustainable audience for live and XR immersive work so I'm encouraging you all to sign up, we even have a Starter Pack of accounts for you to follow, as if this were Pokemon.
Come find No Proscenium and find me on there. We're both in that Starter Pack. Tell me you saw this and we will follow you back.
LA Fall '24 Immersive Meetup
As I mentioned above, we've got a Meetup on this coming Monday the 11th at The Roguelike Tavern in Burbank. To attend you need to have a ticket! We need the rough headcount by Sunday afternoon so John at Roguelike can know how many bartenders to call in.
Because the bar is ALL OURS that night.
We'll be hanging out. They'll be some announcements about The Next Stage's next wave of speakers and something else related to the big Summit.
So if you're a maker or an enthusiast slap down the $10 cover and join us.
21+ only. (It is a bar, y'all.)
The Denver Immersive Invitational
As I write this the teams of the first Denver Immersive Invitational are har at work devising their projects.
The theme is "Auspicious Traditions" and they're all puzzling out how to spin that into dynamic immersive experiences for Denver's lucky audiences.
There are still tickets available for the Showcase on Sunday Nov. 10th at the historic El Jebel.
Grab yours and be there to say "I was there!" when the tradition started in Denver!
The Denver Immersive Invitational is presented by Immersive Denver in association with After Hours Theatre Company & The Immersive Experience Institute with support from the DCPA's Off-Center and The Experientialists. The use of El Jebel has been generously provided by Non-Plus Ultra.
Next Stage Early Bird Ends NEXT FRIDAY!
You have until November 15th to get the Early Bird rate for the Intensive Badges for January's Next Stage Immersive Summit.
Who will YOU meet at The Next Stage January 17-19 in Pasadena?
It Takes Two
To justify publishing something.
IN THIS ISSUE
ON THE SITE & PODCAST
This Week on the Site:
- This week’s batch of immersive reviews are EXCITING. There’s even a BROADWAY SHOW.
We’ve got an awesome-sounding interactive experience in Berkeley, a Seattle show that the reviewer instantly started texting me about the moment they got out of it, and a lovely bit of site-specific dance to boot. - Batman: Arkham Shadow could have been a half hearted attempt to bring the storied game series to VR.
Instead it's the best story of the series, and a feat that taps into the full promise of VR as a platform for playing make-believe at the highest level. Noah Nelson has The No Pro Review, which you can also find at the end of this newsletter! - NoPro London's Shelley Snyder brings us her notebook from the annual Immersive Experience Network Summit, which took place in October.
- It’s 1971 and you find yourself on an ill-fated cruise through the Bermuda Triangle. Your destination: The Last Resort, “a purgatory paradise exploring themes of change, choice, mortality, and growth. Learn all about the Vancouver area show in our latest COMING SOON.
The podcast
- This week’s pod is about a murder mystery, geopolitics, and how the Internet broke us all as British-Iranian theatre maker Javaad Alipoor returns to talk about Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.
NoPro Goes Pro
We wouldn't be here without our Patreon backers, who make everything we do possible. We're on a campaign to make expand NoPro and make it sustainable.
This week we stand just $590 away from our next milestone of $4000 a month in pledges.
The sustaining backers of No Proscenium are:
Sydney Guillory, Samuel Mustri, Lonnie Hanzon, Jerome Joseph Gentes, Tome Wilson, Ryan, Erin Reilly, Chris Wollman, Samantha Davison, Jay Bushman, Cameo Wood, Richard Ayers, Daryle, Lekker Lecool, Elaine, After Hours Theatre Company, The Ministry of Peculiarities, Kurt Collins, Anonymous, and Yan Budman.
SPOTLIGHT: NYC
Step inside DORIS’ dimly-lit basement apartment as she puts on the act of a lifetime — a strange cocktail of dramatic sights and sounds conjured by her unnerving imagination. An aspiring actress and has-been that never was, DORIS confronts phantom memories and nightmares born from the dreams she can’t let go in a performance that may be her last.
A found audio pastiche of old Broadway & Hollywood is realized through lip-synched performance, laying bare the identity disintegration, emotional labor, and substance dependencies that can plague the wayward performer perpetually waiting for their star turn.
Use code EVERYTHINGIMMERSIVE for $35 Tickets.
theatre, site-responsive, performance art; 21+, Manhattan, $60, Nov. 29- Dec. 8
SPOTLIGHT: SOFIA, BULGARIA
Enter the world of KITCHEN, where every corner, hidden from the guests' view, holds its own heated story...
Before the food reaches our table, the journey is long, the time is short and the tension is boiling. The immersive performance KITCHEN recreates the intense atmosphere and psychological tension in a professional kitchen before the food reaches our tables.
Once you've arrived in the world of KITCHEN, we'll take you beyond the confines of the stage into an alternative culinary experience in an unconventional location - the real kitchens of HRC Culinary Academy, Eastern Europe's leading culinary institute. The experience is limited to 10 brave visitors so you can lose yourself completely in the hot depths of the Kitchen.
site-specific; 16+, €30.00, Nov. 16 & 17
SPOTLIGHT: THE XR WING
Get Cast In A Dream Role In ‘Batman: Arkham Shadow’ (The NoPro Review)
The new Quest 3/3s pack-in from Camouflaj & Oculus Studios delivers both the promise of VR gaming and a great Batman story
Originally published on No Proscenium on 11/5/24
The team at Camouflaj didn’t exactly call an easy shot.
Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum set a new standard for superhero action games in 2009 and put in motion a series that has seen highs and lows, confounding both other development studios and even the originators as they’ve sought to expand on the promise of the first game, which captured all the things that make Batman a phase that millions of kids go through and many never leave.
In 2024 here comes Camouflaj, looking to take everything that works about about those games and translate that into virtual reality.
I’m here to tell you they freakin’ did it.
This comes from someone who has played all the core Arkham games, who still heads down to the comic book store every week, and who is sitting on pins & needles over next week’s episode of The Penguin. Not only did this team take on the nearly impossible task of translating a character action video game to VR and make it invigoratingly embodied, they also produced what is easily the best story in the Arkham franchise so far.
Here’s the lowdown:
Batman: Arkham Shadow is set sometime after the events of 2013’s Batman: Arkham Origins, which I played over a decade ago. This means I wound up spoiling myself on one of the big narrative beats of this game while diving through wikis trying to remember what happened in that one. In truth I didn’t need to, that was just my silly lore completist side coming out.
Like Telltale’s duology of narrative-focused games, Batman: Arkham Shadow takes some liberties with the core Batman mythos for dramatic effect. Certain relationships are given twists that add depth and raise the emotional stakes for good old Bruce Wayne, giving extra weight to when you’re hanging upside down off gargoyles, punching the living daylights out of a dozen prison guards, or dipping into the series’ trademark “detective vision” to piece together clues to unlock the next part of the unfolding mystery of just who “The Rat King” is.
Now I’ve been reading Batman comics for over three decades, and we’ve never heard of a “Rat King” before. We have a Ratcatcher, and Otis Flanagan is here playing a critical role. So too are pre-criminal turns from Dr. Harleen Quinzel (Harley Quinn), Dr. Jonathan Crane (Scarecrow) and Harvey Dent (Two-Face). Indeed, in classic Arkham series fashion, a good chunk of Batman’s Rogues Gallery and allies make their presence known over the course of the story. From a comic’s perspective, these games have always felt like getting to play through the classic Hush storyline that trotted out all the big guns for splashy effect. But this isn’t a case of Marvel cameoitis. Every one of these characters is here with a purpose, and sometimes that purpose is to get your plot sense zigging when it should be zagging.
Now it would be enough for Arkham Shadow to do the hard work of making the free flow combat of the series work in VR, and it does. In fact it makes it visceral. Thrilling in a way that raises the heart rate and puts you in danger of smashing your hand against the wall if you get a bit too into it. (I might have landed a haymaker on my bookshelf once.)
It would be more than enough for Camouflaj to get the series’ trademark “predator” system to work. That’s the bit where you sneak around in vents and swing around on gargoyles to stalk criminals and guards who have shoot-to-kill orders on the Bat. (You think Bruce Wayne funds Gotham’s Gargoyle Restoration fund?) It would be icing on the cake for detective mode, the simplest of the series’ core mechanics to translate, to just work.
Yet that wasn’t enough for this team.
They had to go and push the drama in the story. They had to bring their own signature perspective. Narrative cut scenes happen from a dreamlike top down perspective that call to mind Camouflaj’s first game, République, which locked its POV to strategically placed surveillance cameras, keeping the player “above it all.” Most of all they had to think through how to get the player to embody the Batman beyond fighting, snooping, and sneaking.
All of the work on that vector pays off with a final act that had me doing that rarest of things: actually feeling something in a video game. More than just having the best story of any of the Arkham games, Camouflaj has a damn good Batman story on its hands here. A damn good story period that has a point of view on the emotions that drive Bruce Wayne and how that ripples out into the world as a whole. It’s that rare Batman story that really is about who Batman is and what that means. Someone who knows the lore and its many variations can see certain beats coming down the line, but how they are played out are effective and thoughtful. Other beats are full-on surprises, at least if you stay off the wikis. (STAY OFF THE WIKIS! I WISH I HAD!)
What makes it work so well is how the team meshes the mechanics of the game into dramatic story beats. They teach you not only how to play the game but how to play the ROLE of Batman. To say more would spoil certain moments, but this kind of thinking is there right from the very first time you have to cross a seemingly impossible chasm.
This doesn’t mean the game is flawless — don’t get me started on the Batclaw — but the pros outweigh the cons at a level we don’t get to see that often these days, sadly.
If the first promise of VR is letting people play make-believe at the highest level then we’ve certainly arrived at that moment with Batman: Arkham Shadow. What’s interesting to me is that with this game Camouflaj points to a deeper promise in VR, the one that is wrapped up in the craft of acting. What happens when you embody a role? How much do you bring to it and how much does it bring to you?
It’s one thing to see a performance and another to give one, and make no doubt. While you might be the only audience here, you’re giving a performance. For a lot of folks, it’s a dream role.
Batman: Arkham Shadow is developed by Camouflaj and Oculus Studios in partnership with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and DC. It is available now for the Quest Platform (3/3s) for $49.99 and is currently free for those who buy a Quest 3 or 3S between now and April 30, 2025.
–Gotham Needs Me
Noah
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