15. The way in and the way out

Helping your audience on a journey…

Prompt: What’s the way in to what you do? Why is it approachable? What’s the way out? What’s a productive way to take the change and pay it forward?

The Way In:

Right now I am working in the genre that is the intersection of my three creatives passions in life:

• storytelling (reading/writing)
• videogames
• virtual reality

In search of people who understand and consume my content, I had to get deeper. What kind of storytelling do I enjoy? What kind of videogames do I play and remember the most? Why am I so hard-pressed on virtual reality? At the intersection of all these simple questions lies one popular truth: https://pro2.akimbo.com/t/reki-kawahara-and-a-world-of-swords/27597/5. Mr. Kawahara created a story (1) about a regular person who becomes a hero in a videogame (2) that takes place in virtual reality (3). The reason the fans love it so much lies in a simple premise: this is almost real. Whenever something even remotely in the same ballpark as Sword Art Online enters the limelight, we consume it instantly because we are still https://pro2.akimbo.com/t/waiting-for-change/33061/9 that will give our lives meaning. All these fans are waiting for the right push to convince them to take the the first step from being just a spectator to the protagonist of their own lives, and I’m hoping that I can be one element of change to grant fulfillment in this arena.

The Way Out

The idea of Augmented Reality is simple: you superimpose another viewpoint onto your existing understanding of the physical world The idea of Virtual Reality is simple: you step into the shoes of another and experience life from their viewpoint

What comes out?

If I hone my craft correctly, my hope is that I help others re-learn empathy. For reasons as numerous as stars in the sky, the people I meet are so fixated on themselves and the immediate world around them that they fail to see the bigger picture, and what exists beyond themselves (I will stick myself in this category as well, because how will I ever reach my audience if I don’t understand them? :stuck_out_tongue: )

The reason I make my dailies so erratic and random is because I enjoy exploring all the worlds that can be. As an example, take the microcosm of this workshop alone: we come from all walks of life to hone what we feel is important to us, and through our continual collisions and intersections with the works of others, we learn new truths about ourselves. The truths we learn about ourselves will be reflected in newer works, where someone will eventually come along and collide with it, and hopefully continue the cycle of self-discovery.

Virtual Reality is a fantastic mechanism for this collision, because you are literally grinding away all your knowledge of the physical world against the reality of a virtual world as a virtual entity, and if done correctly, will awaken something new inside you.

I have a lot of important ideals I want to hit with my works, but some of the ones escalating in priority have been revealed thanks to lots of great people I have met in the workshop thus far! Just like book being able to hold a snapshot in time thanks to the existence of the written word, Virtual Reality is also neat as it can hold a snapshot of a world that was once was, and best of all, it can be EXPERIENCED as opposed to IMAGINED. If something is remembered, they will always be alive in our hearts, and that’s the beautiful takeaway for the namesake of this post.

Those Who Are Almost Forgotten

We turn away from the things that make us unconformable, and through that simple act of neglect we deprive others of the most valuable gift of all: acknowledgement and justification of your own existence. Through my works I hope to normalize focusing not on what makes others different from us, but what makes us the same, so we can finally reach out a helping hand and bridge the gap between our souls that has been broken for so long.

• the homeless who are frowned upon for falling out of the conformity of the 9-5 grind
• the ex-convicts who have been framed for life over a crime they made have not had a choice in committing
• the drug abusers who turned to and and are chained by substance abuse as the last anchor to tie their existence in the physical world (shoutout to @EdKressy for doing amazing work to re-humanize these people)
• the orphans who have been frowned about by fate and lost the place they used to call home
• the refugees who have lost everything being caught in the middle of a war they never asked for (shoutout to @caroldavis for doing amazing work in this space as well)

That last point hits extremely close to home for me because I failed to realize that I myself was a product of the refugee’s journey (a little known civil war in El Salvador between Democracy and Communism during the Cold War) which leads to the stories of my parents and eventually why I am even here today.

As evident by this post… I have a lot of work to do. But luckily I have an endless amount of material to draw on, and that makes me happy to realize I found a space where the knowledge is plenty and the worlds are infinite and waiting to be birthed into existence.