Augmenting Emotion; Augmenting Reality
Wilderness Wednesday
Wilderness Wednesday
Hey there, welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles! If you’re new to the blog, today is Wilderness Wednesday. On Wednesdays around these parts we like to talk about the backcountry. Bears, boars, butterflies- you name it, as long as it’s an animal whose name starts with B that lives in the wild (ha). All kidding aside, today I want to talk about a special experience I had in the Yosemite wilderness that inspired me to found Zaibatsu Heavy Industries to change the way we tell and consume stories.
Ammo Box
Nine Miles north of Hetch Hetchy, at the top of Mahan Peak, sits a worn ammo box. Inside are a yellowed notebook, a stub of a pencil, and notes dating back 60 years. Notes celebrating an unmarked mountain with no trail. Notes that chronicle the lives of authors making pilgrimage over the years to place intimate journal entries in a rusted box.
One man’s story made an unwitting pilgrim out of me. A set of bound-together pages starts in 1969 with a boy who has summited Mahan for the first time with his boy scout troop. He is 15. In 1979 he returns, this time leading the troop. In 1989 he comes alone to celebrate the birth of his first son. In 1999 he brings his boy, and speaks of a second child on the way. In 2009 his boys help him up the mountain. He laments ailing health, doubts he will be well enough to summit ever again, hopes his children continue his tradition. In July of 2019, there was not another entry.
The world is stuffed to the brim with stories that are invisible to us. Narratives that dictate the lives of every anonymous face in a crowd. Histories that shaped our closest friends. Without the whimsy to climb a peak with no trail, one would never know a box sits at the summit.
Empathy
Used similarly to sympathy, interchangeably in looser usage. In stricter usage, empathy is stronger and more intimate, meaning that the subject understands and shares an emotion with the object—as in “I feel your pain”—while sympathy is weaker and more distant—concern, but not shared emotion: “I care for you” or "I feel sorry for you."
The majority of narrative we consume is locked into sympathy. We can understand the emotions, even conceive of what it might be like to feel them, but we haven’t had the literal experience necessary to fully understand the emotion.
On top of that Mahan Peak there was a raw, emotional power in knowing that every handwritten note you read had been authored by someone else who’d just done the same messy, scrambly, bushwacking hike you had done. You’re covered in sweat and aching from constantly doubling back to find a clear path to the top (this is the life of the off-trail mountain hiker). You can imagine the relief the author had, same as yours, when they sat down to rest. You know they looked out on the same vista.
You read and know you share a link with the author across time, joined by space and a scrap of paper. After climbing their mountain (now yours, too), the only thing left to do is follow in writing. I don’t remember what the note I left in the Mahan box said. Normally I document everything- but these texts felt sacred. I couldn’t bring myself to record any of the notes- even my own.
Community through narrative technology
Three years later I still can’t get that dented ammo box out of my head. It’s off of Tilden Lake Trail, which is a popular weekend backpacking trip that leaves from Hetch Hetchy. Thousands of hikers must walk past it every year without ever realizing such a treasure trove of experience sits off the beaten path.
Would it cheapen things to place a marker? Let people know? Perhaps. There’s good research showing that unexpected positive events are extremely dopaminergic. Regardless of this specific story cache, the event inspired me to think about different ways stories could be imparted in order to increase impact to their audience. What if you had a map that showed you where things like the ammo box were? Now instead make the ammo box digital, and force the user to show up to the location anyways.
For a while, I imagined a social media platform that gated posts behind geolocations. This would created a sort of forced empathy, if you will- in order to see what someone has to think, you need to first walk a mile in their shoes. The idea ballooned into a filter-based product that allowed you not just to filter by location, but time of day, weather, time of year. Maybe you want to see posts in other places where it’s raining? Maybe people with over 50k twitter followers want to discuss DM filtering techniques? Maybe you want a post to only show up in summer that tags a particularly smelly alley in chinatown? Vanilla WoW had something like this; Gurubashi Arena, which had a loot chest appear at scheduled times throughout the day. This created havok and real, emergent narrative as players became regulars trying to win the spoils of free-for-all gladiator combat.
I moved on from the filtering platform relatively quickly as life picked up speed, but one of its applications has stuck with me: the locational novel. There’s already several great apps that allow you to tour a city sans guide by tying audio tour recordings to geolocations. To the best of my knowledge, there are none that feature fiction.
I have a grand image of an author pre-releasing a book in parts, each one dropping in the setting of the story. Fans would converge on particular street corners, diners, mountaintops. They wouldn’t be locked into sympathizing with characters as is the limitation of current storytelling- they’d have to talk to the same bouncer, ride the same bus, smell the same smells as the characters in their story. What’s more, they’d do it all together- you’d know another superfan of a series for the sole purpose that they’re the only other person freezing their ass off at 2:30 am on February 3rd in the parking lot of a particular Walmart in Madison, WI because that’s the only place and time you can find out who actually murdered your favorite side character. You don’t just empathize with the character- you empathize with other readers; you form the bonds that make up community. With the hard part of shared interest and shared experience out of the way, all that’s left is to talk to a real stranger in front of you in the same way you’d talk to them online.1
To return to the unexpected rewards I mentioned earlier, Imagine reading a really good book and going through the typical hunger pangs of wishing there was more, only to get a notification the next time it rained that there was a chapter you didn’t know existed; only exists when there’s rain.
Conclusion
I scrambled up a random mountain three years ago and found a box of notes that changed the way I think about storytelling. In this post, I shared a brief peek into my image for how we could rethink narrative with technology. I imagine authors 40 years from now will be creating nonlinear plots and supplemental material that interacts with your life just as much as you interact with their work. Forcing lived experience, empathy, of narrative will unlock a level of emotional satisfaction thus far reserved only for the strongest of storytelling. For too long, we’ve had a one sided conversation with narrative: it’s time for the stories to start talking back.
For any bikeshedders who want to bemoan safety, obviously there are design considerations to be made around it. This is a concept, not a polished product.