I’m looking at the property Murray speaks about as Digital Environments being Participatory. I think it would be a cop out to leave it at thinking about, well you know XR/VR environments are spatial by definition of most of its function being about the interface between the real and digital environments, and thus arguably can come to existence only once there is a participant. But in thinking about participation, what I really enjoyed was the way he described the functionality of “objects” and moving away from the typical branch based narrative that I’ve been most familiar with. Firstly there is the question of why we don’t have more of the approach Zork takes, which I associate essentially as opting for the game/experience to be spatially aware, and the “space” having objects that function with a certain set of rules. Comparing this aspect, what I find interesting is, in an almost pre-essential way, XR environments ( which I so far have only been able to look at from the context of Unity) exhibit such awareness and functionality. The link I’m seeing is that as a first step, it almost feels impossible to think of creating any sort of XR experience without thinking of the interaction between the user and the environment. The second the interaction aspect comes in, then the question becomes about what objects the user is interacting with. Immediately, this then asks for a set of rules the object/s function by, and thus the question of how the user participates in the experience.
If we were to rule out the aspect of technical ability (like I might end up not being able to make a box light up when the user approaches it), from an experience/user interaction perspective, I think XR for the most part exists with this pre-condition of being very spatially aware, and requiring the aspect of participation under a set of rules (and these rules ten affecting the narrative of the experience) .