Description
An early idea in the project was to work on a virtual space based on the true story of Chris McCandless. McCandless was a young American man from a privileged but abusive background. His family expected him to work in finance or real estate after getting his degree in the early ’90s. Instead, he shunned conformity and embarked on an itinerant lifestyle, seeking to live minimally, with as little as possible to tie him down.
After a year of odd jobs and travelling, McCandless hitched a ride to the beginning of the Stampede Trail in Alaska to live off the land. He found an abandoned school bus along the trail and set up camp. However, naive and ill-equipped to survive the winter in Alaska and cut off from his only route back to civilisation, McCandless perished. The cause of his death is not fully understood, but he left behind diaries that documented his philosophy and his experiments in frontier survival. His story is well documented in several formats already.
A journalist called Jon Krakauer wrote a Vanity Fair article about McCandless, which in turn was turned into a book and then a feature film. This has been followed since by further books and documentaries from family members. The location of the school bus became a shrine visited by hundreds of pilgrims following in his footsteps in the intervening years. The bus was eventually moved from the trail to discourage others from putting themselves in the same danger as McCandless. Telling the story is especially attractive as it is as much about the environment as the characters involved. The bus and the surrounding area, the clearing on the trail where it was located, are consistent spaces in a number of stories, beginning with McCandless and continuing through to the cult interest that followed the news of his death.
Feelings
The story of McCandless is conducive to an object-oriented and spatial approach. McCandless documented his journey using a diary, and he used particular texts to learn survival skills (apparently misidentifying plants along the way). The bus itself, and its interior, are a powerful space and narrative object. McCandless’ world was surprisingly small. His diaries show that once he made camp, he didn’t venture very far from his base, and the space shrunk further as he succumbed to hunger and—some believe—poisoning.
Evaluation
I tried several platforms to develop a space based on this story, and I still fully believe that this is a piece of journalism that can be told primarily through objects. However, I also think this should be a collaborative project built alongside designers and developers with game engine experience written and researched by a journalist. This is of course, very hypothetical considering that McCandless’ story is also tied up in copyright. Even if the events are in the public domain, their documentation is not. So, for example, using extracts from his diary would be problematic, and the project would require new original reporting.
Application
I explored this project using several platforms. Firstly, rather than modelling the school bus, I looked for existing 3D models. Using Sketchfab, the 3D model repository, I found several pre-existing models of the particular school bus in question. The best of these was a version already marked up with annotations, suggesting that another user had a similar idea at some point but had yet to complete their project. However, this model was not downloadable. Instead, I found other crude models and experimented with building spaces on three platforms. The first and most successful was on Mozilla Hubs, which was later deprecated. I used the “Into the Wild” project to experiment with Emblematic groups’ platform reach.love. I found the platform cumbersome, difficult to use, and ultimately unsatisfactory. The final platform that I created a space for was Spatial.io. This was a rudimentary model that pointed the way to a potential workflow for a project of this nature in the future.
Conclusions
One of the overarching conclusions from this project is that not all events and stories lend themselves particularly to immersive journalism approaches, but this one did. The particular nature of the story, which enables it to be told through objects and a contained space without characters, lends itself to an investigative approach. For instance, I imagine a game-like immersive experience where the player takes on the role of McCandless and experiences a number of days from his point of view. The player experiences the story in 2nd person, focalised in 1st – with tasks to perform and phantom affordances leading them to the inevitable conclusion. Another approach would be for the player to explore the space left by McCandless, frozen after his passing. The player would be able to investigate the interior of the school bus, read diaries, pick up objects, and so on. The latter approach would be less production-intensive and eminently possible to assemble using consumer-level development platforms.