Individual Work
Everyone at the Party is Dead

The current work that I am working on is titled, “Everyone at this Party is Dead” by Caitlin Fisher. This is a unique piece because in order to fully experience this you will need a virtual reality (VR) headset. The piece takes you into an imaginary world. At the beginning you start out on the edge of an island, and there appears to be some kind of party going on. What follows after that is a narrative in which you can try to explore different worlds that have story lines of sudden illness, sex relating to murder, and collecting objects and different artifacts that bring up memories. The person who is playing the game can walk around exploring the world and interacting with different things that the game designer has designed. There are objects that you can interact with, that had been marked so while playing the game you will know what you can and cannot interact with. There are about 30 different worlds for exploration. One can explore one story world and then move onto the next one with ease. There is an exit door in each world that one can use to switch worlds. The worlds are pretty small and do not take too long to explore, but because there are around 30 of them it makes it much more enjoyable.
What is interesting about this work is the unique way that one is able to interact with it. This digital literature is intended to be used with a VR headset. I think that this makes it a totally different experience then viewing it on a computer. With the VR headset you get to immerse yourself completely into the work, there is nothing that you are seeing or getting distracted by because your eyes are completely looking into the headset. There is a lot of detail in this game, and what is nice is that you are deciding for yourself what you are going to be doing, and what parts of the game you want to interact with. This work reminds me of a couple other games that I have played by purchasing them in the Oculus app store. When playing a game or watching something in the headset, you get so immersed in whatever you are looking at, that when you take the headset off you remember that you were not in the game or that video, you were just at home sitting in the chair with the headset on. That is what makes the VR headset a really nice way to show your work to someone. Another thing that is different when viewing something on the VR headset is that you are watching or playing the game by yourself. If you have a friend sitting next to you they will not be able to experience it with you, they have to wait until you are done and then they can view it. With a computer however you can have a whole group of people sitting next to each other and viewing the work at the same time.

Screenshots: 
Author statement: 
Everyone at this party is Dead/Cardamom of the Dead is one of the first lyric literary works for Oculus Rift. It is a complete but expanding work (Cardamom of the Dead is the larger suite of stories) containing about 30 small narrative worlds, explored in a sandbox. You enter the piece standing at the edge of a island and in the middle of a soundscape of a party taking place, with guests being named: these were the guests of my 21st birthday and they are now all dead. What follows is a fictionalized narrative, at times semi-autobiographical, at other times entirely made-up. You are urged to explore houses and stones and artefacts spread across the terrain of the island at skewed scales - like a dreamscape. Addressable objects are signalled by tear-shaped signposting and will propel you into a different environments in order to access and bring to light three longer narratives of the dead woven through the work: 1) a story of a sudden illness and a meditation on euthanasia and family stories on this theme; 2) a coming-of-age story of sex relating to a murder; and 3) a meta-theme of collecting - objects, memories, digital artefacts - as a consoling practice: most of the images and soundscapes here are from my family archives.
Read the original work online here.