The VOID was a location-based entertainment company that shut down during the pandemic and maybe coming back at some point. The VOID Co-founder & Chief Creative Officer Curtis Hickman convinced his partners to allow him to reflect upon and share the many experiential design lessons in a book titled Hyper-Reality: The Art of Designing Impossible Experiences. The book launched on June 15, 2023, and does an amazing job of sharing a ton of theoretical design insights that are grounded in specific examples and anecdotes from The VOID's backlog of experiences.



Hickman is a big fan of lists and frameworks, and he includes lots of theoretical reflections with the primary structure of his 52 Laws of Hyper-Reality Design spanning four categories of Story Laws, World Laws, Guest Laws, and Magic Laws. These were the underlying principles of designing impossible experiences that The VOID would share all of the content partners, and he manages to seamlessly weave them together in digestible and fun-to-read book. Hickman is also a professional magician, and spends the second half of the book unpacking how he applied magic design theory to creating awe and wonder within the experiential design of the VOID.



I had a chance to talk with Hickman about his book unpacking his experiential design process, the four categories of Hyper-Reality Design, unpacking the mimetic storytelling affordances of VR, and the VR genres of action, adventure, and "Hyper-Reality." which he defines as "the practical Illusion of an impossible reality so convincing the mind accepts it as reality itself." We chat a bit about presence in VR, and a bit about how my elemental theory of presence relates to his four categories of Hyper-Reality with Story Laws focusing on emotional presence, World Laws focusing on environmental presence and embodied presence, and Guest Laws focusing on active presence, and Magic Laws focusing on Mental Presence.



Before I wrap up, I wanted to make a quick comment on a definition of experience that Hickman uses from Disney Imagineering legend Joe Rohde:




Experience is a record of relationships. Relationships between things that happen in the world, your body's reception of the impulses created by that thing that happened, and the formation in your brain of the story you tell yourself about what happened. Since the last part of that sequence is the main part you are aware of, that means experience is a narrative event. It is what we tell ourselves happened. This means that a lot of the principles that you would apply in crafting narrative, say a play, a novel, a poem…
Hickman, Curtis (2023, June 15) "Hyper-Reality: The Art of Designing Impossible Experiences." page 65. Independently Published.







I love this definition of experience because it is very much aligned with process-relational philosophy, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Process Philosophy says that "If we admit that the basic entities of our world are processes, we can generate better philosophical descriptions of all the kinds of entities and relationships we are committed to when we reason about our world in common sense and in science." As Mesle says in his book on process-relational philosophy:




Just look at your own experience. Isn’t that exactly what your own experience is like? New drops of experience pop into being one after another like “buds or drops of perception” ([Whitehead's Process & Reality page] 68, quoting William James). Each new drop of awareness is incredibly complex, composed of thoughts, feelings, sensory experiences, and deeper feelings of being surrounded by a world of causal forces. You can never make thoughts stand still. Your own flow of experience is a paradigm for the process-relational vision of reality laid out in Whitehead’s work and in the book you are currently reading.




Mesle, C. Robert (2018, March 1). Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. page 7.