Published on 23/12/2020 – Updated on 06/04/2025 – “The Soulignac Brothers” is a creative collective exploring new rituals in virtual worlds, an in-game video project produced with my brother during the lockdown of 2020. Living 10,000 km apart at the time (Paris – Saigon), looking for new usages to overcome distance, we decided to get together in-game to celebrate Christmas, have fun, chat and explore the potentials of the metaverse. Part of the Virtual Tourism Project, a series of photos and videos dedicated to the work of game designers, developers, and a way to keep memory of our excursions in virtual worlds.
Augmented video call
My brother and I had a lot of fun playing and exploring, but mostly we talked for hours. Not just about what was happening in the game, but also about what was happening in our real lives. Two brothers having a long augmented video conversation, plain and simple. A conversation that turned into a three-day creative collaboration, carried out remotely between Paris in France and Saigon in Vietnam. The result of this social experiment is a short video souvenir of the two of us, which faithfully reflects the pleasure we have in discussing and creating together. Other episodes may be created in the near future, but this will depend on the time available within the siblings, because reality and encounters in real life are and will always be a priority for us.
Gamification of the family time
After those first digital vacation experience with my brother, we realized that there were many ways to spend time with loved ones, including in cyberspace. These are truly fascinating times : despite the mobility constraints of the 2020-2021 period and future restrictions linked to the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels, we are fortunate to have the arts and technologies capable of creating immersive virtual worlds, enabling us to simulate a new decorum for our cyber-meetings. It’s up to us to make these new places our own, inventing new rituals based on pleasure with joy and public interest.
New rituals of long-distance relationships
Our brains, although the result of a long and complex evolutionary process, cannot distinguish between reality, imagination and fiction. Video games are nothing more than a collection of pixels, but the specificity of our brains enable us to believe in these alternative realities – or at least to play at believing in them (also called «shifting»). Video games, like literature or cinema, can be used as tools that allow us to immerse ourselves in a light hypnotic trance, enabling us to feel the stories being told much more intensely. I believe that this same phenomenon could improve, or even reinvent, long-distance relationships : reduce the feeling of distance and loneliness by reinforcing the sense of presence that is essential to any human relationship. Read more about “The shifting territories of mental travel“.
The real potential of the metaverse
My brother and I didn’t just “play a video game”, we travelled together in a completely fictional, naturalistic and neo-realistic universe developed by the visionary American studio Rockstar Games. This outstanding virtual space – Red Dead Redemption 2, generates real and lasting emotions, and is considered to be one of the most graphically beautiful existing game. It’s a new theme park, where the risk of accidents is zero and memories can be documented and shared ad infinitum. Wouldn’t this be the ideal place to spend time and chat with loved ones when face-to-face meetings aren’t possible? And finally, isn’t this the Metaverse as it should be?
© 2020 The Soulignac Brothers | Virtual Tourism in the USA – Red Dead Redemption 2. Creative walks and videography in video games. © Rockstar Games (game designer). © Thibaut & François Soulignac (in-game videographers). Technique: video capture on PlayStation 4 Pro, in December 2020. Virtual Tourism Project is a series of photos et videos dedicated to the work of game designers, developers, and a way to keep memory of our virtual excursions in the Metaverse. “The Soulignac Brothers” is a creative collective exploring new rituals in virtual worlds. Discover their YouTube Gaming channel.