Why VR isn't a Shortcut to Emotion

Can everyone please stop confusing a storytelling medium with a storytelling idea. If I read one more thing about how VR's ability to be "real" is the ultimate in empathetic storytelling, I'll explode. Why are we so obsessed with the idea that a recreation of the real is somehow inherently emotionally resonant?

Anyone who's seen Guillermo del Torro's masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth, read Art Spiegelman's Maus, stood in front of Picasso's Guernica, cried at the first eight minutes of Disney-Pixar's "Up" etc... will know that we don't have to recreate reality by accurately reflecting our three dimensional existence to create emotion. It's not VR that'll make people feel something, it's the strength of the narratives that are delivered through it. 

I'm as excited as the next person about the emergence of technologies that open up new forms of storytelling to us. It gives us the chance to flex our creative muscle and tell stories from a different perspective, give people hitherto unprecedented access to experiences that may have been beyond the realm of possibility just a few years ago and create new rules of narrative construction that defy the conventions of old. But to imagine that it somehow allows us to shortcut our way into our innermost emotions in a way that we haven't been able to before, is to completely misunderstand human behaviour. 

The same thing happened when 3D cinema went mainstream 10 years ago. Remember Avatar? That was the movie that was set to blow 2D out of the water and herald the emergence of a "deeper, more immersive" cinema experience.

But nobody every watched a David Lean movie, or saw a Stanley Kubrick or Wally Pfister shot and thought "god this is so flat". Our minds don't work that way, and what makes us unique as a species is our ability transcend the real and escape in our minds to distant artifices. When you're reading a good book, you lose your real existence and immerse yourself in the world of the narrator. It doesn't matter that the world in question is brought to life through black type on paper. That's nothing like real, but it's enough for us to use our imaginations and create our own abstract realities that bring those words to life in deeply emotional ways.

So let's stop talking about VR like it's some sort of holy grail of emotional influence and instead concentrate on what we're going to do with it. The stories we have to tell, the valuable experiences we can deliver, the utility we can provide and the delight we can offer through that medium. Surely if nothing else over the past few years of watching substandard storytelling proliferate across our newly emerging channels, we've learned that lesson. Haven't we?