Carmen et Error
Manual for Navigating Multiplicity: the writing behind the practice.
The collectionOne World,
One World,
Many Games
I made this film to gather a year of development in First-Person Experience Design: a mind, a body, in space, in time, in community. Some of these projects had been waiting eight or ten years to be made.
Building the instruments was a way of sharpening my techniques for making the individual works. The film follows the experiments, the machinery, and the discoveries that gave the work its shape.
One World, Many Games 13:13 · Douglas Goldstein · 2026
Download the filmChapters
The works within it
Follow an experience out of the film, or return to the moment where it appears. The instruments and studies shown here belong to the same developing practice.
The Thaumotrope
Mind and body, future and past, puppet and puppeteer, here and elsewhere; I and you becoming we.
A Debate in Gestures
The Pope and Moishe encounter the same gestures through different rules for reading them.
The writing alongside
From Carmen et Error: Manual for Navigating Multiplicity
The gestures are shared; the rules for reading them are not. The joke lets us inhabit each account before seeing the mismatch.
- 6. Language Games, Spatial Inscription, and the Grammar of XR InteractionThe first player writes it down: meaning as use
A gesture gains its meaning within a practice and a form of life. The same sign can therefore perform different acts for its two readers.
- 12. Interdimensional SelfhoodBefore the Name
The chapter traces shifts between frames through Calvino, Carroll, and the pun. Here, the second telling makes an interpretation turn without changing the original exchange.
Interdimensional Seder
Twelve perspectives gather around the same ritual table.
The writing alongside
From Carmen et Error: Manual for Navigating Multiplicity
Fifteen ritual moments hold twelve interpretations together. Participants can keep the same place in the sequence while inhabiting different worlds of meaning.
- 12. Interdimensional SelfhoodEvery spring
The chapter discusses the Seder directly: a stable ritual lets different readings coexist, and lets a present participant speak from an ancestral past.
- 11. Ritual Design and the Kitchen as Sacred InterfaceDress and toss. Do not speak.
The order of actions provides more than procedure. A shared act can carry commitment, memory, and transformation for those performing it.
The Windows Project
Three windows, one conversation. Begin with the Rob Gonsalves study, then enter the experience.
The writing alongside
From Carmen et Error: Manual for Navigating Multiplicity
The dialogue holds steady while its meaning changes. Moving between three windows makes the frame itself available to experience.
- 12. Interdimensional SelfhoodA single underlying script
The chapter names this project directly: one script can sustain different worlds, and a shift of attention can reveal the frame.
- 4. From Temporal Cuts to Spatial CompositionThe Field, the Threshold, the Trace
Looking, dwelling, and returning compose a path through material that shares one space.
The Room of Four Tellings
Four accounts of one event. Turning toward a voice changes the telling you inhabit.
The writing alongside
From Carmen et Error: Manual for Navigating Multiplicity
Four accounts of one event remain in conflict. Turning toward one voice foregrounds it while other tellings continue beyond your attention.
- 17. Poetics of Dissolution & Quantum SuperpositionCycle 3
This is the chapter’s named case: preserve the tension between situated accounts without treating their incompatible claims as equally true.
- 4. From Temporal Cuts to Spatial CompositionThe Field, the Threshold, the Trace
The room makes attention consequential. Its record of your route lets you return to what you followed and what was happening elsewhere.
Two Kings
Two appeals for judgment, in worlds that give justice different conditions.
The writing alongside
From Carmen et Error: Manual for Navigating Multiplicity
Two appeals to royal judgment expose different conditions for justice. A half-turn changes the world in which the judge must answer.
- 12. Interdimensional SelfhoodCatching the frame in the act of framing
The chapter moves from the Solomon position to the siege of Samaria. The question is what shared ground a judgment needs, and what happens when that ground fails.
- 3. The Chronotope of the VirtualThe seminar, years later: where time takes on flesh
Court and siege give action different possibilities. Space and historical circumstance are part of the meaning of the appeal.
There’s No Place Like Home
Dorothy Eady / Omm Seti. A hand in water answers a hand in sand.
The writing alongside
From Carmen et Error: Manual for Navigating Multiplicity
A hand in water answers a hand in sand. Gesture and place let two lives, two times, and two claims of home occupy one experience.
- 16. Narrative Furniture & Memory Palace of SelvesThe Chelsea Hotel, scraped clean
Remembered and inhabited worlds overlap. Dorothy Eady’s account gives this question a biographical form without resolving the status of her memories.
- 3. The Chronotope of the VirtualThe seminar, years later: where time takes on flesh
The garden and the desert make time perceptible through a place; the hand carries the passage between them.
The Finding of Erichthonius
A painting opens into myth, place, and ritual, then becomes a different painting to return to.
The writing alongside
From Carmen et Error: Manual for Navigating Multiplicity
A painted surface opens into myth, place, and ritual. Returning to the painting means meeting the same image with a different history.
- 3. The Chronotope of the VirtualThe tunnel
The chapter’s Arrhephoria passage is a direct source: carrying, enclosure, and passage give the ritual its form before its contents are known.
- 16. Narrative Furniture & Memory Palace of SelvesThe Chelsea Hotel, scraped clean
The recovered image gives another form to the palimpsest: different histories remain available in one place instead of replacing one another.
Strata
Archival records, photographs, maps, land, and civic data become spatial memory for storytelling.
HERE
After Richard McGuire: windows of different sizes open onto different times at one place.
ARZT
An image matched one-to-one becomes an entrance into a spatial scan: a frame within a frame.
The Half-Drowned Library
Day of the Tentacle becomes a premise for working across several times in one connected world.
Grand Tour
A song becomes a house to move through, carrying memory from room to room.
The Fold
Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room becomes an approach to repetition, transformation, and spatial sound.
Pinpi and Danda
Puppet and puppeteer: the characters leave the screen and play together.
Bumbershoot
Here and elsewhere under an umbrella. An ode to Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Storm Room.
Murder Ballad
Cards, competing accounts, and a shared table: the record of a dark ritual takes shape through play.
The instruments
Docked Windows, the Orrery, the Loom, Decalcomania, Cartography, and Constellation: attempts to make machinery for multidimensional experience.
The Etiquette revelation
Ant Hampton’s audio experience design gives the theories a working form: private instructions organize a shared encounter.
The Usual
One table, two private premises. The relationship is made in the space between them.
Until
Two scores make each participant’s waiting part of the other’s experience.
Outis Abbey
The Library of Experiences becomes a place to enter and explore through its holdings.
The Observatory
Connections find one another; a diagram opens from two dimensions into three.
I submitted this proposal in April 2025, then deferred my return to lived research until 2026 to focus on a new job at a university. In December 2025, I was invited to rethink the Odyssey Works Library of Experiences. That invitation became a way back into projects I had imagined for years.
This edition revises the language and layout of the April 2025 proposal. It retains the research questions, proposed experiments, and original schedule. The schedule records the plan at the time of writing.
One World, Many Games:
A Lived Research Proposal
Fracture and longing
We already walk through layered worlds. Memory changes a street; private associations change a room. Two people can occupy the same place and find themselves in very different stories. I want to understand what becomes possible when an experience is designed around that difference.
My subject is asymmetric shared realities: experiences in which participants share physical ground while inhabiting different narrative or perceptual worlds. I imagine two travelers moving through the same holodeck, each on a different quest. Their paths cross. What can happen between them?
The difficulty interests me as much as the possibility. What counts as meeting when the people involved understand the encounter differently? Is physical co-presence enough? Does it require an emotional connection, mutual influence, or some recognition of the other person’s story? Can an encounter matter to both people without meaning the same thing to them?
This summer I want to explore how those encounters might be made. I am beginning with questions about perception, narrative, and the relationship between participants, and will work toward small experiences through which I can test them.
Why this inquiry
Mixed reality passthrough, spatial anchoring, and adaptive storytelling give us ways to make subjective multiplicity explicit. Different images and narratives can occupy the same physical setting. The design problem is how those differences affect the people sharing it.
Individually tailored realities can isolate people. I am interested in designing situations where different perspectives make an encounter richer, and in understanding where that possibility breaks down. How far can the participants’ experiences diverge before they lose the ability to act together?
Consent and awareness are part of this inquiry. I want to distinguish a productive uncertainty within an experience from manipulation or accidental deception. Participants need ways to understand what they are entering, communicate discomfort, and leave.
There is also a question of language. What happens to a shared gesture when each person reads it through a different story? Can a common vocabulary develop during the encounter, or does meaning have to be negotiated as the experience unfolds?
How I will work
Thought and memory
I will return to Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler to examine how a narrative can hold different routes through it. Calvino’s interrupted beginnings make the reader’s search for continuity part of the experience itself. Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception will help me think about the body, memory, and the histories we bring to what we see.
Alongside this reading, I will draw on game design, narrative agency, multiplayer storytelling, and asynchronous interaction. I want a vocabulary precise enough to describe how distinct experiences can affect one another.
Other practitioners
I will seek conversations with artists and designers whose work approaches these questions. Ant Hampton’s Etiquette is a particular point of reference: two people sit together while private instructions organize their encounter. Janet Cardiff’s walks let a recorded voice and another time enter the place where a participant is standing. I want to understand the techniques that make these relationships work.
The layered city
I will walk familiar parks, alleys, and transit systems under different narrative premises. One day the subway is a hidden archive; another day it is a crumbling underground court. What becomes noticeable? How do the premises change my behavior, my attention, or an encounter with someone else?
I will document these experiments and the friction they produce. Self-awareness, alienation, euphoria, disorientation, and wonder are all responses I want to observe, including the moments when an overlay stops working.
Two small experiments
A shared quest, different mythologies
The first prototype will be an alternate reality game in a shared physical setting. One player searches for a relic, another for a missing map; a third protects a secret. Their paths intersect, but their reasons for being there differ. I want to see how an action can serve one story and become an unexpected event in another.
Interviews after the experience, together with records of play, will help me compare what each person thought was happening with the encounters the game actually produced.
Two overlays, one place
The second prototype will use Meta Quest 3 passthrough and spatial anchoring to place two narrative overlays in one physical environment. Participants will have distinct experiences while remaining able to encounter and influence one another.
Field tests will combine observation with participants’ accounts of what they experienced. I will work within the limits of field of view, passthrough fidelity, and fatigue, and include accessibility in the design from the beginning. The prototypes will change in response to that feedback.
Toward the portfolio
I do not yet know which form the fall project will take. It might be a ritual, a journey, or a layered game. The small experiments should help me discover what is compelling enough to develop further, and what can be made to work between actual participants.
The question I want to carry through the research is how an experience can make room for different worlds while giving the people inside them something to do together.
Reading
- Umberto Eco. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.
- Italo Calvino. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception.
- Stanislas Dehaene. Consciousness and the Brain.
- David Eagleman. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.
- Oliver Sacks. Hallucinations.
The original research schedule
| Dates | Work |
|---|---|
| June 1-10 | Theoretical immersion and question mapping |
| June 10-30 | Interviews, self-experiments, and experiential observation |
| July 1-25 | ARG and mixed reality prototypes; iterative testing |
| July 25-31 | Reflection, synthesis, and documentation toward the fall project |