“Students who learn through telling and reflectively processing their stories develop skills that enable them to link subjective and objective perspectives, capture the complexity of experience and bring about thoughtful change to self and practice,” says Maxine Alterio, an educator and researcher at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand, who notes that storytelling enhances learning. “When storytelling is used as a robust mode of inquiry, student learning is enhanced in multiple ways.”

“Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories,” says Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and author of bestsellers Sapiens and Homo Deus.

Stories, he wrote in Sapiens, are what allowed homo sapiens to dominate the hardier and apparently smarter Neanderthal species: “Cooperation between very large numbers of strangers” leads to “the ability to transmit information about things that do not really exist, such as tribal spirits, nations, limited liability companies and human rights.”

What Harari talks about is communal. But stories, we all know, are just as important at the personal level.

“Everything that I know, share and teach is from all that I make, all that I do,” writes Hanson Hosein, program chair of the Communication Leadership graduate program at the University of Washington, and a mentor to me. “So to remain relevant and credible, I must continue to make. And do.”

Which brings me to why we’re here at RealityNext. Our purpose is all about the story: the story that ties us to a learning subject, sure. But more so we’re about the story of how we work together toward a common goal, the story of how we find our passions. When we can bring a group of young learners together in a room and allow them to test different roles as creators and builders, that’s how they understand their life’s direction.

Paul J. Zak, an economics and psychology professor at Claremont Graduate University and founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, found that the brain releases a chemical called oxytocin “when we are trusted or shown a kindness, and it motivates cooperation with others. It does this by enhancing the sense of empathy, our ability to experience others’ emotions.” According to Zak, with further testing his team found that “character-driven stories do consistently cause oxytocin synthesis.”

So why is storytelling as an idea important? For one, a story puts facts into context, allowing us to make sense of our lives and of those around us—they allow us to engage with one another.

“We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states,” Harari wrote. “Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives.”

A story of course needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. But it also needs a conflict, and that conflict needs a resolution. For instance, did you hear about that time I went to the football game and sat on the 50-yard line? You’re right. Boring. Who cares? But did you hear about the time I went to the football game? We almost didn’t make it when I realized after we’d paid 20 bucks for parking that we’d forgotten the tickets. So I rushed back home, found the tickets, and rushed back. I convinced the parking lot guy to let me back into my spot and we found our seats right at kickoff. And guess where they were? Right at the 50-yard line!

Interesting, right? Now do you care?

If we can help people see the benefits of learning through the art of making stories, they can shift the rote gathering of facts into something more personal: they can see their place in the world. That will spur action on climate change, or help people understand how a war hundreds of years ago has parallels to today. Our students have proven this in our workshops and brought home the importance of the subject in a very powerful way.

Storytelling is fun. It gets the point across. It tells you who you are and your place in the world. And, with a little luck, we all live happily ever after.

When 13 teens showed up at Fluke Hall on the University of Washington campus one wet November day, they had no idea what they were in for. When they emerged from Portal VR in Ballard on Jan. 28, they had just played a virtual reality game they had made through learning, narrative-building, performance and collaboration.

“I liked it. It was very different from what I would have expected it to be,” said Vichette Ros, a 9th grader from Choice Academy in Burien.

Ros didn’t know what to expect because the workshops in this game-creation process had never been done before—they were the first in a series led by Seattle-based startup RealityNext. Over the course of two day-long sessions in November and December, RealityNext co-founders Alex Stolyarik and Joel Magalnick worked with the students and a volunteer crew that included Art Feinglass, director of the Seattle Jewish Theater Company, Luke Tokheim, co-founder of Shadow Motion Workshop, and software developer Michael Gelon to create a story and game based on photosynthesis and the carbon cycle.

“The interesting thing for me was the imagination of kids—could they convert subjects into stories and games?” Stolyarik said. “They can totally do it, and create fantastic and interesting narratives about science, something that is not easily played in a game setting.”

Stolyarik and Magalnick have been working on the RealityNext concept since last June, when they set up shop at the University of Washington’s CoMotion Labs. Stolyarik, 43, worked in the finance sector as CEO of a Moscow-based institution in the late 2000s and later founded a land-development education program that he said serves as the original model of the RealityNext program. Magalnick, 46, spent 12 years as editor-in-chief of a community media company, which he says is perfect for implementing the storytelling aspects of the RealityNext concept.

As Stolyarik and Magalnick began working together, both saw an opportunity to “change the way kids can interact with each other by teaching peer to peer,” Magalnick said, “but at the same time putting them into a safe environment that encourages teamwork.”

The release of RealityNext’s first game comes at a time when adoption of virtual reality is on the rise. Given the high costs of entry, however—a headset and computer powerful enough to handle the intense graphics and data load of a VR experience runs $1,500 to $2,000—home-based adoption has not been as robust as industry leaders have hoped, according to Venture Beat. The entertainment magazine Variety reported in July that film companies, IMAX in particular, have begun investing in VR arcades to supplement their theatrical releases.

RealityNext’s goal, according to Stolyarik, is to open locations where teen can come, whether for afterschool programs, summer camps, or as school groups, to create their stories and games in what he called a “Maker Lab” over the course of two or three sessions. The other goal, he said, “is to put the workshops, which these kids did in an open space, entirely into VR so they can choose their characters, backgrounds and objects to manipulate while they make their stories.”

With the kids broken into three groups to act out their stories, Shadow Motion’s Tokheim affixed sensors to the arms, legs, head and midsection on half the group to digitally record each person’s movements, then had them switch places. He said he was impressed with how the students took to the acting process.

“That’s kind of an advanced thing to be able to pretend to act with somebody who’s wearing the motion capture suit and someone who’s not,” Tokheim said. “The kids adjusted to that naturally.”

Gelon, the software developer, collected the motion-capture recordings, the students’ storyboards, and samples of background images. He overlaid virtual skins onto the recorded performances—in raw form skeletons on a grid background—which, in the final release, became five related stories accessed from a space-age virtual classroom.

“I liked how you made it something I would not have expected it to be,” Vichette, the 9th-grade student, told Gelon. “I think you did really good with the surrounding environment it was in.”

“I tried to bridge that gap between ‘this is cool, this is new, this is realistic,’ but also, ‘this is a kid’s storytelling device,’” Gelon responded.

Vlad Postel, a project manager at Microsoft who attended the game launch event, said he enjoyed how the teens enjoyed the experience they created. “I love the fact the kids were really making something from zero to 100, and it was interesting to see how they built it,” Postel said. “The end result was pretty impressive.”

See a video rendering of the completed story-game.

Watch a 360º video of one of the student groups’ stories (best viewed on a mobile device).

Download RealityNext’s first story-game (for HTC Vive).