This is the 26th & last episode of my Venice Immersive 2022 coverage, and I wanted to end with this discussion amongst film and immersive critics about the various challenges for reviewing and critiquing immersive art and entertainment. This is a continuation of two previous conversations that I also participated in during Venice Immersive 2019 (I hope to air the recordings of those here soon), and the major conclusion back then was that the challenges of the limited distribution of immersive stories makes it difficult to cultivate a broader audience for reviews and critiques.

Fast forward to 2022, and many of these distribution challenges by and large still exist, although it is slightly better given more immersive stories showing up on the Meta platform and Viveport has the most robust selection of immersive stories, even though Steam still is largely games only. But the challenge for immersive festivals is that they’re still having many challenges trying to attract the mainstream film critics to pay more attention to the selection of immersive stories.

It’s under this context that there was another gathering of mostly film critics who occasionally write about immersive work and myself who is solely dedicated to covering immersive stories, immersive art, and immersive entertainment.

Moderated by Michel Reilhac & Liz Rosenthal (co-curators of Venice Immersive)

Federica Polidoro (Contributor, Repubblica, L’Espresso, Vanity Fair, Il Foglio Quotidiano)

Kent Bye (Philosopher and Founder, Voices of VR Podcast)

Róisín Tapponi (Contributor, Frieze Magazine, Sight & Sound, The Guardian, & Founder of Habibi Collective and Shasha Movies)

Xan Brooks (Film writer & novelist, former associate editor at The Guardian)

A big takeaway for me is that the editors...