The New Yorker’s Sam Wolson on interactive storytelling about a mother and her trans teenager leaving the U.S.

I'm a parent and I think there's something universal to the story about just asking … what would you do for your kids? If this is the decision that you have decided to make and you think it's the right choice for your family. There was something really resonant to me with that. 

I've also moved countries many times throughout my career and my life for various reasons, and I know what it means to pick up your life and to move to a new country. It's really hard, and the thing is I've never had to do that out of fear. I've done it out of professional and personal choice. So it encapsulated a lot of these questions — also in the context of this bigger immigration moment that we're in, where you have people being picked [up] off the street, this huge shift in immigration policy for the country. You have this family who's decided to give up on the United States in the context of so many people trying to come here. And this kind of turning on its head, in a way, felt really important.

Constraints … are sort of the mother of invention in some ways. It's like that's where the creativity happens, is when you start having boundaries put in place. So yeah, I think the anonymity of the piece really did help define where we ended up with it.

When I got there, her garden, for instance, was just beautiful and in bloom, and [I] quickly realized in my head that this could be an incredible sort of visual metaphor or way to potentially string together various parts of the piece, right? So I spent a lot of time in the garden.

I spent a lot of time in [the teenager] J.J.'s room interviewing them and talking to them and looking at their things and throughout the house and trying to find the place … where certain conversations happened, so capturing those rooms and then coming back, figuring out how to use those things, process those things, and then sort of weaving it all together.

When you finally bring all those pieces together, then you have to actually work with an engineer to Frankenstein this thing to life, right? Because you can have an idea of the mockups and how things move and how it comes together, but the engineer is the person who breathes life into it. And it's really an artistic process for the engineer as well, because there's interpretation in what they're doing. So then you go from there, to the engineering, and then sort of refining the story and editing and trimming until you end up with the final piece.

 When I heard what they were doing, it just checked all of the boxes for me in terms of something that I think would be valuable as an interactive project. This is a story, subject matter-wise, [that's] important and worth spending the time on.

The space is really important to it. We're moving across multiple scenes where things happen with multiple perspectives. They had tons of forensic photographs, government documents. 

They talked about a lot of reconstructing what happened that day … through the testimonies and statements of people who were there. But you might have a Marine who was there who said, like, “Oh, in this room, I didn't see what happened. I just stuck my gun in the room and I just fired around because we thought there were terrorists.” And then you might have another Marine who was like, “No, no, no, we all saw what was going on. But it was smoky in there and we couldn't see.” And then that same Marine a month later might be like, “Actually I saw women and children and I shot them because women and children can hurt you too.” And then you might actually have an Iraqi survivor in that same room who gives you a different perspective of what happened. And it kind of reminded me — going back to my film career — thinking about films like “Rashomon,” where this film is grappling with all these different perspectives of an event. … 

I think bringing that idea into a journalism space felt really interesting. And at the core of each of these was a series of conflicting testimonies. So this was the seed for me of something that felt like a really fruitful, interactive idea.

Where this becomes a more complicated question is in a project like “Reeducated,” which uses virtual reality as its medium. It's more complicated because when you put on a virtual reality headset, it makes you feel present in a space. It makes you feel like you're literally standing or sitting or existing in a space, right? In a way that when you're reading something, there's some kind of abstraction there. It's like using imagination or you're looking at a screen and it can be really engaging and really draw you in. But it's different than physically mimicking you feeling like you're inside of an environment, right? 

And when that happens as a storyteller, you do have to start to think, OK, I'm making someone feel like they're in this space. Who are they in this space? Are they part of the world? Are they an omnipotent, disembodied viewer? Do you want to implicate them in some way? So those questions become more complicated.