Yeah! Stupid audience! Expecting us to tell you a story instead of you just looking at all the information in no particular order and making your own narrative! What are you, babies!?
A theatre could be any shape. So why, for over a thousand years of people experimenting, have we consistently gone back to putting the actors in a small area around the middle/front while the Audience sit around that place, when we could easily sit the audience in the middle and have the action taking place all over around them? You don't need VR to do this. You could do it in Shakespeare's Globe Theatre easily by having all the viewers in the central pit and instead of having seating around in a circle, instead having a bunch of small stages surrounding them that you have the actors doing stuff on.
PFF yeah, what the hell, Shakespeare? Dumbing down your audience by having people walk onto this little stage in the middle of the room and announce each other's names loudly all the time. Not to mention holding up a dagger and saying "Oh happy dagger!" Like we can't see it's a dagger. What, do you think we're morons, Shakespeare? Oh and let's not forget how Hermia and Helena one of them is tall and blonde and the other is short and dark and they talk about how one of them is tall and blonde and the other is short and dark on multiple occasions just in case the stupid audience forgets which is Hermia and which is Helena. Have some faith in your audience, William!
...But back to the matter at hand. People have tried this stuff, and here's the crux of it:
A bunch of stuff going on and you can look at whatever you like because none of it is drawn to your attention as having particular importance is an experience, but it's not a narrative. The person experiencing may spin a narrative from it (in games writing we call this an "emergent narrative"), or try to interpret it, but they have not been directed by authorial intent towards any particular conclusion.
Stuff happening where you are directed to certain details told in sequence in a way that deliberately highlights links between those events is a narrative.
I can't tell a tight narrative while knowing that my audience may just choose to ignore key elements of it or might just miss them by looking the wrong way. Curating a sequence of events and interactions, though cutting, emphasising or diminishing certain elements, so that they can see how those events relate to each to tell a story about something that happened that had an interesting effect IS narrative. You can't just surround your audience with a bunch of stuff all happening at once and then hope they create a coherent narrative about it themselves. Your audience aren't the writers; you're the writer, it's your job to show them where the story is and to make a statement about something through what you draw their attention to.
And the easiest way to draw somebody's attention to the important elements you're putting in sequence to drive at a specific point is to put them all in one place where the people are looking. You are showing them a sequence of things that relate to each other. Cutting between scenes, flashbacks, closeups on important props, the way people are arranged in a space, these are all not real things; they're storytelling techniques.
This is pretty much the reason that it's arguably impossible to write a post-modern novel or to make a post-modern movie. Novels and movies are inherently Modernist formats; they follow a clear, linear narrative structure based on the modernist belief that the world can be made clear and tidy and understandable through scientific truths we can all agree on. Post modernism goes "yeah no, all that is fake, there's no greater meaning or cosmic order. Life is messy and when you make it ordery, it's fake". If you've ever tried to read attempts at post-modern novels, you'll know they're absolutely exhausting (I did an entire module on them when I did my English lit degree...aaaaaghhhh). It's just a bunch of random stuff with no order on pages and you just sort of have to draw your own conclusions. Interesting for academic study, though still arguably not post-modern since it's still curated by being in the linear format of words on a page and curated by that order and what is there or not there, but you wouldn't read it on a bus or the beach, and you could argue that putting all the onus of understanding a text onto the reader, that the writer is being kind of a lazy, useless person who could just be replaced by a computer that flings out random sentences.
Like yeah, if you've had it drawn to your attention that a technique is in use, of course you're going to notice it. I can't enjoy the movie "Paddington" because all I can see is it crossing off beats from the Save the Cat! beat sheet without paying attention to the fact that those beats don't relate to the actual protagonist of the story (It's the dad) because they want to make the bear the main character even though he's completely static. But loads of people LOVE that movie, and I don't hold it against them; it's very cute and has some really funny jokes. I don't think they're stupid for having studied like... law or how to analyse DNA or something instead of how to analyse stories like I did.
Nobody is clever for pointing out that the actors are actually standing on a stage and saying it's a battlefield rather than being on an actual battlefield. OH DAMN, did you ever notice how in a novel, characters who aren't important to a scene aren't in a scene, even if realistically they would be in that room because it'd make sense with the time of day and what the characters are doing? It's like the writer can't even trust me to believe that the person is in that room but isn't paying attention to that particular conversation, or thinks I'm stupid and will get distracted by being told that actually while Mr Darcy and Elizabeth are talking there are several servants all bustling around in the background because realistically there would be!
What I'm saying is, making the action easy to follow by keeping these simple elements clear, even if it involves using unrealistic elements of organising people in space or having people never talk over each other or ramble on random unrelated tangents when conversing, is good storytelling practice and allows a writer to tell a coherent narrative about complex stuff, and people have been doing it for like 2000+ years. I don't think my readers are stupid, I just don't think it's worth making the basic stuff confusing or that I'm such a genius artiste autour that I should expect my audience to spend ages puzzling out what on earth is going on in my pages.
