There’s a problem a lot of interactive immersive shows have. How do you square the circle of:
a) guests want to feel competent or, if they make a mistake, like they weren’t just ignorant.
b) guests want to enter another world unlike our own.
It’s hard. Within the Come Bargain trilogy, there are seven types of Uncanny Thing (supernatural beings) which guests might want to summon, and that’s just a small part of our specialised world of invoking, bargaining, offering, and the wyrd. How do we do it?
The world is like this one, but…
Guests at an interactive immersive show will always come from our reality. Therefore the closer your norms are to it, the easier life will be.
In Le Guin’s The Day Before The Revolution, she describes a sci-fi anarchist community where people freely choose not to wear clothes. Sci-fi interactive immersive shows would frown upon this as an audience choice. Other norms of language (English), culture (we do not share cups when we drink), knowledge (we know more of fascism than of Shinto), and so on are similarly usually kept the same.
In Come Bargain shows, the world is “ours, but with uncanny things”. Human society looks more or less the same. We reinforce this with design - yes, there are warning posters about Uncanny Things, but they look like warning posters you see every day reminding you to wash your hands, or look out for pickpockets. The design says “welcome to this world. There’s weird stuff in it, but it feels normal.”
This applies similarly to specific knowledge to confidently navigate the world.
How little knowledge can you get away with?
That paragraph above starting “It’s hard” contains almost every word with an unusual meaning we use during the show. That’s a deliberately small list.
You’ll notice that almost all of them have an obvious meaning. ‘Offering’ means ‘giving a gift to a supernatural being’. ‘Bargaining’ means ‘making a deal (with a supernatural being)’. The wyrd is a harder word, but we use it often in the first fifteen minutes of the show to make its meaning clear.
‘Wyrd’ means ‘all the weird stuff in this world - supernatural creatures and phenomena’. It’s a loose, catch-all term that guests can use (and feel clever), but also one that doesn’t need much definition.
The challenge comes with those seven types of Uncanny Thing. Guests need to use that knowledge - is it better to get a bastion or a hellkin? - so how do you help, beyond instructional posters?
Make the weird familiar (navigation by vibes)
All seven types of Uncanny Thing are well-established archetypes, and the clue’s usually in the name.
Fey are similar to fey, tricksters in the tradition of sprites and so on. Hellkin are like devils, bastions like angels. Primordials are slow elemental spirits, kelpies a force of violence, and boatmen are psychopomps, like Charon punting across the Styx. Even the invented-by-me Nachkinder are quickly sketched out as ‘flickering, nervous beings that have a clear sense of the future’. All of them have clear information cards - punchy, catchy summaries of what they are, what they’re good at, and how they’re a problem to deal with.
There’s a vocabulary guests can pick up, but it feels familiar. Backstage, we don’t have strict definitions of what each Uncanny Thing can do - yes, the way they respond to commands is distinct, but the delineation between them is similarly focused on archetype and feeling rather than strict mathematics and rules.
The point is not for a guest to feel they’ve mastered it after coming a second time (or, in the case of some Punchdrunk shows, a dozen times). They need to come in and have a good time straight away.
Make it teachable
An iconic moment of interactive immersive theatre (for me) is watching people learn economic theory during Crisis? What Crisis? They’ve come to play as a collapsing Labour government, decided to help run the economy, and an actor-facilitator (usually Zoe Flint) has to explain how inflation works, and what makes it go up and down.
It was, as a 20-something year old, the first time I ever felt I truly understood the concept. The explanation was short, characterful, and enough to work with. It then got deeper as the show went on.
If you first encounter fey, hellkin, and bastion, then you can learn ‘all these things are archetypes’. Then you can meet kelpies, primordials, and nachkinder happily, while awaiting the arrival of a boatman.
Also, there’s a performer on-hand who can explain the concepts quickly, flavourfully, and clearly if needed.
Finally
Don’t let there be right answers.
By having loose definitions, there’s a lot of room for guests to say “we want to set something on fire, and we could use a hellkin or primordial, but what happens if we use a bastion?” The Uncanny Thing-facilitator can then shift it to a purging, righteous flame, and the guests’ ingenuity is easily rewarded. There’s not a wrong answer, just as in our own world.
I’ve seen shows with strict tracks where unexpected answers at minimum throw a spanner in the works, and at worst forcibly limit guest creativity. This is an especial curse of mystery-based shows, where there must be a right answer for the mystery to work…
The answer there is probably character-driven, but for now, I hope that’s an insight into the ways you’ll get to meet an entirely new world of supernatural beings, strange deals, and not too much strange vocabulary.
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