Austenland is an immersive experience where guests role play as the heroine of their “very own Jane Austen story”. For three weeks, they enjoy Regency-era pastimes like sewing, whist, and horseback riding at a large manor house, while surrounded by professional actors playing potential romantic interests. Each stay concludes with a grand ball in which a “happily ever after” ending is guaranteed.

It wasn’t possible for me to participate as a guest, but when I learned that a documentary was being filmed at Austenland, I prevailed upon proprietor Mrs. Wattlesbrook to allow me to tag along and observe; apparently she hoped for a good writeup.

I first became aware of Austenland from its international marketing campaign, which highlights its sumptuous setting and costumes and vast number of performers. Smartly, it’s laser-targeted at a specific kind of guest – not “the casual Jane Austen fan”, as Mrs. Wattlesbrook puts it, but the “aficionado” who admires the style and manners of the Regency era and has “consuming love for Mr. Darcy”. 

This is essential because though Austenland is not, as it claims, “the world’s only immersive Austen experience”, it is by far one of the most expensive immersive experiences in existence. The company refused to share full pricing details but one guest I spoke to said they spent their “entire life savings” to attend, leading me to estimate it’s at least £20,000 (i.e. around $30,000).

Far be it from me to justify their pricing, but given the manor has several professional actors on hand, dozens of staff, and activities including enormous feasts, private theatricals, and costumed balls, the cost starts making more sense – especially given that during my visit, I saw only three guests. Indeed, the per-night cost of around £1000 compares favourably to Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, which lands around double that figure.

Then again, some guests pay much more. Austenland operates a highly stratified pricing model, starting at the £20,000 Basic Copper package and rising to Platinum Elite, which I’m guessing closes in on six figures (shades of the K-shaped economy). Some of the differences are obvious: Copper guests are excluded from a few activities and are given smaller bedrooms in a less salubrious wing of the manor.

Others are more subtle. Unlike larps where players create their own characters, Austenland betrays its Finnish larp design tendencies by assigning each guest a character name (e.g. Miss Elizabeth Charming, Miss Jane Erstwhile, etc.), complete with backstory and relationships. Where Platinum guests play rich heiresses, a Copper guest might be “an orphan of no fortune”. As any larper knows, this is not necessarily a recipe for disappointment; orphans can have agency and adventure, too. However, the classist and choreographed world of Austenland makes this rather harder.

Nevertheless, all guests are guaranteed romance with an actor. Supposedly no touching is allowed “other than the necessary social graces” such as during dances, but it is probably not surprising that I saw all three guests pulverising the rule multiple times. Clearly it’s hard to deny paying customers.

Guests are required to stay in character and maintain appropriate manners and conversation during their stay. Crucially, all technology including phones is banned. While this, along with the period hair styles, costumes, and horse-drawn carriages, is framed as a way to preserve guests’ “complete immersion in the Regency era”, phone bans are in keeping with a wider trend across immersive experiences and clubs; the idea is to keep guests in the moment by reducing distractions. As soon as you introduce cameras and social media, the theory goes, people start performing not for themselves or one another, but for an unseen audience – or worse, they get self-conscious.

I was dismayed, however, at Austenland’s complete lack of workshops during onboarding. Frequent readers are probably tired of my evangelism for Nordic larp’s practice of mandatory workshops in how to move, talk, and role play – not unlike warmup exercises for stage actors – but Austenland really has no excuse. I can understand why a comparatively brief immersive theatre show might balk at them, but surely a three-week experience can find time to help guests get into character? Early on during my visit, I overheard one guest confess, “I thought I’d come here and be a total pro at this,” but it turned out active role play is very different from passively reading or watching Jane Austen stories. Certainly, teaching guests D&D and larp-style metatechniques to modulate the intensity of encounters, not to mention intimacy replacement actions, would have prevented more than a few mishaps I witnessed.

Absent workshops, Austenland’s hardworking actors bear the brunt of ensuring role play goes smoothly; I’m told they sign six “proper behaviour agreements”. For the most part, I found their performances quite impressive, staying in character persistently despite some guest’s attempts to break them. 

Since the experience is so reliant on them, it’s fitting that they have lots of downtime and their own dedicated pool and barbecue area. I don’t know how much they’re paid, but they certainly have bargaining power given that some guests return specifically for them.

The one exception, unfortunately, was Mrs. Wattlesbrook herself, who plays the lady of the manor. In my experience, it’s very rare for directors or designers to perform in their own productions. Perhaps it can work for well-oiled machines where guests have little agency or if they’re popping in for brief cameos, but usually there’s too much going on that deserves their attention. That’s why, in blockbuster larps and overnight experiences like The Key of Dreams, the main staff are safely ensconced in private “mission control” areas.

Guests struggled to separate her character – which shared her real name, a sure sign of concern – from her real life identity. No doubt Mrs. Wattlesbrook thought this was useful as a way to cement her authority within the fiction, but it meant guests didn’t feel able to push back at things that made them uncomfortable, like rude behaviour. One guest was pressured into playing the piano, which did not go well at all.

Thankfully, other activities were more pleasant. Horseback riding, whist, sewing, and croquet allowed everyone to get outside and pursue their romances. Some activities were wildly anachronistic, contradicting Austenland’s commitment to historical accuracy – women of this era would never go pheasant shooting – but guests seemed perfectly happy. As sociologists like Edward M. Bruner and Ning Wang (PDF) have noted, tourists are willing to accept “staged authenticity” providing that it’s fun. 

Spread out over three weeks, however, even the most die-hard guests tired of sewing, and Austenland lacked the kind of interpersonal dynamics and plotting that could have allowed guests to entertain themselves through deeper role play. This was less of a problem for returning guests who maintained stories and relationships between visits, but it wasn’t until the handsome “Captain George East” from the West Indies arrived halfway through that the drama finally amped up. 

It was also at this point that I noticed one guest, tiring of her pre-written orphan character, proclaim, “I’m going to take charge of my story!” What ensued was a masterclass of co-creation in action: she modified her costumes and seized agency in the story by enlisting another guest, turning herself into the main character of her own story, just as an experienced larper might. In particular, the play-within-a-play private theatrical gave her the alibi to act more adventurously than in real life. 

The culmination of Austenland is a spectacular costumed ball with hundreds of attendees. I’m not quite sure how the organisers arranged this – were they all paid extras, or just friends and family coming along for a free party? – but in any case, the three guests were wholly occupied by their assigned romantic partners. In a faintly ridiculous piece of choreography, all three were proposed to simultaneously. 

Unfortunately, both Austenland’s guests and staff lacked the vocabulary to talk about these very serious matters. “I don’t know what’s real or what not any more,” was a frequent refrain, along with “don’t you think it’s possible to confuse truth with fantasy?” Well-designed larps that deal with intimacy maintain clear boundaries between in and out-of-game scenes, and usually have extended debriefs to help players come out of character and return to their normal lives. Even Richard Schechner’s environmental theatre in the late 60s had to bring in professional therapists. Not so in Austenland, or, indeed, most modern immersive theatre. 

Happily ever after? Not quite. My visit to Austenland concluded with the ball, but I understand one guest felt deceived and manipulated by the organisers. In essence, they thought their romance with a “behind the scenes” staff member was real, when in fact it was scripted from the start. No doubt Mrs. Wattlesbrook would reject these claims since romance was guaranteed upfront, but this guest understandably assumed this would happen very much within the fiction. 

Not along after my visit, Austenland was acquired by a wealthy American superfan. To be honest, its days were numbered no matter what; I had heard rumours of drunken performers and even assaults. Today, the manor is home to a successful, albeit more traditional, theme park, packed with funfair rides, rollercoasters, and shops.

It’s safe and welcoming, but something has been lost, too. Social interaction is no longer at the heart of the new Austenland. A visit there is free of the risks of role play – and their rewards.  

I’ve been working on the book more or less full time for the last two years, and in my spare time for around a year prior to that. Here’s what my day looked like:

• 9am: Sit down at computer, do emails, check RSS feeds
• 9:30am: Work
• 10:45am: Go for a swim or a run
• 12pm: Work
• 12:45pm: Lunch, then a walk
• 2pm: Work
• 3:45pm: Snack
• 4pm: Work
• 4:45pm: Snack 2.0
• 5pm: Work
• 6:30pm: Make dinner, watch TV or a film
• 9:30pm: Work
• 11:30pm: Get ready for bed

I did this pretty much every day, and also worked a few hours every Saturday and Sunday too.

Now, while I’m working, I am doing other stuff too, like checking my email and RSS feeds and chatting online. Sometimes this can eat up a bunch of time but usually not too much.

At the start of the research phase, I had a reading list of around one hundred books on installation art, medieval tournaments, pilgrimages, D&D, Happenings, Nordic Larp, panoramas, film history, environmental theatre, waxworks, virtual reality, theme parks, world’s fairs, things of that nature. I tried to get most as ebooks or PDFs so I could do full-text search on them, but this wasn’t possible for rarer texts.

Every time I finished a book, I created a new Apple Notes file. I reviewed every passage I’d highlighted or made notes on (ranging from a handful to a hundred), then summarised its ideas in a series of nested bullet points. After that, I reviewed the bullet points and summarised them again at top of the file. My goal was to assemble a collection of files that I could easily scan through on every topic I was interested in. No AI was involved in this process.

Inevitably I added more books to my reading list as I went along. I don’t have an exact count since some that relevant and I didn’t bother recording them, but I probably read two to three hundred books in total, most of them cover to cover. I also read a few hundred papers, conducted formal interviews with dozens of people, investigated primary documents, visited historic and modern sites, etc.

My files were very useful in assembling a highly detailed outline for my book proposal and the book itself, but unsurprisingly I ended up consulting all the original sources again to double-check things or answer new questions. On a good day, I could write a thousand words, though often I’d edit that down a fair bit. Sometimes I had to take a break from writing for a few days to read extra books on an unexpected new topic.

Around a third of the way into the manuscript, I decided to start putting references in as I went, since I remembered it was a huge pain doing so after the fact with my previous book. I used Zotero as my citation manager, which synced nicely with Google Docs – until my manuscript got too long. I realised that Zotero’s sync was doing way too many network calls which was putting a strain on my laptop’s weak wifi connection, so I installed Cat6 ethernet across the house largely to speed this up (which it did!). Right now, my manuscript has 992 references from around 700 or so individual sources. Maybe I’ll get to one thousand!

All of that said, the book is definitely not finished yet. There’s plenty of rewrites and editing to come! But this is the beginning of the end, I think. And to celebrate, I have a new immersive experience review coming soon!

If you’re at all interested in larp and immersive experiences and can afford an €850 ticket, you owe it to yourself to check it out. I don’t know of any other team with the skills and experience to pull off this scale of project. They’re very smart and ethical people and I very much hope they succeed.

I know I’ve pledged for my tickets!

From my post last year:

[In 2024] hundreds of players inhabited a spaceship on the run, scrambling to keep one step ahead of the enemy. The sci-fi larp Odysseus was inspired by Battlestar Galactica’s “33“, but where that episode only lasted 45 minutes, Odysseus’ players worked, fought, ate, and slept in-game for fifty non-stop hours.

Odysseus is widely recognised as one of the most accomplished larps (live action role playing games) of all time and is the subject of an exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Games. Originally mounted in 2019 for three sold out runs, Odysseus returned in 2024 for another three runs. Over two hundred volunteers worked on the larp, using €190,000 to transform an elementary school into a sprawling spaceship complete with mess hall, bar, ops room, science and medical bays, jail, and hangar.

The gameplay and story design was equally ambitious. Custom open source software was written to power Odysseus’ combat and engineering hyperdrive jumps, RFID-scanners, internal message board, and livestreaming drone videos for away missions. Every player character was unique, supported by over 300 NPCs, their activities as doctors, criminals, soldiers, fighter pilots, terrorists, and politicians meshed in intricate “clockwork” gameplay. Where the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser’s story was hopeful and life-affirming, Odysseus’ mixed grief with joy, anger with determination, and its plot raised the spectre of genocide. It was demanding and adult. Participants had to role-play specific characters with lengthy backstories and numerous relationships.

Header image courtesy Tuomas Puikkonen.

I’ve been quiet for the past few months because I’m heads-down writing my book about the history of immersive experiences. It’s going well! Trying to re-interpret the last thousand years of art and culture and entertainment through the lens of “immersion” isn’t the easiest thing to do, but I’m genuinely enjoying it and now that I’ve finally reached the 1980s, I think my broad scope is really starting to pay off. But that’s not what this post is about, because…

I’m running a Jubensha Convention in London on 8-9th May next year!

Play jubensha, learn how it’s made, and meet designers from Suspense Studios (KMS Games), Chronic Insanity, and the people behind Spy of the Year! It’s probably the world’s first English-language jubensha convention. If you think otherwise, let me know so I can stop telling people it is.

It won’t be fancy, but we’ll have most of a floor in the lovely and very central Theatre Deli. My goal is to help grow the English-language jubensha scene and get cool people to meet each other.

If you were intrigued by my post on what makes the phenomonally popular Chinese “scripted murder” format different to murder mysteries, larp, and escape rooms and my interview with the co-creator of the first original English-language jubensha, then this convention is for you.

Even better, tickets will be around £15!

Sign up for updates (and so I know how many people will come!)

The Ladder is an absurdist escape room from Hatch Escapes about a life spent climbing the corporate ladder. Your team plays an employee at the Nutricorp megacorporation, starting in the mail room in the 1950s and ending in a corner office in the high-tech 90s, with your appropriately-named colleague Stab Backner always one step ahead.

Despite their popularity, I don’t go to all that many escape rooms for all the usual reasons – cost, co-ordination, travel time, logistics, and so on – so I can’t tell how unique The Ladder truly is. From what I understand, it’s not that unusual to have multiple rooms, an hour-plus duration, good storytelling, Disney-level production quality, or even Hollywood actors. 

What is unusual is seeing all of those things in a single space, especially with this level of replayability and madcap humour, which I assume is why it won a Thea award this year, in the “Attraction, Limited Budget” category (The Ladder cost over $1 million to make, which really tells you something about budget sizes in the themed entertainment industry). 

It’s also refreshing that The Ladder isn’t based on an existing IP or brand, nor is it part of a chain. It doesn’t even involve the usual tropes of murder, fantasy, or sci-fi. Instead, it delights in the bizarre theatricality of work in a ruthless company, an escape room version of the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy.

We began in the office toilets. The mirrors transformed into screens, and Stab Backner (played by Jordan Belfi) welcomed us to Nutricorp in a delightfully nasty performance. We chose an avatar to represent our team by turning the sink taps, and then we were off to our first job in the mailroom. Since this was the 1950s, the room was painted entirely in grey.

Right after doing Stab a favour, an entire wall-sized pneumatic tube apparatus tumbled to pieces on the floor, requiring reassembly. Across the room was a grid of cubbyholes awaiting the parcels stacked on the floor, their destinations determined by a simple physical rotation task. A third wall held drawers whose purpose I never cottoned onto, and I think there was yet another task I’m forgetting to do with letters.

These tasks were all classified as “games”. Progression in the games earn teams money and determine whether their company will be successful. Because some of the games are endless and others are extremely difficult to finish, you earn money based on your incremental progress, which makes the whole thing feel much fairer.

Each room also includes a “puzzle” track. These are more like traditional escape room puzzles involving codes, deduction, logic, observation, and all the rest; the mail room’s puzzle track required two people to decipher instructions and flip light switches. 

This embarrassment of riches is why The Ladder strongly recommends teams of six to ten players, with at least three people tackling the puzzle track and the remainder split among as many games as they can handle. Since we were only five, we had to make do with two players on the puzzles, one of whom was me. I’m not sure I’d agree that the puzzles were “very tough” as their website claims, but I have the suspicion we were helped along our way – not just by our host appearing as a janitor occasionally to dole out hints in-character (they do this for everyone) – but with a few extra minutes here and there. After all, the time pressure is what really makes The Ladder tough: only 15 minutes per room. 

Since there’s little time to waste, The Ladder does the very unusual thing of clearly and non-diegetically signposting instructions for each game, along with the start point of each puzzle track. What’s lost in immersion is gained in comprehension, and I wish more escape rooms would follow suit. When you think of them as tooltips or contextual help in a video game, it all seems so obvious.

Whenever we completed a puzzle track, a voiceover or a video would play about a conspiracy and whistleblower inside Nutricorp. This invariably happened right before our time was up, at which point the lights dimmed, we saw our performance review, and a character invited us to make an ethical or personal decision by twisting a doorknob left or right, or similar. These came with strings attached: choosing to do good might provide a time and/or score penalty on the next room, while your choice in your avatar’s marriage partner provided unique bonuses – RPG mechanics crossed with The Game of Life.

The 60s moved us into the secretarial pool. This was dominated by an irresistibly tactile switchboard game involving an audio version of Memory: callers would ask to be connected to increasingly bizarre people, and players would remember or call out candidates to each other (e.g. “1015 wants the garage!” “Oh, I think that was 3027”). Another game was Boggle in the form of filing cabinets.

There were probably others but I was completely occupied with the puzzle track, which was contained entirely with a cupboard. Essentially the goal was to discover four different numbers through a series of pretty decent logic puzzles, and connect them on the switchboard. Solving it led to a spectacular flourish that continued the whistleblower story where an entire wall lifted up to reveal a parked car. It makes sense in the story!

By the 70s, we’d reached middle management. The room was bursting with character, one corner holding a mini-cocktail bar with some kind of drinking game that none of us played, another with a barcode-powered Guess Who? game, and a combination putting green/skeeball threading between the two.

Despite a hint from the janitor I abjectly failed to solve the puzzle here, related to identifying the whistleblower (I think). 

In the next room, Stab welcomed us to the information age. The time for fun and games was over, he intoned – then all the screens flickered to life with spins on classic 80s arcade games like Donkey Kong (“Bossy Kong”) and Robotron. 

While I found this to be the weakest room in terms of gameplay – I can play arcade games at home – the story, which felt a little thin earlier on, was now in full swing. Nutricorp was up to no good, we were juggling loyalties between the FBI and a whistleblower, and Stab had become a deliciously malevolent villain. To be fair, the other non-arcade games may have been more fun, which appeared to involve connecting cables between different types of computer ports in the ceiling.

There was even a computer terminal in this room we used to manipulate the metagame itself, entering codes for bonuses and spending money to shortcut the puzzle and unlock a secret room. I won’t spoil it other than to say it was very much worth the effort.

Finally, the 90s. Stab had become CEO at Nutricorp, while we’d been poached to run rival megacorporation Vitamind. There were no puzzles left to solve – our battle against Stab was now waged through a Spaceteam-style co-operative game: each player manned a station controlling different aspects of Vitamind’s operations (e.g. knobs to set advertising spending, switches to manufacture products, etc.). Stations also had a little display showing commands, but crucially those commands were for operations on other stations, so everyone was continually yelling, “Change neckties to plaid!” or “Set password policies to lowercase only!”

The onboarding for this room was lacking, however. “Is this Spaceteam?” I asked, upon inspecting one station. I wasn’t sure, because the instructions seemed to suggest a completely different single-player game of hitting flashing buttons – and maybe it was, to begin with. But a few minutes later, as I was debating this with a teammate, a voice from the escape room host confirmed, “Yes, it is Spaceteam.” 

Since everyone had played Spaceteam before, we did fine and had lots of fun. But what if we hadn’t played before? There might’ve been instructions somewhere, but I missed them. Maybe our problem was that we were only five players and there were so many stations and switches it wasn’t at all clear that the commands we were seeing actually corresponded to things someone else could do rather than being part of another puzzle. When I mentioned this to another escape room designer, he suggested directly assigning players to stations, spelling out the game rules, and starting with a more limited selection of commands and controls. No doubt the janitor would’ve stepped in if we remained confused, but that’s not ideal.

Of course, we triumphed over Stab. Even better, we’d earned over a million dollars during our career, meaning our team’s company was officially a success. Coupled with our High Road ethical choices and our puzzle successes, we unlocked the Messiah ending, told through a gut-bustingly funny epilogue that dove head-first into absurdity, leaving us on an absolute high.

The Ladder is an incredibly polished production. For all its complexity, I didn’t spot a single technical issue or rough edge. All the games and puzzles instantly registered success or failure without a moment of lag. Even with a million dollar budget, that’s deeply impressive.

But I’m more interested in how The Ladder is explicitly designed for replayability. The vast majority of escape rooms can be completed in a single session; exceptions like Doors of Divergence are rare. Even if there are different combinations of puzzles available, the story rarely changes based on player choice. I don’t want to exaggerate the depth of agency in The Ladder – it’s not like you get entirely different rooms based on your choices – but I’m curious enough to play at least one more time. And of course, I’d actually get to play the games rather than the puzzles.

Replayability is a direct answer to the biggest challenge in the escape room business, which is that unlike bars or restaurants or shops, your happiest customers have zero incentive to return. Even if you have multiple escape rooms, eventually they’ll burn through all of them.

Because replayability is so rare, The Ladder goes to great lengths to educate players that this is even an option. One side of our score card highlighted every decision we made and all the ones we didn’t, along with the eight endings left unseen. The flowchart on the other side showed how to achieve them:

The card also came with a 20% off rebooking code, tips for return visits, and a special secret code to enter on the 1980s computer terminal. In fact, since one of our team had played before, we’d already selected a New Game Plus-style “nepo-baby” avatar with a 10% score bonus.

I am not enough of an escape room business expert to know how replayability pencils out. If physical space is at a premium (e.g. high rent rates) and you’re able to carefully plan and produce everything such that you can produce 2x the amount of gameplay for 1.5x the cost of a non-replayable room, maybe it makes sense. If space is much cheaper and you don’t want to be locked into a single story, it might not.

It also depends on your ability to market your experience. While gamers might appreciate replayability, I’m told that some escape room fans were frustrated by The Ladder because they couldn’t see everything in a single 90 minute session. But my hunch is that as escape rooms get longer and deeper, and frankly, better, and their technology and software stack keeps maturing, we’ll see more replayability because it’ll be easier to dynamically update their story and gameplay rather than build something entirely new. I know of at least one story-focused escape room with a much lower budget than The Ladder that’s designing a sequel playable in the same room as the original.

And this gets to what’s so interesting about the genre as a whole. Escape rooms are one of the few types of immersive experience that have their own widely-understood label. At the same time, experiences like The Ladder and And I Met E barely resemble traditional escape rooms any more. You aren’t escaping from anything; you aren’t even really solving anything. They’re more like “co-operative puzzle-solving under time pressure in a contained physical space”, which is dangerously and excitingly vague. Maybe this hazy distinction is why Bridge Command, an immersive theatre/spaceship simulator show, has to deal with players who assume it’s an escape room and expect it to adhere to the genre’s conventions. Is The Nest an escape room? Not really, but I can see why people think it is.

The Ladder is a fascinating expansion of what an escape room is, borrowing ideas as easily from role playing games as it does from cinema and theme parks. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t: for example, it never quite made sense to me that my team was collectively represented by a single unspeaking avatar. But its madcap satire of corporate America is an absolute joy and points toward just how much storytelling and gameplay potential remains in escape rooms.

I previously wrote about Hatch Escapes’ tabletop puzzle game Mother of Frankenstein: Volume One, which I found just as interesting as The Ladder, though less accomplished in its execution.

I also wrote about The Nest, a fantastic storytelling-focused immersive experience hosted at Hatch Escapes.

When the larp begins, all 150 players are in a base on Gliese 628A, one of seven candidate planets for colonisation. The three days take place in real time as the base initiates first contact with aliens. Like Arrival and Interstellar, twin inspirations for Italian creators Chaos League, it’s less about space battles and more about the self-destructiveness of humans and the nature of existence. These themes aren’t unusual in Nordic larp, which I’ve covered recently, but Chaos League follows the New Italian larp tradition, which favours top-down storytelling over player-driven plot, like Odysseus, a recent Battlestar Galactica-inspired larp. 

Both Eclipse and Odysseus are blockbuster or “international” larps, so big and ambitious they draw players from multiple countries. They also have spectacular settings, hiring entire castles for medieval or fantasy stories. Now that player are willing to spend more and production costs have dropped, it’s become possible to create convincing science fiction environments, too. In Eclipse, everyone gets their own 8” tablet loaded with fully customised software; everyone wears a jumpsuit that looks appropriately sci-fi; and 3D printed props and impeccably-designed banners and instruction manuals make you feel right at home in 2059. Something barely feasible just ten years ago can now be organised by volunteers. 

Even better, Eclipse takes place at Alvernia Planet, a massive network of concrete and glass domes spanning 13,000m². It looks like it’s ripped straight from the cover of Amazing Stories. Originally a film studio, it now hosts exhibitions and events, located just outside Krakow in Poland. Castles are plentiful, but Alvernia Planet is rare indeed.

Maybe this shouldn’t matter. Some long-time larpers are dismayed by the growth of expensive blockbusters, arguing they’re exclusionary distractions from the things that make larps distinctive: role play, relationships, dialogue, and gameplay, none of which require castles or domes. 

In blockbusters’ defence, visual and physical verisimilitude can be a scaffold for our imagination, easing our way into immersion. At the very least, it can be aesthetically pleasing, and it does wonders for marketing. I met someone brand new to larp who signed up for Eclipse just because they saw a photo of Chaos League’s Sahara Expedition, which really does take place in the Sahara. But the best argument for blockbusters is that they can be a gateway toward more affordable chamber and blackbox larps, not least because even blockbusters need to use their lo-fi techniques for more abstract and emotional gameplay. 

My journey has been in the opposite direction. The longest larps I’d played were a few hours at most, at The Smoke and Immersion festivals, in conference rooms and blackbox theatres. I enjoyed them a lot, but I was told you can get much more into character with longer larps. Eclipse would be my first multi-day “proper” larp, a test of how far the art form could go.

This is a detailed account of my time at Eclipse in May, on its first run in English and second overall.

Cost

A ticket to Eclipse starts at €680. Players are expected to dress suitably, and most opted for the official jumpsuits (€45 to rent, €95 to buy). Accommodation at a decent hotel was €165 for a double/triple room and €265 for a single room; players with subsidised tickets could sleep for free at Alvernia Planet with their own sleeping bag. All meals were included, all vegan. They were fine!

The total cost for most people – a standard ticket, jumpsuit rental, and accommodation – came to €890 ($1000 / £750). Not cheap, but you could easily spend the same on a nice European long weekend. Still, one experienced larper blanched when I told her the price. 

All four remaining runs of Eclipse in 2025 are almost sold out and none have been announced for 2026.

SPOILER WARNING

If you intend to play and don’t want to risk any spoilers, stop reading now and come back later. That said, the first part will only cover information from before the larp begins, meaning details from the public larp guide and the pre-larp workshops. I’ll make it very clear when I begin spoiling the larp itself.

This account is as complete as I can reasonably make it, but larp is an individual experience. I didn’t see everything in the main plot and barely a fraction of the interpersonal drama that surrounded it. 

Pre-Larp

Eclipse provided a vast amount of writing and videos detailing the gameplay, characters, relationships, and three decades of fictional history. Players weren’t expected to memorise it, but they did need to choose some characters they’d be happy to play.

Rather than read 150 unique character sheets totalling over 1000 pages, I narrowed them down based on gameplay. Each character belonged to one of three Divisions:

Hard Science: “Mindlink” to aliens, carefully interviewing them about their biology and history. Heavier on deductive gameplay, lower on physical activity. 

Soft Science: Learn an alien language’s glyphs, then communicate through highly controlled face-to-face encounters. Heavier on social “parlour” role play, lower on physical activity. 

Exploration: Venture outside to alien sites to deploy sensors and gather information. Heavy on physical activity.

I was intimidated by the level of performance required by Soft Science and worried Hard Science would be constant puzzle solving, so it was easy to opt for Exploration, especially given my past experience in outdoor gameplay making Zombies, Run!

Then I had to choose one of six Academies. These are like school Houses, where members belong to different divisions but are trained with a common ethos. Each academy comes with its own secondary training (“sidespec”) used in emergency situations, covering co-ordination, security, psychology, communications, medicine, and engineering. Some people chose to learn into their academy’s ethos when role playing, while others ignored it. I filtered the list for security and engineering, and scanned through the one-line descriptions of a dozen characters.

There were a few happy-go-lucky individuals but most had darker histories reflecting the dire state of Earth, not to mention whatever would drive them to volunteer for a risky mission lightyears from their family or friends. I chose seven characters and a few weeks later was told I’d be Bex, “The eternal nomad who does not trust relationships”.

Bex had a nine page character sheet. There were three pages on their personal history, a three page diary of their first weeks on Gliese 628A, and the remainder covered their in-game relationships. Like all characters, Bex was ungendered and could be played however I liked (male, I decided).

As a piece of literature, Bex’s backstory felt dense, verging on overwritten, and hard to mine for ideas on how to role play. The same went for much of the writing about Earth, the Eclipse program, the six academies, and so on. I didn’t have to remember it all, but there were details I overlooked that became genuinely important during the game, if only because they were important to other players. Apparently a helpful player on the larp Discord made a cheatsheet, which I missed entirely.

While such detailed worldbuilding may seem self-indulgent, it’s crucial to Eclipse’s project to create a convincing and original fictional universe, even if it’s through dry factsheets rather than Harry Potter or Star Wars’ books and movies. Why bother? The obvious answer is that it’s basically impossible for larps to get the license for those kinds of IPs. The real answer, however, is that making your own fictional universe means you can tailor it for a specific kind of gameplay and politics and emotional experience. 

The problem with Harry Potter and Star Wars (Andor aside) is that they glorify very small groups of saviours, so everyone wants to be the main character and save the world. This just isn’t possible in larp traditions that prioritise everyone being able to contribute and feeling valued. Sure, you could base a story around the anonymous scientists in Arrival and Interstellar, but at that point you might as well start from scratch, which is what Chaos League did. Every single one of the character backstories I read described people who were decidedly unheroic but always intimately tied to and reliant on others, whether they realised it or not.

A few weeks before the larp, the organisers asked players to record a short Departure Log video, as if made before the departure to Gliese 628A. In-character, we were to explain our hopes for the Eclipse mission, how we’d like to be remembered if it failed, and so on. 

I happened to be travelling at this time so I completely failed to record the video. I did manage to connect with some of Bex’s friends from their academy and the base via Discord in case we wanted to do anything special with our relationships (answer: no). Some players did a lot of pre-larp co-ordination, writing shared histories and chatting in multiple calls, while others told me they turned up at the larp knowing next to nothing. 

Day 0

I arrived in Krakow the evening before the larp and went to a meetup at a bar in town. Amusingly, most of the players were Explorers, clearly the jocks of Gliese 628A. Several players were novices like me, but a lot went to multiple blockbuster larps each year. I guess it’s like people who are really into cruises or theme parks, except blockbusters are considerably cheaper.

Day 1

From central Krakow, it was an hour to Alvernia Planet via the official coaches. 

The two largest domes were occupied by a Harry Potter exhibition, on the opposite side of the complex from us. We never noticed their guests except when embarking on expeditions, during which we were encouraged to view them as hallucinations of Earth.

I was instantly impressed by Eclipse’s graphic design. I am cursed with a preternatural ability to detect misaligned and poorly-spaced layouts but everything – banners, patches, branded water packs, even the custom door signs – was perfect. “Just look at that kerning and line spacing!” I marvelled to a friend. 

We stowed our luggage and found our individual lockers in the basement, stocked with our jumpsuit, name tag, and tablet. But before putting them on, we had three workshops to attend.

Introductory Workshop

Larp workshops teach everyone how to play. By requiring attendance, they guarantee everyone’s on the same page, meaning you can role play knowing others will understand what you’re trying to do and support it. This first hour-long session largely covered the same ground as the 7000 word larp guide, correctly assuming some players skipped or forgotten it entirely. Here’s a brief run-down of what we were told:

• There are three pillars to Eclipse: work, the planet, and social life. Work is organised by division, with a morning and afternoon shift each day. Work doesn’t need to be done perfectly, and we shouldn’t stress out if we mess up. “You can’t break the game” because it was designed with redundancy in mind, with multiple teams in each division tackling the same general problem.
• There’s no winning. Don’t play to save your character from failure. Eclipse isn’t a campaign larp where your character returns across multiple games, so use them like a stolen car and try things you wouldn’t try in real life. “Make wrong choices!” 
• Improvise in your character’s personal life. Some people got married in the first run, with ten people attending. 
• Some story would be communicated extra-diegetically. For example, each day would begin with a voiceover to set the scene, but we shouldn’t mention the voiceover in-game.
• At the end of each shift, we would report our professional opinion on Gliese 628A’s alien life to Yggdrasil, the base’s AI. Yggdrasil exists both in-game and out-of-game, aggregating opinions to steer the plot in lieu of open voting. There are different possible endings. If we disagree with the path of the game, we can be angry but we need to follow the decision rather than, say, attempting a coup.  
• There won’t be any massive twist removing players’ agency. “This is not a dream, you aren’t all dead, it’s not fake, the premise is real.”
• Each day, we should record a two minute video diary. We can address it to people back on Earth, and they can be a memento of the game afterwards. 

• Twice during the game, we’ll have calls to our “affections” on Earth, affections being family members or close colleagues or friends rather than romantic relations. During calls, we’ll be paired up to take turns playing each others’ affections, with those “on Earth” receiving a sheet with our character backgrounds and prompts. We have the option of giving our affections a free ticket to Gliese 628A if the planet is deemed safe. 
• We can visit the lounge while off-duty for drinks and snacks. Real alcohol won’t be served, but we should role play as if fizzy drinks are alcoholic.
• The upper deck of the lounge has an “Earth Wall” corkboard where we should put pictures of our loved ones. Players can visit it to talk about their relationships. 
• “I’m done here” is Eclipse’s safe word. If someone says it, don’t ask why they’ve left the room or mention it when they return. (I never saw it being used myself).
• Escalate altercations slowly and de-escalate quickly. If you want to get into a fight, all parties should verbally invite it, e.g. “Oh yeah? Come over here and say that. What are you gonna do, punch me?” etc. A very convincing and effective demo was provided.
• If you see someone crying in a corridor and aren’t sure if they’re role playing or in genuine distress, give them the OK hand sign. A thumbs-up means they’re fine, a wobble or a thumbs-down means you should fetch an organiser.
• No phones may be used during the game, and absolutely no photos. You can use them in the toilets, if you want. I usually went outside and hid behind a pillar to take notes. 
• Eclipse deals with themes of colonisation. Your character can have colonialist intentions, but it’s only your character, not you. The purpose of larp is to experience different points of view, then reflect seriously and critically upon them afterwards. 

This was a lot to pack into just one lecture, and I’ve missed out a bunch. Compared to some Nordic larp workshops I’ve been to, however, it was swift, and there weren’t any physical exercise on embodying our character through how we walked and talked. I’m told this is typical of Italian larp, which may have less emphasis on interiority and immersion into character. I don’t know if exercises about walking were necessary given the characters we were playing, but I wouldn’t have minded a bit more about talking. Some players constantly used idioms from 2025 or pop culture references from the 1980s and 1990s, which I found unconvincing, like how every Star Trek character only likes culture up until our present day.

Novices are always shocked by the existence of larp workshops, which have next to no equivalent among commercial immersive experiences or immersive theatre. Lately I’ve seen designers, especially those newer to larp, try to “design away” workshops, arguing they reduce accessibility and hurt the commercial viability or financial sustainability because they take so long. 

I understand the sentiment but it seems deeply mistaken. Workshops are a necessary part of Nordic-style larp because they guarantee a base level of understanding and safety required for substantive role play. Sure, you can skip the workshop if you’re absolutely sure every single player knows and remembers the rules and you aren’t introducing any new design elements. You can also skip it if your game doesn’t have any substantive role play, but then you aren’t making a larp any more, and you might as well accept that.

Academy Workshop

Next, we split up into our academies for an hour. Mine was Blackstone, with its sidespec of base security. 

Blackstone is not military, the organisers stressed. We would not carry weapons and there is no brig on the base. If we noticed an altercation, we should use reason to de-escalate, not force. 

As civil protection, our responsibility during a base emergency would be to search for cracks in the domes. In practice this meant turning off the lights in each dome and using torches to find fluorescent stickers on structural elements like walls and ceilings. If we found two or more cracks, the entire dome would be evacuated.

There was a slightly tedious Q&A about splitting up during emergencies to cover more ground, which was obviously something we as players would need to figure out (or not) during the game itself. I did appreciate how the organisers had come up with their own in-universe explanation for how the domes were shielded and why the central dome was immune from cracks, being repurposed from our starship’s reactor.

It was during this workshop that I realised I’d forgotten all of Blackstone Academy’s history. Someone suggested we split up the room along rival “white” and “green” lines. I had no idea where to go until I was reminded that Blackstone cadets were once instructed to fire upon protestors: the greens laid down their weapons and were later tried, while the white followed orders. 

The next 15 minutes were spent in groups of three, representing friendships made in the academy. From a design perspective, this gives players a number of people they can justifiably hang out with during the larp; for the same purpose, I wouldlater sync up with the friends Bex made shortly after arriving at Gliese 628A.  Bex’s friends at Blackstone were both white cadets and we brainstormed why we might have followed orders during the protest, though this didn’t end up being significant.

We then paired up with the person who’d play our “affection” during the two calls. This was about calibrating the kind of role play we were looking for: some might ask their partner to shout at them or manipulate them, while others might explicitly put those things off-limits. 

Next, a quick tour of the base. All nine domes were connected by at least two tunnels each, with the central K2 dome leading to most. Each dome had two or three storeys, and some were enormous, with multiple rooms and entire cinemas and auditoriums. You could easily fit a thousand people in the space we had, and we were just 150. Nowhere was off-limits unless explicitly signed as such. It was big enough for every group to have their own private space but small enough for plenty of chance encounters.

After lunch, some couldn’t wait to get into their jumpsuits. There was plenty of customisation, like patches denoting blood type, 3D-printed magnetic nametags, utility toolbelts, tablet holsters, and sling bags. One player even had a smartphone in a high-tech forearm vambrace on which she wrote notes in-game, a reasonable exception to the “no phones” rule.

Explorer Workshop

My final hour-long workshop focused on Exploration. During our five work shifts, we would venture into the forest to investigate alien sites:

• Shifts begin with a 15-30 minute briefing, then 45 minutes outside, then a debrief. 
• Outside, Explorers wear “spatial sonar” headphones delivering atmospheric sounds and music, half in-game and half out-of-game, a kind of emotional influence from the planet itself. In practice, they were silent disco headphones controlled by our team supervisor, meaning we all heard the same pre-recorded track and the sonar wasn’t actually location-based.
• Explorers are forbidden from talking outside. Diegetically, this is for safety reasons (or something) but out-of-game, it was to make things more interesting. Simple hand gestures are used instead, like a fist held in the air for “stop”, and others for “gather”, “danger” etc. 

• There are three types of explorer mission involving deploying sensors or searching for specific objects. In practice, the sensors were LEDs and lasers housed in 3D-printed units. We might set up four lasers around the perimeter of a site to “scan” it, or place flashing LED devices in a grid. This process is designed to look “scientific”, and because the sensors weren’t smart, it’s up to players whether they play a deployment as successful or not. It turns out you can save a lot of time and money by trusting players to play along rather than making a genuinely functional sensor setup, though you do lose out on skill-based gameplay.
• Any failure during a mission, such as only scanning two out of three sites, is treated as a partial success yielding incomplete information rather than something to feel really bad about. 
• There was a lot of chat about the science and rationale for processes, much of which boiled down to “it’s more fun if we do it this way.” Why not use little whiteboards rather than hand gestures? Hand gestures look cooler.

• Emergencies may occur during when the “sonar” detects psychic threats. Players might have to hide, or drop to the ground, or inject an antidote.
• One or two players are designated “hooks”. Hooks mask the “bio-imprint” of everyone else in their team, at the cost of being even more exposed to psychic threats. Before embarking on a mission, hooks are surreptitiously handed a note telling them what to do during an emergency, like sitting down and refusing to move, or running away.
• Players are free to role play missions however they like: they can care more about completing a scan than saving a team member, and vice versa. They can also train in advance, create more hand gestures, etc. 
• The organisers put signs around the forest warning of a film shoot so the public wouldn’t bother us. I don’t think anyone took notice of rhem, and we never had a problem. 

Afterwards, we suited up and headed to the main auditorium for the beginning of the game. The lights lowered, we closed our eyes, and music and extra-diegetic narration eased us into the fiction. The game would start the moment a video played.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
DO NOT READ IF YOU EVER INTEND TO PLAY!

Game

Above the music (from Interstellar), we heard an unnamed member of our crew describing the journey to Gliese 628A and the importance of our mission. It was a quick and effective way of saying “this is how you should be feeling right now.” 

A video call from Earth appeared on the huge cinema screen, a pin-sharp, good-looking 4K image that made a great first impression. Our commander announced that phase 3 of our mission could begin: first contact with Gliese 628A’s non-human intelligent life (NHIL), along with outside exploration. Afterwards, a staff NPC told us to go to our division to begin work.

There were five Exploration teams with around ten people each, mine designated “Romeo”. Our NPC team supervisor told us our first shift wouldn’t require a hook, which was met with much grumbling and set a fun tone of “us vs. the bosses”. We consulted a map, talked about how we’d use our sensors, practiced hand gestures, and divvied up the equipment.

Stepping outside the dome initially felt a bit awkward – we were, after all, walking out across part of Alvernia Planet’s car park, which didn’t look like an alien planet – but after a couple of minutes we were into a largely deserted forest. With the headphones playing muted musical tones and sonar pings, it felt eerie.

We spotted a cluster of basketball sized eggs a few minutes out, hanging in webbing between trees. Should we be shocked or blasé? I wasn’t sure, which in itself was interesting. We awkwardly set up tripods and sensors on the uneven ground and “measured” the site. Not for the last time, I regretted that I hadn’t bought a utility belt. 

Occasionally we heard faint dragging sounds and footsteps, but nothing happened. We returned silently, trooping back to Romeo’s headquarters and slumping down in a ring of chairs. Our team supervisor disappeared to deliver our data to her bosses and returned with an “analysis” printout explaining what we’d seen, apparently some kind of alien (NHIL) nursery. 

Our goal during the debrief was to discuss what we’d seen, then individually report to Yggdrasil on our tablets whether we thought the NHIL were instinctive, emotional, or rational. We each gave our hot takes, our supervisor gently interjecting “last sentence” if someone went on too long.

But the discussion was inconclusive. One could see the arrangement of the eggs as any of the three options; whatever you chose was a reflection of your character’s biases and preconceptions more than anything else. Perhaps that was the point, a Rorschach test for humanity, but it felt doubly abstract because our personal observations of the eggs were essentially overridden by the objective analysis of the data we gathered. 

This lack of direct correspondence between gameplay and plot-relevant discoveries may have been unique to Explorers, though. From what I understand, players in hard and soft science communicated with the NHIL more directly. That this was accompanied by ambiguity or confusion helped generate speculation. 

To make matters worse, explorers couldn’t talk to each other about anything they saw. The five exploration teams rotated between the five sites, and while it made (in-game) sense that they shouldn’t prejudice each others’ observations and (out-of-game) not spoil the surprise, it meant we couldn’t speculate about the greater meaning of our discoveries like other divisions did. Still, explorers had their own unique pleasures; I found it much easier to role play as a Nostromo-style space trucker grunt than a know-it-all scientist.  

During a lull in our debrief, I opened my tablet. These included manuals and procedures for each division, like instructions on how to deploy sensors outside; a daily news feed from Earth; a readout of the status of the six other Eclipse missions; a form to submit your reports to Yggdrasil; and Yggdrasil’s predictions of the overall outcome of the Gliese 628A mission (more on this later). But the tablets’ most important feature was the chat channels. Each player was automatically enrolled into channels for their team, division, and academy, and they could direct message any player. 

As the game progressed, the channels became busy with rumours and gossip. Unfortunately, the tablets struggled with the traffic. People blamed the wifi, but this seemed unlikely; 150 devices isn’t a lot for corporate-level infrastructure, and the error messages (“too many connections”) suggested the chat server was overloaded. Everyone quickly got used to force-closing and reopening the Eclipse app, though this didn’t always work. 

Shortly after the first shift, we gathered for our first call with our affections on Earth. I was imagining the Comms dome would be a series of phone booths, but instead it was a vast dark space with a cloudy plastic sheet hanging from the ceiling, arranged in a square. We lined up in pairs on either side of the sheet and atmospheric audio counted down. With the connection to Earth established, everyone stepped forward and started talking. You had to get quite close to hear each other above the babble, but you could still only see a blurry silhouette. It was much lower-fi than I expected, but perhaps the only way they could process every player’s call in a reasonable amount of time. 

As mentioned, the “affection” side of the call had a cheatsheet with their background and conversation prompts. This made it straightforward for me to role play as a burgeoning eco-freedom fighter/terrorist on Earth who’d been left behind by their friend who’d run off to Gliese 628A. At seven minutes, calls were long enough to have a proper discussion and feel appropriately awkward, but short enough that you didn’t run out of things to say. Surrounded by dozens of calls, cajoling and joking and shouting and crying, I had a sense of what everyone else was going through. It felt more like performance art than anything else. Of course, as with everything else in larp, it requires everyone to buy into the premise. 

Like the affection calls, dinner was split into two shifts so everyone could sit at the communal tables. A scientist joined my table and, on spotting my Blackstone Academy patch, asked whether I was a white or a green. Thankfully I knew the difference by this point and we had a thoughtful conversation about the ethics of following orders and his belief that humanity’s true foe was capitalism, not terrorism. But as others arrived, it devolved into a tedious rehashing of colonial tropes, one of those annoying situations when you can tell who’s completely closed to conversation and you already knew everything they’re going to say.

In the lounge, I chatted with teammates and groused (in-character) about the lack of snacks and drinks. I felt beat, so I collapsed into an armchair. It turned out the tablet was a great way to participate even when you needed a rest. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through apps, you knew everyone looking at their device was still inhabiting the same fictional media space. I got into a fight with a troll about the whole white vs. green issue, and later bumped into them and joked about it. If only more of this happened in real life!

Another great bit of design in the larp: every team was making momentous discoveries (e.g. finding a nest of alien eggs) but because they weren’t instantly and globally communicated meant players had to actually talk to each other, mostly in person, to learn what the hell was going on – like the discovery that one of the six other Eclipse missions had just failed. This didn’t make the conversations any smarter, but it did provide an excuse (an “alibi”, in larp parlance) to approach random strangers and say, “Hey, you’re in soft science, what did you find out today?” We all need practice in forming connections and persuading one another, and like so many good larps, Eclipse provided that where real life often doesn’t. 

People followed threads wherever they could. Earlier that day, I idly mentioned on chat that I’d been bitten by an insect outside. When medics from Lighthouse Academy heard, they tracked me down and conducted an impromptu psychological evaluation which, in retrospect, I should’ve played into more. Next time!

Being an international larp, Eclipse attracted players from all over Europe and even some from the US. The different accents added to a feeling of an international mission, though I only saw one other Asian-looking person, an older woman. There weren’t any obvious player cliques – I got the sense a lot of people simply didn’t have the time to pre-plan individual storylines. The demands of work shifts and the social organisation of the larp forced people into new groupings anyway.

After I got bored of the lounge, I wandered through the vast empty Soft Science dome and looked at the circular Arrival-style glyphs players had pinned on whiteboards, surrounded by scribbles of best-guess translations:

“We escaped home, no sorrow (do not despair) / We got angry the natives threatened (our) beloved / We made a mistake, waged a war and are guilty of dead children.”

I got chatting with a lone soft scientist about the translation. A hard scientist joined us, asking about my team’s mission outside. It made me nostalgic for when I was a neuroscientist at Cambridge and Oxford, chatting to colleagues after-hours. We marvellled at what each of us had discovered. Apparently the NHIL had come from a great distance after their own planet had been destroyed by a supernova. On arriving at Gliese 628A, they somehow wiped out an indigenous intelligent species known as tænari or “farmers”, though now the NHIL themselves were dwindling, despite their highly advanced technology.

Around 10:30pm, right before the end of the game period, everyone’s tablets sounded an emergency notification to head to the enormous K1 “Containment Grid” dome. Inside was a large rectangular space curtained off with cloudy plastic sheeting. A large, spidery alien slowly walked in, and the same unnamed narrator from the beginning of the day described how they felt awed by the encounter. 

Then, David Bowie outro music, and we were officially out-of-game. We left our tablets on the front desk to charge and boarded coaches to our hotel. I realised I’d barely used my phone all day.

Day 2

I loaded up on breakfast at the hotel, then boarded a coach back to Alvernia Planet at 9:45am. Most people I spoke to appreciated having a proper sleep but admitted that some “vibes” were lost from not being in-game 24/7. Getting just four hours of sleep is part of the attraction when you’re run from bloodthirsty aliens; less so in Eclipse, which is a much more sedate affair.

Back in the domes, some players were a bit too eager to get into character before the game officially started, which caused a couple of awkward moments. But soon enough, we assembled in the auditorium and closed our eyes…

Game

Sci-fi music (Arrival, this time), narration, then a briefing video. Everyone on Earth was excited about our progress and hopeful we’d declare Gliese 628A safe for mass colonisation. An NPC staff summarised each team’s findings from yesterday. Though I knew most of them from impromptu chats, it was a good way to catch up anyone completely left out.

Before we headed to our work shifts, the staffer said they believed an explorer was smuggling recreational drugs into the base. Despite investigating this on my tablet and in person, I never quite got to the bottom of this story; I wonder whether this was a product of player-driven behaviour or an organiser-led prod to role play in a particular way. In a similar vein, I tried to get Blackstone Academy interested in “New Era” cult pamphlets I discovered in Romeo’s headquarters, hyping them up as a potential security threat, but to no avail.

Romeo was much better organised during our mission to analyse a large monolith, practicing with our laser transmitters beforehand. While on mission, an emergency – poison gas, I think – required us to hit the deck and inject an antidote. Some teammates had to hold our “hook” down and find out where he’d stashed his syringe. Amid the confusion, we lost a sensor. 

(I expect our NPC team supervisor triggered this emergency at an opportune moment, switching the audio track broadcast to our headphones when we reached a secluded spot).

Back home, our team complained about a malfunctioning laser. Despite the organiers’ ingenuity, players understood things would break, so rather than getting annoyed at them and demanding a refund as one might in a commercial immersive experience, we redirected our frustration in-game at our higher-ups on Gliese 628A. How could they expect us to do these missions properly if they don’t maintain the equipment properly?, and so on. That’s the social technology of larp, a collective pretence that everything is working even when it isn’t. Players aren’t alienated from the creation of larps – we know how the sausage is made because we’re making it too. And so, denied the camaraderie of the scientists, the explorers shared hacks. We measured and cut spare pieces of fabric so we could space out sensors faster and devised procedures to run multiple sensor sweeps at once. It was a lovely demonstration of people taking pride in their work, as good a simulation of a workplace I’ve ever seen. 

I was distracted from our surprisingly thoughtful debrief about the meaning of memorials and statues by news that Blackstone’s “white” cadets on Earth might be retried for shooting at protestors. This set our chat on fire, and naturally I got stuck into the ensuing flamewar. In larps, digital distractions are just another opportunity to role play.

Everyone was making discoveries and very eager to share: someone from soft science asked me whether we were the explorer team who’d found crystals that morning. Very normal, except I happened to be in the toilets. It was a little more fun to talk about that than the news that a second Eclipse mission had failed.

Ymir, the black hole near Gliese 628A, was due to make its closest approach later in the day, wreaking all kinds of mayhem on the base’s shields, psychology, and comms. Blackstone met in advance to co-ordinate an emergency response, but the meeting was fraught. There was no established hierarchy, tablet problems meant people arrived late, and everyone kept talking over each other about how we should divide into groups, who’d get the walkie talkies, what to do if they didn’t work, and so on. Eventually we muddled through it without concluding much at all: classic office politics. 

As I watched, I reflected that it’s hard to know whether someone is just playing an asshole in a larp or they really are one. Maybe there’s less difference than it seems, especially when it comes to extreme duration role playing; no-one can wear a mask for a long time, as Seneca put it (a worrying thought given some characters’ colonialist leanings). Metatechniques are meant to help calibrate intensity, but I didn’t see any used in real time during Eclipse – perhaps everyone was OK with the rare bit of poor behaviour, as I was when confronted with rude players. When I brought this up to some experienced larpers, they suggested it might be due to misunderstandings caused by mixing different “larp cultures”. I found this to be a diplomatic rationalisation of behaviour I usually saw from the same few people – people whom I noticed other players eventually learned to avoid. I suppose the good and bad thing about international larp is that players don’t carry their reputations around with them quite as much. 

Wild rumours abounded after lunch. The alien eggs had grown in size, an explorer team had stolen data crystals from a research site, the NHIL killed the tænari with a superweapon summoned from the planet itself. Some were exaggerations, others were jokes repeated as facts. A larp wouldn’t be a bad place to teach media literacy…

Romeo’s afternoon shift took us out to a “cemetery”. Once again, our equipment malfunctioned and we had to cope with multiple emergencies. Still, I enjoyed the slower, more deliberate pace of our work outside.

Analysis of our sensor data revealed the NHIL killed the tænari, or something. Again, I wondered what use it was to report our opinions to Yggdrasil when the results of its analysis were far more pertinent to its questions (are the NHIL good/neutral/bad?) than anything we’d observed ourselves. Regardless, we had a good discussion about the ideas of existential threat. 

The approach of Ymir triggered a base-wide emergency around 5pm. I rushed to Blackstone’s headquarters where walkie talkies were being handed out to roving teams inspecting domes. The role play was more military-themed than I liked – why ask people for their “callsign” when you mean their name, especially when the term has literally never been mentioned in the game before? – but unlike our earlier meeting, communication was surprisingly good-tempered and efficient. Who knew that when people are actually doing stuff rather than endlessly talking about it, they get along better?

I led a small team to help inspect a couple of domes, and I’ll admit that my leadership was quite poor because I ran around too fast for some people to keep up. In each dome, we fetched a supervisor to turn off all the lights so we could look for “cracks” (i.e. stickers). This was disruptive to everyone else who had their own vital work to deal with, like decoding messages or fixing energy systems or manufacturing medicine for Ymir-induced space madness (my term), so we negotiated with them on the best time to turn off lights and where to put displaced teams. More practice in logistics and communication, disguised as a game!

An hour or so into the emergency, players were summoned to shelter in the K1 “Containment Grid” dome. There, a radio transmission indicated we’d jumped forward in time by seven years due to Ymir’s gravitational pull. Time travel is a classic sci-fi trope whenever black holes are around (e.g. Interstellar), but I genuinely hadn’t seen this coming, my thoughts being occupied by the NHIL and more prosaic concerns. 

We trooped into the main auditorium for a very short video call from Earth, who thought our base had been lost entirely. As soon as the video ended, some players began shouting and others shouted to tell them to stop shouting, both in-character and out-of-character at once.

Our second affection calls went ahead as scheduled, more dramatic and emotional than expected. By unstapling the folded sheet we received at the start of the game, people playing the affections revealed new backstory and prompts – my eco-freedom fighter/terrorist had blown up an oil rig and been imprisoned for years. Beside me, I heard joyful calls where people reunited after being thought dead. Others were darker.

With the news that every other Eclipse mission had failed and Earth’s climate was worsening, there was even more pressure for us to secure Gliese 628A for human colonisation. I dreaded what that might mean given fears of the NHIL.

An impromptu rave in the hard science dome also went ahead at 9:30pm, powered by portable speakers and LED lights some players had brought along. This was very fun and had some great dancing. Because it was a larp, some players distributed space drugs (again, my term) and of course, one person overdosed and was administered to by medics. The party continued, another person fell over but then got up again because he was only playing as drunk. 

While chatting to a soft scientist at the rave, I realised I had no idea exactly what they were doing during their work shifts. When they said they were talking to the NHIL, did they literally stand in front of the alien? What did the alien do in response? My uncertainty felt peculiarly thrilling and realistic, aided by the larp’s lack of internal photo and video documentation; some philosophers might even call it a process of re-enchanting the world. 

Day 2 also saw the opening of the larp’s focus rooms. These were partly in-game and out-of-game, a way for players to abstractly experience the process of travelling lightyears from Earth. You entered a dark room with moody lighting, sat in front of a mirror, and put on a headset. The looping audio had an ASMR quality to it and prompted you to breathe, open or close your eyes, while visualising a kind of Powers of Ten movie scene. It was a nice way to chill out while remaining in the game space.

The day ended with our being summoned to K1 again for an encounter with the NHIL. It looked ill, our unseen narrator explained, and it swore vengeance against us for the harms we’d done to its children.

Bowie outro music again, then coaches back to the hotel.

Day 3

Game

During our opening briefing, we discovered that the NHIL from the previous night had attacked our base’s environmental systems. It had failed to cause any damage, however. All humanity’s hopes lay with us. 

Our morning exploration shift required two hooks this time, perhaps due to the elevated threat. One of the Romeo team members began planning out our mission so I asked, a little grumpily, who made them our supervisor. Someone said “she’s Argo” and expected me to understand. As I later read in the larp guide, members of Argo Academy are trained as leaders and co-ordinators, so they were actually role playing correctly – but I didn’t know this and so didn’t support her role play. Afterwards, a player suggested Academy “sidespecs” were under-theorised in that they had no substantive recognition by the game system or other characters outside of emergencies. 

No matter – we had a mission to find artefacts in a tænari “village”. We assumed this would be easy because most of the sites we’d visited were pretty small, but the village turned out to be an entire collection of huts and barns. We fanned out, eventually encountering three statues of NHIL, surrounding an etched metal disc, which later caused memory loss from people who touched it (I’m still not sure whether it was secretly prompted by our supervisor or just a fun bit of improvisation). Analysis of the disc revealed the location of NHIL’s home planet, along with a special plant cultivated by the tænari that could kill the NHIL in minutes.

Because we’d seen the statues and village with our own eyes rather than just read about them in a report, this was by far the most interesting debrief of the game, one in which we, once again, were trying to determine whether co-existence with the NHIL was possible. What did the statues mean? Did the tænari hate the NHIL or respect them? I noted the status hadn’t been defaced, which is what you’d expect in a conflict, but others suggested they were placed at the edge of the village as a warning (out-of-game, I assumed this was for “level design” purposes, so we’d discover them last). 

One team reported that when the NHIL arrived on Gliese 628A, they erected a monument declaring they came in peace; only later was there a misunderstanding that led to war. There were rumours a hard science team had talked to the planet itself; others claimed the NHIL had summoned a “sword of light” from the planet to attack the tænari, though exactly what that meant was anyone’s guess. I felt I’d been transported into a Stanislaw Lem novel. Hubristic colonisers, exhausting debates about the impossibility of communication, Soviet aesthetics, annihilation superweapons –  it was a perfect hard sci-fi cocktail that benefitted from larps’ extreme duration. 

In the afternoon, Romeo team took a group photo, taking advantage of an official base photographer. They tried to find me for twenty minutes and pinged me via chat, but decided to go ahead without me. I was a little annoyed when someone asked why I hadn’t come; the bad network connection meant I didn’t bother checking my tablet regularly. Not coincidentally, I was troubled about how I was playing Bex. For an “eternal nomad who does not trust relationships” he was getting on far too well with his teammates. I couldn’t figure out how to play a loner in a game that’s fundamentally social in its nature but it felt wrong for him to suddenly become trusting.

Being left out from the group photo was the perfect opportunity to turn things around. At Romeo’s afternoon briefing, I upped my annoyance from a 3 to a 10 and lashed out. I fumed and swore at my teammates, saying I was going to request a transfer since I clearly wasn’t wanted. I even got to chew out the character who always had an answer for everything. 

My eruption didn’t delay our final shift, in which we scanned an underground NHIL temple. One player was careless with handling their laser, leading to amusingly fussy disagreements on whether the measurements had been done “correctly”. Still, we covered a huge amount of ground, much to the delight of our Argo team member.

Analysis revealed temple inscriptions stating the NHIL had visited multiple planets on their way to Gliese 628A but had moved on because “genetic merger” wasn’t possible. The analysis also confirmed that human/NHIL merger was possible, with other teams revealing their aim to incorporate humanity’s “progressive traits” so that both species could survive.

Merger or annihilation? That was the subject of our final debrief. With Earth on the brink of environmental collapse and our base being their only hope, a few in Romeo wanted any excuse to kill the last remaining NHIL on Gliese 628A in an attempt to pave the way for “safe” human colonisation. The temple inscriptions could be lies, they argued. It was them or us. And didn’t they try to murder us last night? 

It felt distasteful to hear players pushing for genocide even though I knew it was an act and the larp was fiction. I struggled, unsuccessfully, to not let it affect me personally. Abigail Nussbaum says novels lead us “outside of morality”, making us accomplices of jealousy and revenge, in order to illuminate their boundaries. Larps help us explore distressing boundaries more directly, even as players remain thoughtful and self-reflexive. It’s legitimate for Eclipse to tackle these issues given humanity’s dark history of colonisation. But as an experienced larper suggested, when there are actual genocidal people in the real world being more public about their aims, it’s harder to know whether a player is putting on an act or not. Someone can act evil in a game, but they should understand they’re the villain. 

Our argument was repeated across the whole base. Yggdrasil’s final predictions of our mission’s fate only raised the temperature:

1. Put everyone into cryogenic suspension and wait for another way forward.
2. Make Gliese 628A safe for human colonisation by nuking the entire base and the last remaining NHIL along with it.
3. Genetically merge all humans on Gliese 628A with the NHIL, initiating a consciousness and memory reset.

As we awaited our fate to be announced by Earth, the final few hours of the game revealed everything the larp had become. 

Deepwater Academy called an emergency meeting in the main auditorium. I was told it descended into a shouting match despite their “empathic, intuitive, analytical” values. Touchingly, some explorers organised knowledge sharing meetings; now that each team had seen all five sites, we could finally talk about them openly and record everything we’d seen in writing. Our writeups are probably still archived on Chaos League’s server somewhere. 

But most people I saw had a sense of anticipation, or resignation – there would be no further work shifts, nothing left to solve or discover. Waiting in line for dinner, a member of Romeo who’d also played my affection on Earth had a toy duck on his shoulder. Someone asked what it would say if it could talk. He said Bex should know he had friends at the base. A broker roved the hall with a handwritten list: the seven year time jump meant some people had spare tickets to Gliese 628A and they aimed to be a matchmaker.

We were called into our final briefing from Earth after dinner. Cryogenic suspension was dismissed out of hand, and they didn’t think a nuclear explosion would destroy the NHIL. Therefore, we were ordered to merge with the NHIL. Earth was lost, but at least this way something of humanity might still survive.

Our NPC staffer quickly modelled the larp’s desired behaviour, saying he hated the decision but would abide by it, and asked us to meet in K1 for our merger with the NHIL in a couple of hours. Lots of people shouted that they’d never merge. Everyone gradually drifted away, meeting with their teams one final time. 

I remained, mordantly chatting with a friend that this was the best outcome we could have hoped for. I wasn’t planning to seek out my Romeo teammates, thinking a Hollywood ending didn’t make sense for Bex, but as we got up to leave, we spotted them right at the top of the auditorium. I decided to join them, curious what they made of our orders. 

Just a few hours earlier, Romeo were arguing vehemently about the merger, but the finality of Earth’s decision seemed to have crystallised something in the doubters. We were explorers, so why not continue exploring the stars? Better for humanity’s last mission to make something new rather than simply die, forgotten. I didn’t say it out loud, but I chose to reconcile with them. What more could I want than friends who could face the unknown without fear? For the last thirty hours I’d felt a bit distant from my character, but now, in an empty auditorium at the end of the world, Eclipse finally seemed astonishingly real.

We decided to record a group video diary on one of our tablets for our descendants. This time, I joked, we’d get everyone in. Just one person left afterwards, unwilling to merge. I later heard she committed suicide by overdose with a few other holdouts in the focus rooms. Other explorers walked out into the forest on a final expedition. 

In K1, we assembled for the grand finale. Our unnamed narrator described the bodily feeling of merging. Inevitably, it was a little underwhelming because the moment had been built up so much, but it’s hard to know what could’ve worked here given Eclipse’s limited budget. What came after was the perfect capstone, though. A hidden projector flickered to life, displaying a montage of players’ departure logs recorded weeks earlier, describing their hopes for the mission. I couldn’t imagine a better transition back to reality.

Post-Game

The moment the outro music began, everyone started hugging each other. For practically the first time in three days, we could talk about what had happened to our characters. 

The lounge was converted into a bar selling real alcohol to support future Chaos League larps. Payment was done on trust – I wrote down my drinks and got an invoice a few days later. 

The afterparty is a beloved staple of larps. Organisers rarely make money so they need to find motivation elsewhere, and being thanked by grateful players isn’t bad at all. One member of Romeo asked me whether I was genuinely annoyed by being left out of the photo. Another praised how I made our final briefing more exciting (“they were getting a bit boring”), while the teammate I argued with enjoyed that I pushed back. Everyone joked about acting differently whenever they saw a photographer. 

The coach arrived at 1:30am. I left for the airport the next morning, missing the two-hour debrief. I asked Alessandro Giovannucci, co-founder of Chaos League, how it went. Here’s my summary of his notes:

We started with some de-roleing activities to gradually get out of character: structured conversations to make sense of the experience and socialise what happened in the game; visualisation exercises (the character walking away, etc.); and writing down one’s experience on a piece of paper to make it “external” and thus understand it better. 

Next, discussions in groups of three. Prompts included: “Who did you play with that touched you deeply? What was the most intense scene in the larp? Did you feel something you had never felt before? What was something you liked about your character you want to carry on with you?”

Finally, free time for unstructured discussions to progressively descend before leaving the venue. 

Some Notes on Gameplay…

Larp is deeply personal. Not just in terms of taste, but in the simple fact that your experience will vary greatly depending on your character and relationships and what you put into the game. Some think a player reviewing a larp is as nonsensical as a violinist reviewing their orchestra – larpers aren’t consuming media but co-creating it as they watch it.

For that reason alone, I want to be careful in drawing broad conclusions about Eclipse, but also because Giovannucci has thoughts about critique in larp I fear I will not live up (PDF, p281). While I’ve read an awful lot about larp, this was my first multi-day experience, so I have little to compare it to. I had to lean on experienced larpers to get more context for these notes. 

Eclipse’s gameplay is avowedly idiot-proof. Its team-based structure means that if one player doesn’t contribute, the game and plot as a whole can continue. Apparently this is very different to Odysseus, where individual players failing to do their jobs can cause real problems for others. Someone even suggested to me that Eclipse felt more like an immersive experience than a larp. 

This is very much intended by Eclipse, whose larp guide cites redundancy as a key design principle, and yet is contradicted elsewhere by the suggestion that “every character will have one or more duties to carry out, all of which will have a meaningful impact on the mission’s survival and outcome.” I was so carried away by the story and setting and relationships that, outside of my problems with explorer gameplay, I didn’t notice this lack of agency, but when I compare it to other larps I’ve played, the contrast is clear. During Seaside Prison, a larp set in a fictional occupied Finland, I played a student. Nominally, I had very little agency, but depending on the letters I wrote and decisions I made, I affected everyone’s fate.

Arguably, the same was true in Eclipse, at least in terms of characters’ personal lives. I’m sure the wedding in the first run of the game was very significant for everyone involved. However, our personal lives in Eclipse were essentially firewalled from the wider plot, which didn’t care whether anyone got married. Reporting to Yggdrasil was the only way for players to affect the outcome, and because decisions were aggregated from 150 players, individual agency felt weak. Had the ending not required every player to have the same outcome, something that only makes sense in a quasi-military setting where characters can be ordered to do things, decisions made in character’s personal lives – like marriages – would have had a greater lasting significance. 

Is this bad design? Not if you want a larp that prioritises forward narrative momentum and has a collective ending, nor if you place more value on the journey rather than the destination. 

…and Story

Chaos League cites Arrival and Interstellar as key inspirations, but Eclipse reminded me most strongly of Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction, particularly Fiasco, The Invincible, and Solaris. Lem was Polish, and actually lived in Krakow for a while, not far from Alvernia Planet. According to Wikipedia:

Lem’s science fiction works explore philosophical themes through speculations on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of communication with and understanding of alien intelligence, despair about human limitations, and humanity’s place in the universe.

Eclipse’s spectacular setting, costumes, and technology got me in the right frame of mind for a science fiction experience, but it was the larp’s gameplay, social organisation and, most of all, storytelling that truly evoked Lem’s core themes. We could only guess what the NHIL really wanted and the constant arguments within the base certainly drove me to despair. The themes of nuclear annihilation and genocide are as depressingly topical today as it was in Lem’s main period during the mid-20th century, too. Interestingly, genocide was also the focus in Odysseus. It is a little disquieting that the two blockbuster sci-fi larps in recent years both essentially force players into a moral choice between survival and extermination. 

But Eclipse is not Stanislaw Lem. There was a third outcome, one that presented transformation – a leap into the unknown – as a hopeful, beautiful act. It was not conservative or fearful or nostalgic, and for that, it’s something I will always treasure.

Epilogue

Eclipse’s players weren’t professional actors reading from a script, but weeks later I can still remember conversations vividly. It still amazes me that it works, yet, for seasoned players it’s just another larp. 

Some larpers are waiting for the moment when the mainstream will take them seriously. In truth, there’s barely any mainstream left, just bigger and smaller influencers and interest groups that occasionally coalesce into moments of monoculture. Larp may be incompatible with traditional media and arts coverage that’s obsessed with scale and convenience and is terrified of participation, but it’s very compatible with the move away from massive algorithmically-driven online communities to smaller ones that value embodied interaction.

In many ways, larp isn’t accessible. You need to participate in hours of workshops. You have to commit to the premise earnestly. Big events are few and far between, and surprisingly hard to find. If you want them to exist, you have to help build them yourselves, and then co-create them in the moment. On paper, larps are the same kind of frictionless, transactional liminoid experience as immersive theatre or theme parks or escape rooms, but in practice they require and reward a level of commitment that looks much more like genuinely liminal rituals – a ritual of rituals, even.

At the afterparty, I remarked to Giovannucci that Eclipse’s production values rivalled those of multimillion dollar immersive experience. He didn’t seem at all surprised. Volunteers might not be as skilled as the very best professionals, but if they’re doing something they love they can give much more of their time than the latter, whom even well-funded companies can barely afford. And to think that fewer than a thousand people might ever see Eclipse.

One of those players left a New Era pendant by every locker. I didn’t check mine until someone said that each had its own personalised message. Other players wrote and ran a three-part TTRPG epilogue on Discord. Nordic-style larp only survives if people have such a good time they come back with their friends and eventually become creators themselves, so there’s little room for gatekeeping. Never-ending “campaign” larps can reward players with character advancement across years and decades, but since each Nordic larp starts from scratch, players can feel more like equals – not to mention it opens the possibility for stories with actual endings.

The demands of larp raise fears that it’s impossible to write about them. Doesn’t reflecting on them in the moment, taking notes as I did, de-immerse you? Are you really participating if you’re observing what you’re doing all the time? It’s an odd argument. Movie and video game critics manage it just fine. Our lives are a constant act, it’s just that in larp the act is more transparent and reciprocal. If anything, larp trains us to observe ourselves better.

Lately, digital distractions have become society’s bête noire. Conservatives blame them for a drop in sociality, declining birth rates and, by implication, the end of “western civilisation”. Other than returning to religion or banning technology, they have no solution.

I know a fair bit about digital distractions myself. I spent 45 minutes a day solving crosswords and puzzles on Puzzmo for 556 days in a row. There are far worse things to do with one’s time, but I don’t mind saying it went beyond a habit to being an addiction. I maintained my streak despite travelling all over the world on holiday and for work. I played while I was jetlagged, while I was ill, while I was with friends and family. 

Eclipse broke my streak. I easily could’ve stepped outside during the larp to play one or two puzzles at a time, but… I didn’t want to. There was something more meaningful to do. 

Larp can be so consuming it ejects you from your normal relationship with reality. It looks scary from the outside but even at three days, it’s only a short moment in our lives. During that moment, we had the opportunity to shift angle. Eclipse was like a simulated near-death experience, an attempt to convince players they were on the brink of unimaginable transformation.

A month on, life is mostly back to normal. I’m doing the same work and exercise and reading I did before. But I still haven’t touched Puzzmo once.

Thanks to Alex Macmillan, Alessandro Giovannucci, Chaos League, and the entire crew of Eclipse Run #2 for their contributions to this essay.

All photos by Chiara Cappiello are from Run #1, while all other uncredited photos are by me from Run #2.

If you ask game designers and makers of “immersive” experiences why their work has become so popular recently, their answers will fall into a few buckets. Sensory spectacle has always been attractive, fuelled by seemingly constant improvements in technology. There’s the allure of entering a flow state, where the outside world and all its distractions fade away. And many games and experiences offer deep social interaction, which can feel absent in our individualised, atomised society.

But one of the most popular arguments for why games and immersive experiences have become so popular recently is the idea that “agency” feels missing in modern life. Our obligations are so strict, our resources so limited, and our choices so few that playing Animal Crossing or visiting Sleep No More feels liberating. We can craft our own world, choose our own friends, and wander to any room we like to rifle through any cupboard or drawer.

This is a tricky argument. If we’re lacking agency in modern life today, does that mean we had more agency fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, five hundred years ago? Even the harshest critic of modernity would have to admit that the average person has more choice in their life in terms of education, occupation, relationships, travel, religion, and entertainment—for better and for worse.

The more apt comparison is not time but media. Proponents of interactive and immersive art rarely miss an opportunity to contrast their work with “passive” media. The entire notion of immersive theater lies in opposition to “traditional” theater. One audience quietly faces forward, applauding politely at act breaks. The other audience is liberated: they are adventurers who can express their personality through their agency. The same goes for books, TV, movies, and paintings versus interactive fiction, video games, and installation and environmental art.

Left unanswered in this debate is just how much agency actually exists in these more interactive and immersive experiences. Escape rooms, open world games, and even platformers are replete with buttons to press and puzzles to solve, but the agency they offer is often highly structured.

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues that this structuring — or crystallisation — of agency is definitionally distinctive of games as an art form. Indeed, the entire point of games is that they are not as free as life. Many of the most popular immersive experiences, whether immersive theatre or Netflix’s The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience, are similarly limited in the agency that they offer. In the latter, you can choose what gown to wear and how you dance but you can’t become the queen. As Felix Barrett, artistic director of Punchdrunk, recently told me in regard to Sleep No More, “Actually, there isn’t really real agency. You’re basically a floating camera . . . you don’t really have much control, but you can just choose where you stand to watch.”

The concept of agency itself is worth teasing apart. I believe that a strong appeal of games and immersive experiences lies not in the promise of unlimited agency—nor even in differently structured agency—but in sovereignty.

Sovereignty is an old-fashioned word, usually associated with nation-states and monarchs. Put very simply, a sovereign has absolute authority. They can do whatever they want within their own domain without being questioned or restricted by anyone else. The notion of sovereignty gradually evolved to the point where, around the turn of the twentieth century, economists invented the idea of the sovereign consumer. A sovereign consumer is independent of external domination in the domain of purchasing: they can choose whatever they want to buy. Their purchasing choices are therefore taken to be rational and utility-maximising, and are consequently unquestionable. If someone decides they never want to eat vegetables, this is because they’ve made a rational decision that their life will be better without vegetables. As such, no authority can restrict their decision: neither medical, political, religious, nor otherwise. For economists whom we would now term neoliberal, the sovereign consumer was just what free-market democracies needed: they personified an essentially individualist but competitive society.

Of course, this is all fiction. People are not perfectly rational. They are continually led astray by advertising and propaganda. Their choices are constrained to whatever the market produces, and if they lack resources and power, they have even fewer choices. But the idea of the sovereign consumer still lives on. If anything, this fiction has only become stronger throughout the last century with political activism itself becoming refracted through consumer choices and boycotts.

The sovereign consumer is allied to the idea of sovereign agency, which argues that because our actions are self-generated and a product of our conscious will, whatever happens to us is at least partly under our control. This is an attractive proposition, argues political philosopher Sharon R. Krause. We like the kind of control it promises. This proposition means that we can always rise above our circumstances.

This proposition also sounds a lot like video games, specifically single-player role-playing games. Players enter a little universe where everything that happens to them is theoretically under their control. No one else exists except as things to dominate. The fact that video games deliver a fantasy of sovereignty does not mean that they always let players win. However, it is always within a player’s hands whether they succeed or not. It is not up to anyone else.

Sovereignty becomes trickier in co-operative multiplayer games. Negotiation and compromise is essential here, whether in an escape room, Dungeons & Dragons, or World of Warcraft. As Hannah Arendt noted in The Human Condition, “Sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to the very condition of plurality. No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth.”

What does agency look like in a world of non-sovereign individuals? It is distributed. We can try performing an action, starting a protest, venturing on a quest, or designing a game, but if no one else takes up those projects with us, our agency becomes deeply limited. There is also always the threat that we might be actively opposed in these endeavors.

We are responsible for other people’s freedom of agency, and they are responsible for ours. Single-player video games — and multiplayer games masquerading as single-player with the aid of disguised bots — can guarantee that our actions are always recognised and always lead to success. However, multiplayer games and experiences with true freedom of agency cannot guarantee this, because humans can always ignore and oppress each other. It is therefore understandable when people opt instead for fantasies of sovereignty over the uncertainty and contingency of social life, choosing places of unrestricted action where no one can say that they are playing the game wrong.

It would be simplistic to say that spending time in solo sovereign fantasies inevitably leads to sovereigntist ideas of politics, but bringing the same attitudes and expectations to social spaces may alter our understanding of agency and sovereignty for the worse. Artists creating games and immersive experiences must build spaces where players can practice being courageous in the midst of uncertainty, supporting one another when there can be little expectation of success.

This is not necessarily as thankless a task as it seems. Designers of multiplayer games and real-world immersive experiences are finding that their players increasingly desire social experiences. Currently, these games often lack the conceptual framework required to foster prosocial behaviour — teaching people to play nicely with one another while still giving them meaningful agency. Some designers prefer to jettison social interaction entirely rather than risk players’ sovereignty, or else replace humans with bots. Others, such as Daniel Cook, are creating design principles for prosocial multiplayer games.

Of all the interactive and immersive arts, non-digital role-playing games have seen the most intense thinking and experimentation on these questions. Unlike in video games, “anything can be attempted” in tabletop RPGs as Jon Peterson puts it, because the game world is literally co-created by the players and the referee (aka DM/GM). When anything can be attempted, gameplay can be deeply unpredictable.

The real-world, embodied nature of Nordic Larp offers even more opportunities and challenges for social gameplay. Its “play to lift” philosophy, also known as “play to lose,” asks participants to support one another in creating a more beautiful or dramatic outcome, rather than seeking to individually dominate and win, leading to the foregrounding of issues such as sex, grief, trauma, work, and even genocide. Nordic Larp has pioneered safety and calibration mechanics that have spread to tabletop role-playing games, giving players the confidence to explore difficult subjects. Crucially, the experience of players in Nordic Larp have bled through into the real world, teaching them skills for real-world organising.

Agency only takes us so far in our understanding of what people do in games and immersive experiences. As games become the lens through which people understand and interpret the world, and as they occupy more of our time and transform our relationships, we need to examine the fantasy that players are really being given. In so many cases, this is the fantasy of sovereign agency. But there is an alternative.

This essay was first published in Das Videospiel, an international journal of narrative design, part of The Evergreen Review. My thanks to Miracle Jones for their editing. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

For an example of Nordic Larp tackling difficult subjects, read my piece on the Immersion Larp Festival, which featured a larp inspired by life under siege in Gaza.

Net immigration to the UK increased significantly in recent years for three reasons: people coming to work (particularly in healthcare), study (because international students’ fees are essential to keep them afloat), and for humanitarian considerations.

Humanitarian migration spiked due to the Ukraine war and the introduction of the Hong Kong BN(O) visa in response to the imposition of the National Security Law in 2020.

Not everyone offered a safe route chose to settle in the UK, but since 2020 over 150,000 Hongkongers and 200,000 Ukrainians did.

350,000 people is not a majority of the net migration to the UK, but it is a substantial chunk. Moreover, it is temporary. These two facts are rarely repeated in discourse about immigration, though, which favours a story of “strangers” inundating the country.

No doubt I will be told that Hongkongers and Ukrainians are “the good ones”. It’s something I’ve heard all my life whenever immigration rears its head in the news and I bring up my own experience as the child of two immigrants from Hong Kong. Like some other immigrants, I could easily take on this identity and say we should raise the drawbridge.

But being among “the good ones” is not something permanent. I grew up near Liverpool, a city with a long history of Chinese residents, the first of whom arrived in the 1860s due in part to British colonialism. Liverpool prides itself on being welcoming, but after Chinese seamen were instrument to Britain in WW2, thousands were forcibly repatriated following a wave of racism fuelled by the media. Families were torn apart and left in the dark because the Home Office was sworn to secrecy.

Britain benefitted immeasurably from its centuries of imperialism and colonialism. Many are deeply proud of this era and the resulting Commonwealth, but the moment they are asked to take responsibility, they look away. When white British people complain about cities being taken over by immigrants, do they mean we should bulldoze Chinatowns and curry miles? How many foreign restaurants in a row will they permit?

Cutting immigration will cost the country dearly. And if the UK is indeed an island of strangers, it sure as shit ain’t because of immigrants, unless I missed the memo that all white Brits are dear friends.

ACMI did a fantastic job producing the talk, which is now online:

One “object” I explore is Minority Report’s ill-fated but hugely influential gestural computer interface, briefly tracing its evolution through Jeff Han’s famous multi-touch demo at TED, Microsoft’s Kinect, and now the Apple Vision Pro. Other works include Death Stranding (exoskeletons), Westworld (androids), Master and Commander (frigates), System Shock (neural interfaces), Paprika (DC Mini dream control device), and Sliders (parallel universe travel).

I usually cover games, so it was a genuine delight to be invited to talk about some of my favourite films and TV shows too! My thanks to ACMI and Seb Chan (check out his newsletter) for the opportunity.

Voidspace Live is a lo-fi festival of interactive theatre, games, larp, and playable art happening in London on the weekend of 7-8 June 2025. It’ll have over 30 shows, fifteen of which are premieres, a five-room fully playable exhibition, four larps, two Jubensha, interactive Shakespeare, and plenty more. Check out the programme for Saturday and Sunday.

I’m especially excited because artists behind experiences I’ve previously covered, including The Manikins, Bridge Command, The Key of Dreams, and The Smoke, are presenting new work. There are very few festivals like Voidspace Live where you can see such a wide range of art so quickly, and even fewer that are this easy to reach: the venue, Theatre Deli, is right in the City of London, a stone’s throw from three different tube stations.

Tickets are £55 per day (£30 concessions). I will be there both days! If you come, I promise to say hello!

I’m also looking forward to the social side of the festival. A big part of the fun of these things is talking in the bar after a game or larp or show, not just with other participants but with the artists themselves. When else do you get to do that? As artistic director Katy Naylor told me, “no-one is going to enforce a creator/audience divide or hide in a VIP lounge.” That’s a world away from immersive industry clubs where entry costs hundreds or even thousands of pounds.

Katy is also responsible for the Voidspace Zine, a brilliant resource of essays and interviews with people making immersive theatre and interactive fiction and participatory art of all kinds. Here’s my brief chat with Katy about the festival, which has been edited for clarity and length:

Why is it important to have a festival that combines all the different kinds of art forms that Voidspace Live does?

Interactive theatre, arthouse games, performance art, and larp all invite the participant to become incorporated into the performance in some way. They all invite co-creation and a form of engagement that is magical. And yet they often are seen as completely different things, attracting different audiences. 

If you put all of them together, under one roof, and encourage people to take a punt and try something new, they love it. You find that if you like “this sort of thing”, you’ll like other “this sort of thing”s too, even if you thought you wouldn’t. 

Why did you decide to run a festival after writing Voidspace? It’s an unusual step, especially for a solo writer!

I think the idea for a festival came about to prove a point! Voidspace started as an online zine to encourage indie lit writers to experiment with interactive writing: interactive fiction is its own community with its own competitions and jams, and it seemed wild to me that these two very similar worlds didn’t speak to each other. That germ of commonality spreads beyond the writing community: interactive theatre, dance, performance art, indie games, larps. 

I started out by interviewing creators and publishing listings and got increasingly frustrated by how engrained the division can seem. The theatre folks look askance at the environmental folks, who look askance at the larpers, etc. 

And so the idea for a festival was born: get a bunch of people under one roof with a bunch of these things, on a single ticket so there’s no risk in trying something outside their usual frame of reference, and they’ll finally understand what I’ve been banging on about for so many years: that these forms have more to unite them than divide them. It gets participants and creators thinking in new ways, and everyone has a bloody good time in the process! This is why it’s important that the festival is over a single weekend. If it was spread over a fortnight, the dance people would go to the dances, the theatre to the theatre, and so on. 

Financially, it’s bonkers, especially if – as we do – you want to pay your artists decently and not take income from submission fees. It’d be a lot less risky to run this thing over a month and do a door split on 30 shows, than offer a single ticket and fixed fee and hope we sell enough. But it’s the only way to create the open, try-anything-once environment that’s crucial to our mission. 

Does Voidspace Live have any institutional funding/support or is all funded via ticket sales?

Nope. We tried for Arts Council funding a few times, but it’s hard to communicate the value of the festival when they don’t necessarily have a grip on the power or importance of lo-fi interactive art (i.e. not just the stuff that relies on big tech), or the community’s need for this sort of space. 

We’re lucky to have received a lot of support in kind from Theatre Deli, our programme partner, and to have had some very generous donors through our crowdfunder. Without some form of subsidy, it’s just not possible to make something like this work.

Despite this, the bulk of our funding comes from ticket sales. If people want to see this sort of work happen, the best way to support it is to buy a ticket. You’ll be supporting so many creators, and get to have a brilliant day or weekend in the bargain. Easy!