If you’re gonna do that, you might set it in a magic school, because historically those have been one of the most popular kinds of larps for kids.  But there’s a couple of problems here. For one thing, magic schools have a pretty unsavoury association with Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling. For another, most fantasy adventures portray the protagonists as rebels fighting against fascists.

That’s great if you want to fight comic book villains, but it doesn’t address the fact that toxic communities are pulling in more and more young people today – people who think they’re the heroes fighting for good, people who are attracted by the sense of belonging and dignity and purpose that these communities offer. 

How do you teach that? Well, a magic school larp might work – if you had the teenagers play the fascists, not the rebels. That way they’d get to understand and experience first-hand just what it is that attracts people to these toxic communities – the rituals, the certainty, the binding of an in-group through exclusion and bullying, the constant praise from authority figures.

Now, if you were going to do that, you’d have to design it incredibly carefully. Partly because it’s a serious and sensitive topic, and partly because if it’s too didactic, teenagers will simply check out. But mostly, it’s because you can’t risk accidentally teaching teens that fascism is actually awesome. To be really careful, you need to prepare them for the experience months in advance, and have a lot of good onboarding and safety mechanics. 

That’s what Epos Daimon does. It’s an antifascist magic school larp in Denmark where teenagers role play as fascists. Players are high ranking students at a prestigious school at the very heart of a theocratic, fascist regime. For four days, they hunt down witches and monsters, they denounce their parents as rebels, they build technology for the state, they sing songs and go on marches and take part in rituals. Students who break the rules aren’t cast out – they’re drawn in closer, re-educated, assimilated. They discover for themselves just how quickly their morality can slip when they’re praised for it by teachers and nobles, when that’s what the entire community is doing.

Epos Daimon was designed by Katrine Wind, a veteran larp designer, for a boarding school called Epos that uses larp as an educational tool. It’s inspired not by Harry Potter, but Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials universe. If you’ve read those books, you know a big part of that universe is that every person has their own “daemon”, an animal that represents their souls. 

That was key to Daemon, a larp for adults designed by Katrine, and it was also crucial when Katrine adapted it into Epos Daimon for teenagers. In the larps, players are paired up, with one playing the human and the other playing the daemon. It makes the experience more powerful and more safe, because it means no player is truly on their own, even when they’re being bullied within the game.

I was immediately intrigued when I first heard about Epos Daimon last year, and the more I’ve learned about it, the more I think it could be an incredibly valuable way to illustrate to teenagers the dangers and the allure of toxic communities – one they won’t instantly tune out.

During my conversation with Katrine, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the origins of Epos Daimon, how she made a theocratic fascist regime feel real, the extensive preparation, onboarding, and debriefing that students underwent, her theories on “river rafting [larp] design” and “dyadic play”, and her background as a larper and larp designer.

I also produced a video essay which uses our conversation almost in its entirety. If you plan to quote anything, please use this written interview as we’ve made corrections and provided the full context here, since English isn’t Katrine’s first language.

Thank you so much for being here, Katrine. So first, can you tell me a bit about what Epos Daimon is?

[Epos] is a boarding school for 15- to 16-year-olds in Denmark that uses larp and play as an educational methodology. Students go there for a year, and are there during the weekdays and some weekends, away from their parents. Each year they have a trip, usually abroad, where they go to a longer larp. For many years, they’ve done a College of Wizardry larp in Poland, their own version.

But the organiser of [the trip] didn’t want to do that anymore. And some kids don’t like J.K. Rowling and all that, so they wanted to do something else. A teacher down there had played one of my larps and had recommended the headmaster talk to me. The headmaster was someone from the Danish larp community; I didn’t know him personally but we built a really nice bond and found out what we wanted to do. 

For the past 15 years, I hadn’t done anything for people under 18. I wasn’t sure I knew anything about making educational larp, and I wasn’t comfortable with that, so I had to make sure that he’d be responsible for being the pedagogue, so that it was good content for the kids and I would do the larp experience.

So it’s for 15- to 16-year-olds?

Yeah, 15 to 17. It’s at the end of their [Danish] primary school, before they go to high school or further education. They’ll usually have their last year or last years of school there. It’s usually kids who are pretty interested in larping to begin with. But some of them haven’t [larped]. Maybe they have mostly been cosplayers, or maybe it’s completely new to them, or they’ve done some D&D around a table – but the live role play part is something many of them have an interest in. Then they also have school weeks where they do different themes [in larp]. So they do some [larp] but not in this kind of form before this [annual trip].

They can’t do a long form, spectacular blockbuster larp every week at the school. That’d be too expensive or disruptive.

Absolutely. They’ll put math into some [larps], history lessons, English lessons – they’ll take it all into a themed week several times during the year. And then maybe they do smaller one-day larps. 

But [Epos Daimon] is for fun, both a great and memorable experience – and not actually part of the curriculum, which their normal classes are. Usually they would go to a castle in Poland. But what the headmaster and I agreed was, “Yes, it’s really cool for them to be in a castle, but the trip there itself exhausts them so much.” So we found a castle in Denmark, and it doesn’t matter that they are in Denmark when we are [inside the castle and playing].

Historically they went to College of Wizardry, which was originally literally based on Harry Potter, then for obvious legal reasons it became Harry Potter-inspired. So when the Epos students were still going there, they had a fun Harry Potter-inspired experience of being in a magic school?

Yes, exactly. Everybody knew about wands and spells, so even though the spells were called something different, they still knew about being in a magic school. It was very familiar to them, either the Harry Potter universe itself or something homemade that looked like it. That was also a consideration – what should we design so that they’re all on board? 

I suggested I could adapt something that would challenge them a bit more, larp-wise. The students will definitely find fantasy larping on their own – some of them already have – and many of them will find vampire larps, many of them will find D&D. But we also wanted to make sure they were introduced to Nordic larp, because that’s not something they’d necessarily find themselves. So I focused on: how do you make your own character, how do we create a coherent world, how do we workshop so that we are playing the same thing, and what themes could we consider when the larp isn’t just about stats and spells and explosions? 

I thought I could adapt my larp Daemon, inspired by Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy – some might know it as The Golden Compass. That’s also a magical version of our world. I didn’t want to take the adventure out of it for the kids, it should still be a special experience and not just a historical larp. But the grown-up Daemon version is only for 36 people. I decided I’d rather just make one for them.

How many students took part in Epos Daimon?

85 kids. The original version of the larp was definitely not able to do that.

Unlike some forms of larp, Nordic larp isn’t stats-driven or about beating other people in combat, and it’s often co-created and has serious themes. Presumably there were some pretty serious or adult themes you couldn’t bring into Epos Daimon?

Absolutely. To make sure there are no unclear boundaries, anything like sexual violence or sexual interactions in general aren’t themes that exist [in Epos Daimon]. They can have some romance – if they’re 17, that’s okay, with others their own age. But we set some clear limits and their headmaster agreed, because then there’s no misunderstandings or off-game issues with bleed.

Let’s get into Epos Daimon. It’s inspired by His Dark Materials. What is the world like, why is it interesting, and who do the students play?

There are many really interesting things about the original source material. The thing I use the most is that people have their soul outside their body in the form of an animal. That’s called your daemon, or daimon in Danish – that’s why it’s called Epos Daimon. You can only go a very short distance away from each other without pain. It’s like an invisible bond: when one hurts, so does the other, and you can kind of read each other’s thoughts. 

I have always been very fascinated with what I call “dyadic play“. That means having some kind of very close connection, either narratively or as a character identity/concept, with another person. I would say that Daemon is the most extreme form I could imagine as a dyadic play experience. This means these kids are playing two people that are one character. One is the human and the other is the daemon – the soul. 

Obviously they can’t really read each other’s minds, but we run a lot of [pre-larp] workshops around how you can have awareness of where the other person [in a pair] is, how you share a story, how you build a character together. That challenges them as writers, designers, and larpwrights. It also means they take responsibility for both their own game and the co-creation with another, which ensures that they’re less lonely. 

You know, these kids, some of them have really rough childhoods. [The design] makes sure that they’re not standing on the outside looking at the fun, but always have a buddy with them. That was the perfect setup for these kids.

It’s not like one person can go off to another part of the castle, they have to be close to each other in the game. They’re always talking to each other. Even if they’re fallen out, which I know happens in His Dark Materials, they still come back together. Then we have this idea of the Magisterium, which is a fascist organisation?

Theocratic, yeah.

Now, normally the kids would be rebels. That’s what happens in Harry Potter. But you’re doing something really different here.

Yes, absolutely. I wanted a school setting. College of Wizardry was very good because it’s recognisable and it gives a structure to their days. But I was thinking that, as you said, with Nordic larp, we also try to explore societal structures or relationship structures. Competitive [experiences] often make it more fun to be the rebels or try to win, and that’s what I tried to take out of this.

There’s also a very serious theme that emerged. When I was designing this in 2023 and 2024, suddenly both in America and with a lot of the politics in Europe, things had gotten really, really dark, really fast. The kids saw some of their friends disappear into manosphere forums. Conspiracy theories were on the rise and being legitimised.

I’m also a political scientist myself, so I thought of the brilliant, brilliant film, The Wave or Die Welle (2008). A classroom teacher teaches his class to be fascist, and then they don’t stop when he tries to stop them. I was thinking, how can we help kids understand why people get lured into these toxic communities? Not everybody who is attracted to a toxic community is stupid or evil, which often becomes the explanation. I wanted to show them the attraction of it. So we have this theocratic fascist regime – if we make the kids part of it, I could try to show them the allure, because we misunderstand what is drawing people in. It’s about dignity and belonging and purpose and clarity. And by letting them feel it themselves is definitely something this larp can offer.

Most students in Epos Daimon role play as supporters of a theocratic fascist state. I’m going to attempt to word this carefully, but you’re trying to show why some would willingly choose to belong to it. You have rituals and songs and things like that. How did you bring that to life in terms of what students are actually doing?

First of all, I brought twenty-five good friends as volunteers to depict the grown-up world. They were the teachers. They were parents. They were also rebels we had to do something about. 

I tried to make a very obvious otherness in the lessons. So, for example, one of the lessons was monster hunting, but one of the things we were hunting were witches that were actually just people, and some of the students were even witch-born. We made them ashamed of it and hide it. Basically, I showed them the “inclusion through exclusion” mechanism so that we are the in-group and it’s us against them. 

The teachers praised the students all the time when they adhered to the system, and when they bullied each other into adhering. They felt proud and seen and important and felt good when they were actually adhering to the system. That’s the mechanism that lures people in so fast, in my opinion. None of this is science-based. It’s just a political scientist’s take on something that sounds pretty obvious to most people.

Students playing witches weren’t just kicked out of the game or taken to some different thing. Other students who were loyalists would draw them in, they would hold them tight.

Yeah, they would draw them closer. I’m not sure this is what actually would happen in many of these [toxic] communities, but at least one of the mechanisms was that we have to draw them closer, we have to teach them, we have to keep an eye on them, we have to make them part of us, we have to assimilate them. That’s obviously also an off-game structure to make sure no players are just thrown out or killed [thus removing them from the game permanently] but it is actually something that happens in cults as well.

You mentioned cults. Are there any other organisations or parts of history that you drew upon?

I’m not a historian, but the fascist regime of Italy, obviously Nazi history, there’s been some cults that I’ve looked at as well. But basically, it’s just human psychology, much of it, and bullying structures. Even though it’s on a very, very extreme societal level with many of these really dangerous political communities, it’s not that different from how bullying works in a schoolyard.

If I could keep that relatable to the students, they’d also recognise it themselves more than if it was about, “We need to murder this whole group of people.” It was much closer [to them] because it was like, “My friend was [a child of] one of these rebels, but at least now they showed that they didn’t want to be their child and publicly renounced their parents. So that means now we’re in the same group and they’re OK.”

Can you talk me through what a typical day would look like? It was like three or four days long, is that right?

Yes, four days. They’d have an off-game time in the morning where we could see if anyone needed anything. They could get practical information. Also, teenagers – many of them neurodivergent as well – so many of them needed a little extra support, like, “You have to eat now!” [laughs]. You have to just make sure that they were “off-game OK”. There were ten teachers from Epos taking care of the off-game needs. The rest of us were there as the game helpers. 

When going in-game, we would start with communal singing. We had these two songs we wrote and practiced from home, so we sang them every time we went in-game. They knew them by heart. Then we would make our greeting [like a two-word chant] that was very powerful. We said a few words, then raised our hands in a certain way. When a hundred people did that, it was super, super powerful, so we did that as often as possible – also when greeting the teachers and each other. We made it a symbol and a tradition, a ritual to symbolise belonging to the in-group. 

Then we would go to either a lesson or, sometimes, a club you were part of. You had lessons where you were with the same classmates, then there were shifts to clubs based on interests, basically like houses. You’d have maybe one and a half hours of lessons with a break in between. We’d have a meal where we were sitting with the teachers up front and then the kids present and eating in-game. And we would have then club time. There was free time as well. 

A lot of the students got punishments where they had to go and do extracurricular stuff if they hadn’t been adhering to the rules, and a lot of them thought that was a lot of fun, right? Then we talked with them as teachers. So they had three blocks of different kinds of lessons each day. One of the nights there was Lanciers, a dance party in a very well-mannered, very proper way. 

We also had a nighttime [event] from 10pm to 11pm. The students’ characters were supposed to be to bed, but this was an hour where the off-game students were allowed to actually run around the castle. We were patrolling the corridors so they could do stuff that they weren’t allowed to do [in-game] and possibly get caught. But at 11pm they had to be really in bed

They slept in the castle?

They slept in the castle, yes.

Obviously you spent a long time preparing the students with workshops and onboarding. Absent that, you could imagine some people saying, “Isn’t this just a way to get people to think fascism is awesome?” but clearly this is an illustration. I think you told me that throughout the year leading up to the larp, you were talking to the students or they had lessons about it. What did that look like? 

It’s a school year for them. Already in September or October, I’ll be there and present the world to them, and what we’re going to do. They’ll watch The Wave in their lessons. They’ll talk about all of this. The teachers at the school are very good at teaching anti-fascist stuff. They also have subjects already where they are taught what it all means. 

But then we also built the characters together. I tried to tell them of the advantages of actually playing part of the system [i.e. the theocratic fascist state]. Because many of us, again, want to play the rebels, but larp-wise, it’s nice to have people who actually want to play [in] the system in that way. I tried to make sure they knew the interesting parts of upholding the structures of the larp with your own character. 

They also filled out a questionnaire before the larp, like, “Would you like to do more fringe science or monster hunting? Would you like to be a secret witch?” They could [express] different preferences. I built a character based on their wishes, then they built their [character’s] relationships while I was there. They kept doing it during the year and building their costumes. All the way from when they were introduced to it in October until the larp in March, I worked with them, and so did their teachers.

This is a whole process where you are preparing them for the larp and you’re giving them context. There are other larps and Nordic larps that do that, but I would contrast that with a lot of other immersive experiences or immersive theatre where it’s just like, “Let’s just go straight in, we can’t be bothered doing any workshops.” So what do the pre-larp workshops and onboarding look like? What sorts of things are you teaching the kids or getting them to practice?

I introduce them to the setting and they can ask questions. Many of them know about His Dark Materials but I usually get some people interested that weren’t necessarily into it before. I’ll start with some collaboration practices like, “What will an [in-game] greeting look like?” Then they go and workshop that and get some influence over what this world will look like. I show them some photos of previous Epos Daimon runs, from His Dark Materials, from my Daemon larp, so they can relate to it better. 

Then we practice some of the things that are part of this world, like what it feels like for characters to be pretty close to each other, how it is to move like an animal, and what are the safety mechanics. So there are different exercises.

Because these are boarding school students and [teenagers], they might not be friends with the same people as they were three months ago, so I make sure not to make [in-game character relationships] for them. I say, [your character needs] a best friend, you need an enemy, you need a … and we workshop that. Like, “Who needs [X relationship], is there anyone interested and to what degree”? I make them do co-creation in relationship workshops several times to make sure they’re comfortable with what they’re building into their character themselves.

Students’ social dynamics are arguably even more dramatic and changeable than with adults. You can’t just ask six months in advance, “Who’s your friend?” You need to double-check, like, the day before, “Are you sure you still want to play with this person?”

Yeah.

I’m really fascinated in the dyadic play. How does that play into the anti-fascist, theocratic themes of Epos Daimon specifically? Could you do the larp without it? And how is it better with the dyadic play?

I think it at least makes it a lot safer emotionally, because if you are the person being excluded or is threatened with the prospect of no longer being part of the “in-group”, it’s much nicer being two people standing there against the others. You’re never really alone, so the off-game loneliness doesn’t hit as much. You always experience the same thing as at least one other person. 

Usually when I do the adult version, people can’t go take a break away from each other unless they really need to. The kids will have to sometimes, and it’s OK. In Epos Daimon, if one of the [two players in a pair] needs to go and lie down, they can get into the game again more easily if they have someone who can explain, “So this and this and this happened,” which means their character has still been [in-game] and done stuff even though they as an off-game person weren’t there themselves. That’s really valuable with this age group, I think.

I’m not sure if the fascist part is better in a dyadic version, but it’s easier to be a bully and [perform] groupthink if you’re more people. If you’re only two characters standing around, there are actually four people present and suddenly you are a group who can be a structure. I think it helps in smaller ways, but maybe more with the play experience than with teaching them about the allure and danger of fascism; we could do that in a normal classroom as well.

I was wondering whether you had pairs of players who were “internally” torn about what they’re doing, where they’re disagreeing?

Totally. I would say 20 or 30% of the kids are so powerful and experienced [at role playing] that they would be ready to play with the rest of us [adults] now, even though they’re 16-17 – at least roleplay wise. I can’t speak of their individual emotional maturity. They would be super good and challenge a lot of us grownups, so many of them want to play around with the internal fractures that this type of dyadic play offers to explore at length.

Some of them also just think it’s fun to do the conflict part, but they can do it with someone they feel safe with. They’re definitely up for arguing with each other internally, like, “I’m not sure that this is what I actually want to do,” [and the other saying], “It is what I want to do.” And then they kind of tear each other apart in that way, emotionally.

I’m not going to ask for spoilers on how it ends, but I am interested in the debrief because they’ve gone through this really intense and, I assume, very emotional experience. What does that look like?

Usually we split them into smaller groups. Because the interest-based clubs have one teacher they’re connected to all through the larp, they’ll go with that teacher-couple, then we’ll talk about what is filling them up right now and how is this different from your normal life? [The students] say stuff like, “It was scary how easily they stopped seeing witches as humans” and how happy they are that they have a healthy community in their real life. So many of them will have reflections like, “Whoa, that was fast how my morality slipped because it was easy and felt good.” And that is exactly what we wanted. 

Some of them also need to talk about what we can do to resist, because it can feel pretty hopeless in real life – “But it’s my real friend who has gone to this internet community that’s really toxic.” And obviously, we don’t have the solution for all of that, but we try to make them comfortable talking to each other about it, talking to the teachers about it, and making them appreciate what a healthy community they have at the school, so they can actually talk about these complicated emotions. 

I want to return to what you said about whether this larp would inspire some to think that it would be really awesome [to join a community] that’s super toxic like this? And I will say it’s a risk. Definitely. It is a risk. We could introduce someone to something, but my claim would be rather that they do it while they are in a school with great, great teachers and other students who can help them with these thoughts. And the question is, would they have found it elsewhere anyway? 

It’s not like I hope that anyone will go that way, but it is a risk and that’s why I definitely need the school and the headmaster to say, “Yes, this is something we want to do, we are behind this and we know what we’re doing,” because it is scary what could happen.

Like you say, this is not a theoretical thing. Young people are finding these toxic communities right now, from all walks of society and political persuasions. So, how many times have you run the larp and how has it changed over time?

I ran it a few months ago this year for the second time, and I just agreed with them that I’ll do it next year as well. it changed a lot in the way that obviously we didn’t know how things would work. The teachers didn’t know the world. That was a bit like, “Oh, but I knew about the wands. What about this? What should I say? How can you talk here?” But I think it’s mostly the structure. 

We changed some of the schedule. We gave them a little longer break. We moved it to Denmark. The first time it was in the Czech Republic, in a beautiful castle, but then we just decided that it wasn’t worth the trip. We’d rather have more time where [the students] were actually rested.

We had more helpers as well, because when you need to go out [as] two people to be a helper [e.g. NPC], it takes more. And many more visits, phone calls, and letters from disappointed parents, or from two supportive parents. They loved that shit.

Oh, so in-game parents visiting them at the fictional school saying, “You’re doing great,” or, “You denounced me!”

We made some of the board members of the school the kids’ parents, because they gave status to the students who wanted that. Both years, we’ve had the [in-game] king visit to see the new science stuff that the students have been doing, because it’s a prestigious school for the nobility, the top of society. Some of the kids have a noble and a rebel parent, and they don’t even know that, then they get a visit from both. 

We combine the down-to-earth stuff with things like a “steampunk science” witch-suppression machine. Another example of the scientific stuff we put in to balance out the very emotional play was that we had these really complicated marble ball lanes that took, like, eight hours to build and then it can do all kinds of mechanical stuff. We put these items there because some of the kids just want to tinker a little bit.

There was this great, great kid building one during the larp because he wanted to just sit there by himself, and he came in at exactly the right time, all proud, like, “I fixed the witch-suppression machine!” and everybody cheered and he became the hero at that moment. But it meant that the witches couldn’t actually escape as they wanted to, so it was actually pretty terrible for them! But he was the “systemic hero”, and it was such a great way of showing the terror of this regime.

Wow, that’s fascinating! So there are 85 players and 25 volunteers plus ten teachers, and on top of that you’ve got more parents or board members?

Those are taken from the 25 helpers, so we have 12 or 14 people dedicated as teachers and staff of the school, and the rest are like monsters or different parents or [NPCs].

It must be quite fun for the parents and the volunteers. They get to play and do something meaningful. Presumably that makes it easier to get people to volunteer.

It definitely seems so. A few weeks ago, I asked if [the helpers] wanted to join again, and I think it was 80% of people that said, “Yes” instantly, even though it was, like, four days they have to take out of their holidays. I’m just so impressed that everybody wants to join voluntarily.

And they’re not getting paid. I want to zoom out a bit now. I understand Denmark is kind of the capital of the world when it comes to young people larping, and this has been a long-term strategy. Can you tell me more about that? You have larp schools in Denmark, what does the youth larp scene look like?

I’m not really an expert on that, but it’s true that it’s a long-term strategy. To begin with, I think you have to see the connection to where the money comes from. In Finland, they’ve really succeeded with making larp an art form, so it’s from cultural institutions that you can get support from, but in the Danish communities it’s youth institutions and funding focused on activities for kids and youth. More importantly, we have a national [larp] organisation that’s stronger than anywhere else in the larping world, and you can be represented as local organisations. 

In Denmark, we have a massive organisational tradition in that if you’re a football club, if you are a scouts association, music school, everything is a voluntary association – and so are the larp clubs. That means that we have a huge tradition for voluntary work and organising activities in that way. 

I would say most of the kids’ [larps] are now magic schools and fantasy larps. I started [larping] when I was a grown-up, but when I was younger, it was mostly only fantasy larps for kids.

Tell me about your larping and larp design background. How long have you been doing it for?

I’m 38 now. I started when I was 19, at the end of high school, where I come from. I was doing some amateur theater and I just thought it wasn’t creative enough, then I found these communities where you could improvise. The people I went to high school with had this local [larp] association, and when The Lord of the Rings was big, there were like 300 people [playing]. That was a lot for a local organisation, way out in the western part of Denmark, three hours from Copenhagen. Almost right away, when I was 19, I got a job as a substitute teacher, and in that setting I was allowed to make some [larps] for the kids. I just played locally to begin with. 

In 2016, I went to my first English-language larp, then later that year, [I larped] abroad as well. That’s when I found that in the local organisation we’d been doing Nordic larp within a fantasy setting. There was all the stats and competition and everything belonging to the “gamist” larp tradition, but we’d been playing Nordic larp within that. So I’m lucky I found the Nordic larp community. I play all kinds of things, including non-Nordic larp stuff. And I appreciate that a lot. [Nordic larp] is just my preferred style when I design.

That means you’ve been designing almost as soon as you started larping.

Yeah, that’s actually true. It’s also because I wrote a lot already – small novellas and some theatre scripts. I just thought it was nice to facilitate some of the play we had together.

What do you like about designing? Why do you think you do it?

Basically, to make things work between people and facilitate the best possible experience. If you go way back, my larp design philosophy is that good design is just probability calculations. With good design, you heighten the probability that the most possible people will have the best possible time. 

I mean, you can have the best time in your life alone at home in a closet [Mike Pohjola’s The Empty Closet larp]. I know some people have had that [laughs]. But for me, what I love is collaboration and interaction, and [good design] can increase the chance to get a fun experience around that. Solving problems of how you make something that is interesting, challenging, builds relations, builds experiences and builds immersion is what’s interesting about larp design for me.

I really enjoyed your article about “river rafting design”. Can you tell me a bit more about that and how it fit into Epos Daimon?

My river rafting design concept is something I made because I think we’ve been structuring larps wrong. I think we’ve structured larps after the Hollywood model [of storytelling], because that’s what most media is inspired by, so that there’s a climax in the end. The problem for me is that many media art forms are based around one coherent story, but I would like everybody to feel like they’re a main character. Usually, when there’s an end-of-the-world plot, or when something unexpected or highly dramatic connected to some overarching plotline happens in the end, often it won’t fit with the story that you’ve created for yourself. River rafting design is a way of saying, when you design something, design it earlier in the larp because then you have more opportunities for emotional impact that is meaningful for a larger part of the players. 

The best larp experience in your life can be in a larp structured in a way where there’s nothing happening and then there’s a climax at the end. The problem is that if the climax doesn’t work for you, you’re out of luck with no second chances. So if you as a designer can put in stuff where you offer the possibility that players could experience emotional impact earlier in the larp, then you have a bigger chance of that happening. I do that specifically by trying to make the characters dense, not necessarily long, but interesting and complicated and highly playable, meaning the things that you put in as dilemmas in the characters should not be solved before or easily solvable during the larp. You should make complicated relationships that are actually interesting to enact with your physical body while you’re there at the larp. And you should make the setting really interesting and front-loaded. 

The front-loading concept is probably something that people have heard a lot about, this front-loaded setting is something like, “Why don’t we start when it’s interesting instead of ending with something interesting?” Often, there’s a big battle at the end of a larp or someone dies. Why not start there and see what happens? So, many of my larps start at the very end of a big war or right when things are getting uncertain, but we have a lot of story to play on. I think that creates a lot of basis for creativity and inspiration for interesting stories.

If you just book a location and write some characters, you make things very dependent on [players’] chemistry with co-players and if [they] like the character. This setup means that nothing happens unless you as a player happen to create it. That can be fine, but the probability for an impactful experience is lower. So I think having mechanics like, “[Players] can’t go more than two meters from each other,” or “Two [players play] one character together,” can be interesting to play with no matter whether you like your character or not. There are just more strings you can pull, more tools that you can use to make your boat rock. 

Then there’s the most unusual part of river rafting design compared to so many larps I participated in: I front-load the pacing, which means that the events that I put in, or something [vivid] that everybody experiences, I put in the beginning, because then I start rocking their boat. If I rock the boat at the end, it might not be as meaningful. I don’t know where [players] are with their story. But when I’ve written the characters and made the mechanics, I can make them practice those at the beginning of the larp by making events or set-ups that actually require them to act as their characters and use the mechanics right away. That has the advantage that they start getting into the larp from the get-go instead of looking for a time to actually start engaging in the larp. Because I believe that when we act, we experience. So I make them act. Like, maybe some immediate crisis. It doesn’t have to be an action-filled event, but it has to be something where you need to react from the beginning, because I just hate walking around saying greetings for three hours [laughs].

Yes, I’ve definitely seen that in some immersive experiences [laughs]. In a way, you’re saying at the start of the larp, you have more control over the plot, over the experience, so you should make it dramatic. In video game terms, you put it more “on rails” than later on. In the aftermath of a war, there’s negotiations, you’ve got people who’ve lost, you’ve got people who’ve won, and that’s exciting. Then you can slow down and have people develop their relationships. You also said you want to give people complicated dilemmas and relationships that require them to use their bodies physically. What does that look like specifically, for using their body versus not using their body?

[If my character is] described as the most beautiful and wonderful and desirable person in the world, but it’s not in other people’s character [descriptions] and it’s not said anywhere what I should use that information for, that’s fluff description. That’s not something that I can do anything with. However, if it’s then written into your’s and another person’s character that I’m the most desirable thing that’s out there, but that I then hate both of you, that’s something to actually play with in an engaging way when we are then placed at a dinner table together for three hours and have to sit next to each other. 

That’s something where you have to act. Another example could be that within this setup, you have a task that you have to propose to this person. Some people like to have jobs in larps, right? So you have a task on a spaceship. That might be good enough. Then you’re doing something with your body, but a complication comes: something happens in the pacing that you don’t know, or suddenly another person shows up that wants you to do something else, and suddenly you have a conflict with your boss. 

It’s basically; what am I physically doing with my body? It doesn’t have to be [represented] in every single [relationship]. Some of the relations can be just emotional, but if there’s no agency in acting, if it’s just that you hate each other, okay, we’ll just stay away, won’t we? But then I’ll try to create either writing or situations, pacing, mechanics so we are forced together.

That’s really interesting. I want to wrap up by going back to Epos Daimon. One of the things you’re doing is showing people the appeal of the dignity and belonging and clarity you get inside of some toxic communities. It reminds me of how a lot of political commentators say people aren’t socialising enough now, that everyone’s just looking at their screens and we should return to churches and choirs and all that. But that doesn’t seem to be working. You’ve talked about how in larp, something that is really powerful is designing structures for social relationships, so people have reasons to talk to each other. That can be fun and meaningful. To what extent do you think larp has a role to play in creating a healthy form of dignity and belonging and purpose outside of toxic communities?

Oh, I think it can absolutely have a very, very good influence and be an example of a community where we can do something like that and where we are used to designing social situations.

In the broader larp community and as grownups, I definitely think there’s also the risk of exclusion in the larp community. What is the individual responsibility? What is the community responsibility? But I think we have the capability to be more aware of it and can definitely play a role in all of that. However, maybe this problem is larger outside of larp communities as well. So, if you can come together and do something social, I don’t care if you are a Scout or you go to larp – but maybe larp can open some people’s eyes to what you can do. 

I don’t think that larp can solve things in itself, but I think larpers can help make these healthier communities.

Are there other schools or other institutions that are interested in Epos Daimon? It’s still early, you’ve only done it twice, but is that something you think about?

I’ve had a few people ask what it’s about, like you’re doing now, I’m really happy that you want to talk about it. But, you know, I have a full-time job besides this, so it’s not something I’m actively pursuing. But I think it would be pretty cool if someone wants to look at it or maybe even improve it, because I’m just doing it after work sometimes. 

I think there’s a lot of potential. It doesn’t even have to be the same setup or the setting. There are some learnings about the dangers of toxic communities as well as the fun we create together that could be pretty universal. If Danish kids can make a boarding school British vintage setting work, then especially across Europe and maybe America, it would be pretty easy to make something adapted to local kids. But there needs to be someone responsible for the social structures off-game because I would never take responsibility for that.

Yes, running this in another location or at another school requires a whole community of people and a long time to prepare.

Yeah, or else just like giving the concept over to them, and then they’ll do it in the way they know works for them, right? All of this is written in Danish. It could pretty easily be translated, but maybe that’s not the most interesting part. Maybe it’s the basic ideas that are the most interesting, and they can build their own version from there. That would be fine with me if anyone wanted to do something with that.

We’ll try and get people interested! Is there anything else you want to mention?

It’s really nice when people can do something that’s a very good experience while also being a lesson. I didn’t want to make this just an anti-fascist lesson. Obviously, that’s a very important theme for me, but it was also really important to make a great experience.

We need great experiences, just for getting a little escapism and making sure we have some good interactions with other humans when things are dark. Just have some fun with all of this, is my suggestion.

That’s really important. You can have the most well-intentioned message but if it’s not fun or engaging or thrilling, then people have choices and they can just do something else that is more fun and maybe not as fulfilling. Thank you so much, and good luck with next year’s larp. 

Thank you so much, Adrian.

Further Reading

Here’s Katrine’s bio from the Nordic Larp Wiki, which also lists selected articles and talks:

Katrine Wind is a Copenhagen-based writer and Larp designer. In 2019, she founded the independent and voluntary based Danish Larp organisation Narrators Inc. So far, the organisation only consists of her, but it has supported other larps in the larp community. 

Complex and meaningful characters as well as many opportunities for emotional impact is in the core of all of Katrine’s larps in a framework she calls River Rafting Design (published in the 2025 Knutepunkt book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: a breathing corpus). 

Katrine insists on a community of kindness, tolerance and respect for cultural differences in the larps she is responsible for. Concepts like “The House of Bravery” is core to all her projects. She exercises a strict time management policy at her larps and aims for clear communication as well as predictability both for participants and crew. 

She has helped as a consultant on many international larps from other designers and offers this especially to newer organisers.

You can contact Katrine at katrine@narrators.eu.

There is no complete history of the College of Wizardry – it seems to have been mired in controversy ever since it began in 2014, partly due to the organisers falling out – but a great start is the free 2017 book The Magic of Participation, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola.

The same authors also edited another book, Nordic Larp, which is also free and provides a great introduction to the tradition.

Magic schools are a common format in Nordic larp for children. These days, most have departed from the typical Harry Potter tropes. Here’s a fun talk by Mike Pohjola about the design of his local magic school:

Voidspace Live is happening on Saturday 6th to Sunday 7th June at the very centrally-located Theatre Deli in London. You can visit for as little as £15/day, which gets you the new Art Pass with access to the event’s games and playable art, while the £65/day ticket gets you into three shows.

This year, I’m looking to the latest work from artists like Yannick Trapman-O’Brien, who made the brilliant Undersigned and Telelibrary, and John Robertson, the man behind the maniacally funny “live action video game” The Dark Room.

But I’m just as excited to see work by artists I’ve never encountered before, like TomYumSim’s Trainwreck:

Taking inspiration from Glasgow’s infamous “immersive” Willy Wonka knockoff and overhyped global fiasco ‘Fyre Festival’, this is immersive madness at full steam ahead. Toot Toooot!!

and Mia Foster and Ariana Aragon’s Yours Truly, which:

narrates the negotiation of power, fantasy, and desire between a student and their teacher. Born from research around the ethics of participatory theatre, this show explores the ways we choose to care for one another. This is a love story, one that begins with meeting a stranger.

My own Jubensha Con was directly inspired by Voidspace Live’s no-frills ethos, which puts artists and accessibility first, so I’m glad to be going again this year. I’ll be there all Saturday until we’re kicked out (and probably beyond that) so do say hi if you’re around!

Note: These are my personal recollections and opinions, not necessarily shared by my co-organisers, Arlo Howard, “t&c”, Joe Strickland, and David Middleton.

Origins

Several people have asked me how Jubensha Con came about and why I had ended up organising it. Here’s the full story, which illustrates the importance of writing on a public stage and having spaces that encourage repeated spontaneous interactions over time.

Jubensha Con had its genesis at the Immersive Experience Network summit in October 2025, where I was running a panel about larp. Also present were an unusual number of jubensha designers including t&c from Suspense Studio (makers of the first original English-language jubensha), Joe Strickland from Chronic Insanity, and Arlo Howard (co-creator of Spy of the Year).

I knew t&c because he’d reached out following my March 2025 blog post on jubensha, after which I interviewed him and invited him to speak in Edinburgh that May. I’d also met Arlo in that same year’s Nordic Larp conference and at other immersive events in London.

I didn’t know Joe, but I was struck by how excited the audience were in his workshop on making jubensha. Most had heard of jubensha before. They’d seen People Make Games’ 2024 video describing its enormous popularity in China and wanted to know more. Through his detailed and thoughtful presentation, Joe made the prospect of designing jubensha seem both creatively thrilling and commercially feasible.

I caught up with Arlo, t&c, and Joe, and pitched the idea of a convention. Suspense Studio had run jubensha at conventions like PAX since 2024, but as far as I knew, no-one had ever run a convention dedicated to English-language jubensha, where designers could network and run their games, the public could try out a wide selection, and experts could present their research.

I was sure this would happen on its own eventually, probably in 2027 in the United States, but it felt like this was an opportunity to make it happen even faster in the UK. I thought it might help that I wasn’t actively making jubensha and so could act as a kind of “neutral” organiser who wouldn’t have obvious incentives to favour any particular company. More prosaically, while I was still in the midst of writing my book on the history of immersive experiences, I had the time and funds to pay a venue deposit, and I’d previously organised other events.

The day after the IEN Summit, Arlo connected me to our venue, Theatre Deli, and things moved rapidly thereafter. I was confident there would be enough interest in at least a small event, and with the promise of jubensha by Arlo, t&c, and Joe, on 18th November I pre-announced the convention dates of May 8–9, 2026 on my blog and social media, inviting people to fill in a survey.

After receiving 140 responses in two weeks, it was clear we could hold at least a full day of games and talks. The official website went live and tickets went on sale on 18th January. By this point, people were pitching talks and games, including David Middleton, who joined as a co-organiser, and Ophelia Au, who knew Joe and ended up offering a free game at the convention and contributing a remote talk. Notably, Celia Pearce from Playable Theatre International and Northeastern University put together a group with extensive experience of jubensha from China to present a special session at the convention.

Hopefully this rather exhaustive account illustrates a few things:

1. Lots of people were influential in the success of Jubensha Con beyond the core group of organisers.
2. It may well not have happened if not for the IEN Summit. Real-world events are vital!
3. Writing blog posts can result in very good things.
4. You never know when you’ll end up working with acquaintances, so try to keep making them.
5. You can do things very fast if you keep them simple. Idea to realisation took just over six months.

Scheduling

We ended up with a 1.5-day event, running from Friday 6pm to Saturday 9pm. This gave us four slots of around four hours each, more than long enough for the typical two- to three-hour duration of our jubensha. Since David was offering some shorter games, theoretically an attendee could play five unique games during the convention, though in practice most seemed to play two or three.

We put all the talks in a single slot on Saturday afternoon, so attendees could maximise their game time. That meant talks were just fifteen minutes long, with very brief Q&As.

Tickets and Budget

I spent a while looking for a ticketing platform that would let us sell tickets to the convention and then sell tickets to individual timed games running in parallel, each with limited capacities. The only such platform I could find was, unsurprisingly, developed by an RPG convention whose name I forget and, in any case, didn’t look particularly useable for our purposes.

In the end, I sold convention tickets via Ticket Tailor and individual game organisers sold their own tickets (£15-30) separately, usually via Eventbrite. I wasn’t very happy with this outcome – it risked people buying game tickets without convention tickets, which did happen – but I believe it’s not unusual at big games conventions, so I resigned myself to it.

I wanted the ticket price to be as low as possible. Most immersive experience conferences cost hundreds of pounds to attend, and some cost well over a thousand. It goes without saying that this poses an enormous barrier to entry and stifles innovation. Jubensha Con tickets were £15, enough to cover the venue hire and discourage no-shows. David donated all the lanyards and I spent about £50 on printouts, masking tape, sharpies, flashcards, and a hole punch. Joe provided the gear to record our talks, and t&c paid for hot meals for our volunteers.

Other costs included the website (£72 for a two-year WordPress plan), domain registration (£35 for two years via Mythic Beasts), and event insurance (£58).

Excluding my travel and accommodation, I probably spent a few hundred pounds of my own money beyond the income from our 140 ticket sales. None of the organisers or volunteers were paid, though we did offer a small fund to subsidise travel and accommodation for speakers and attendees. While I realise even a few hundred pounds is too much for some organisers to front, especially if they aren’t getting paid, the point is that you really can run a good event on a comparatively tiny budget.

I could have spent more money making things fancier, but ultimately a highly unprofitable event is unsustainable and sets unrealistic expectations for other events with shallower pockets.

Venue

Theatre Deli takes over empty spaces in city centres and turns them into rehearsal and event spaces for artists. I’d visited their location in the City of London several times for The Smoke larp festival and Voidspace Live, and thought it was almost perfect for our needs, with plenty of small and medium-sized rooms that could host groups of six to eight around a table.

Almost, because it didn’t have an auditorium or a space where we could erect a stage for talks. This meant we had to host our talks in what was effectively an open-plan office. The building’s dense column grid meant we’d be in trouble if we had more than eighty people who wanted to watch the talks, and even then, I worried greatly about noise bleed from the game rooms. In a pinch, we were prepared to set up a simulcast room.

I felt a little bad holding the convention in London. I’ve lived in Edinburgh for several years and always want to run more events for people here. However, the very young nature of English-language jubensha demanded we give it the best chance of success, and that meant making it reachable tby the greatest number of potential attendees from the UK and Europe. Still, I didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t able to easily visit in advance.

Publication

I had hoped to print a small publication for the convention with speaker and talk descriptions, game info, and a few short essays and interviews. This wouldn’t have cost much at all – around £90 for twenty A5 pages via Mixam – but in early 2026 I was in the final stretch of writing my book and didn’t have the mental bandwidth to co-ordinate and design it.

Talks

I was honoured, then a bit intimidated, by the calibre of people pitching talks and requesting tickets. Academics and experts at the top of their fields in game studies and larp announced their intention to attend. Jubensha Con wasn’t an academic conference. We didn’t have their funding or institutional backing. Still, we were the first convention of our kind, and clearly that was very exciting for people studying jubensha-related topics.

Jubensha grew popular in China. It would’ve been unacceptable if we didn’t have anyone who’d worked or studied there, so I prioritised experts familiar with the Chinese scene. At the same time, jubensha came to China via Korea and France and, further back, Britain and the United States in the form of boxed murder mysteries, so I was happy that our British designers reflected the historically global nature of the wider form.

I informed speakers they could count on the audience knowing the basics, so they should skip any “jubensha 101” introductions and jump to a more sophisticated discussion.

Marketing

We sold out of tickets within weeks, and after we expanded our lineup and released extra tickets, those sold out quickly too. As such, no additional marketing was necessary beyond the organisers’ social media accounts, word of mouth, and my posting to various larp and immersive forums.

Initial Thoughts on the Event Itself

It’s still too early to assess Jubensha Con’s legacy. We plan to survey attendees for their feedback, and there are some press stories and blog posts in the works. It’ll be months and years before all the effects are known, however – hopefully in the form of new collaborations, new ideas, and new jubensha.

In the meantime, here are my initial thoughts on how things went:

Jubensha Games

• I suspect the convention was the first time most attendees had ever played jubensha, so some hiccups were to be expected. I didn’t sit in on any games but I heard some players acted in non-ideal ways, e.g., revealing more information about their character and backstory than they ought to have. I don’t blame anyone for this – probably they were approaching puzzles from a collaborative “let’s all solve this together” attitude of pooling information. Gratifyingly, even in these cases, players seemed to have enjoyed the game and I imagine expertise will only climb.
• Some players forgot which games they’d bought tickets to. They figured it out, but a central ticketing platform would have helped.
• Around 5–10% of players didn’t show up for their games. This was quite surprising, since games cost £15-30 each, and extremely disruptive given that jubensha require a certain number of players. We used a standby queue to fill available slots, which worked well. I’m not sure how suitable it’d be if we had a multi-location convention though – maybe we’d need a standby app or website.
• Ophelia Au had sent a couple of copies of Worms Against Humanity for attendees to play for free. As a short, GM-less, 4-player game for beginners, this was a perfect way to absorb players who weren’t able to get into a longer game or wanted something a bit quicker. Highly recommended!

Venue

• We needed more rooms! They were a bit smaller than expected, and jubensha can get noisy when things are dramatic, which doesn’t work for some players. I had booked an extra couple of rooms in anticipation of this, but to be really comfortable we really needed another two to three in addition to the seven we already had.
• Jubensha is an extremely space-inefficient activity compared to talks or chamber larps. Most games have five to seven people around a table, like tabletop role playing games – but unlike TTRPGs, you don’t really want to have multiple groups playing the same game in the same room due to spoilers. Yes, you can mix up games in the same room, but what if people are playing the other games later on?
• Most event venues don’t have lots of small rooms. We will need to figure out how to dampen noise in larger rooms to make this work better in future.
• That said, Chronic Insanity managed to run four games in a single room during the convention, so clearly it’s doable!

Ticketing

• Because we didn’t have every attendee’s name in advance, we got people to write their own nametags. It would’ve been a bit faster to print them in advance, but not that much faster.
• We had different coloured lanyards for whether attendees were OK to be photographed. What a great idea! This was much more visible than a sticker on their nametag and, I think, instilled more confidence than the usual strategy of the photographer saying “I’ll take a photo of you and remember not to use pictures of your face”.
• A handful of attendees had bought game tickets but not convention tickets. They were usually very apologetic but it was awkward and slowed down check-in. More impetus for a better ticketing platform!
• As expected, around 20% of convention ticket buyers didn’t show up.

Talks

• Since I wasn’t running any games, this was the area I was most responsible for and therefore more worried about. But they went really well!
• All our speakers hit their timing marks and delivered punchy talks that left the audience wanting more.
• Around ninety people attended the talks – more than I expected! Those around the edges were happy to stand or grab chairs from elsewhere in the venue.
• The audience were fantastic, bringing a lot of energy to proceedings and asking good (and brief!) questions. In particular, everyone loved the final talks by Yulin Tian and Joanna Lyu, who gave talks jam-packed with up-to-the-minute information about the Chinese scene – information that I don’t think has been written about elsewhere.
• The TV wasn’t big enough given our audience size – ideally we’d have had a projector.
• We hope to release slides and talk recordings, pending speakers’ permission.

Attendees

• I saw plenty of familiar faces from other “immersive” events in London like The Smoke and Voidspace Live – unsurprising given jubensha’s affinity with larp and interactive theatre.
• Also in attendance: video game writers and designers, creative professionals from TV, music, and movies, escape room fans, TTRPG makers.
• It was great to see Mike Pohjola bring his jubensha-adjacent Nordic larp to a design workshop, and in turn, for Yulin and Joanna to reference Nordic larp in their talks.
• A surprising number of people came from Europe, North America, and China. Often they looped Jubensha Con into an existing trip (e.g. AMAZE in Berlin was happening just a few days afterwards).
• There’s nothing I like more than bringing people from different areas together. A lot of attendees told me how many interesting people they’d spoken to, and jubensha’s ability to bring strangers together for dramatic role play was the perfect ice-breaker for players to chat after games.

Other Logistics

• Besides the organisers and their teams, we had two volunteers for the event: Miranda Lee and Margaret Maitland. For the most part, they staffed the reception desk and answered questions, and helped with setup and tidying up. Both had the chance to play one or two games and check out some of the talks.
• Ideally we’d have had one or two more volunteers so that the reception would have always had two people, and so I could’ve spent more time away from the reception helping out on the convention floor.
• While I understand the need for event insurance, I am quite resentful that it’s necessary for pro-social non-profit events like ours. If we think there’s a loneliness epidemic, we need to make it as easy as possible to organise social events.
• I completely forgot to put higher-priced sponsor tickets on sale, at £30–50. These are common at Nordic Larp conferences. They don’t get you anything extra, it’s just a way for well-off attendees to further subsidise the event. I think we would’ve sold ten or twenty, which would’ve boosted our travel and accommodation fund.

Final Thoughts

No event is perfect. We had a couple of complaints about the convention’s lo-fi trappings, which I think are broadly answered by its first-time, non-profit, zero-budget nature. And of course, there are lots of things we could have improved upon.

Overall, I’m very happy about the event. I was kept busy but it was less stressful than I expected and nothing really bad went wrong. Over a hundred people played multiple games of jubensha, attendees got to hear cutting edge talks and meet interesting people, and designers sold lots of tickets and boxed games. We moved the field of English-language jubensha ahead!

I imagine we’ll do another event, though I don’t know exactly when or where. More importantly, I hope other jubensha conventions are organised elsewhere!

If I’m being totally honest, I also hate the idea that someone else might rip off all the research I’ve put into my upcoming book about immersive experiences. If anyone’s going to rip me off, I want it to be me. So there’s an element of professional pride too, plus a touch of “I bet I could do that.”

Through a curious stroke of fate, I’m acquainted with some extremely popular YouTubers, which means I’m under no illusions that any video I make would ever do numbers. I’m too flighty to sustain the level of content production required to build up a big audience, and I like writing too much to give that up. And yet – wouldn’t it be fun to try making a few?

First, I had to decide what topic to cover. I have ideas for multi-hour epics, but that seemed unwise for my very first video essay. If I ended up hating it, it would’ve been a shame to have wasted so much time, and if I enjoyed it, I might regret burning a good topic with beginner’s mistakes.

But that didn’t narrow things down much: there are dozens of things from my research I could make a twenty-minute video about. Thankfully, this is when my natural indolence reared its head. Why write a brand new script when I could just reuse an existing one? I give talks about “immersion” all the time; in Gothenburg alone last month, I did three.

Of those three, the most well-received was my eight-minute talk about the 2013 movie Austenland, which was based on my April Fools’ Day “review” of Austenland as if it were a real immersive experience:

This, I felt, was the perfect subject. Mostly lighthearted and silly, but not without a serious point to make. And unlike my longer talk about the early 19th century Russian director Nikolai Evreinov, which I’ll put on this blog later, it came with a whole movie I could illustrate the essay with.

Topic secured, I moved to the next pressing matter: buying completely unnecessary equipment. I already had the podcaster’s standard Blue Yeti mic, but I’ve never liked using it; it’s unwieldy, especially with a pop guard attached, and it picks up surface vibrations too easily. Rather than a shotgun mic that would require its own tripod, I opted for a DJI Mic 3.

Wireless lapel mics aren’t really the done thing for video essays where you’re just sitting at a desk – they’re designed for people who are moving around – but they’re very easy to set up, which counts for a lot. Though the DJI Mic 3 is unquestionably overkill, I saved a bit of money by getting the new DJI Mobile Receiver rather than the fancy one with a built-in screen.

Next, I had to pick a camera. I have long lusted after those cool vertical “influencer” cameras with gimbals and stabilisers and screens, and the DJI Osmo Pocket 4 was newly released. Surely buying this would make me into a real YouTuber!

Try as I might, however, I couldn’t convince myself to spend £430 on a camera that I might only ever use once. I could use the DJI Mic 3 to get better audio on video meetings, whereas the Osmo Pocket 4 is best served taking footage in busy streets and theme parks, which I have no current plans for. At the very least, I ought to give my iPhone 17 Pro’s camera a go.

My first test with my iPhone involved me perching it on top of my MacBook with Belkin’s Magsafe iPhone Mount. This is designed for Continuity Camera, where your Mac uses your iPhone’s camera to capture video in real time. I suspected this would degrade the video quality but figured the ease of being able to see myself on my laptop screen was worth it.

It turned out that the video quality was only borderline acceptable for a 1080p recording, so after I remembered I could use my Apple Watch as a viewfinder, I just used the iPhone on its own. I don’t take many videos with my iPhone, so I was genuinely astonished at the image quality. In a well-lit room, any difference with the Osmo Pocket 4 or even an SLR is likely imperceptible.

With my equipment assembled, I found a good spot to film in and had a go at delivering my essay. Before long, I realised I had to write out a full script. I almost never write out talks in full – I prefer improvising from a detailed outline – but the video essays I like are much crisper. What’s more, I could already tell that editing would be way easier if I were working from a script. I am not such a good performer that I can make this feel spontaneous, however, so in future videos I hope to leave room for improvisation.

My script clocked in at 2,600 words, based on my talk and my blog post, but also on thirty prospective movie clips I’d collected by scanning the movie script and scrubbing through the movie itself. I saved a lot of time by doing all of this in Final Cut Pro (FCP), which lets you “favourite” sections of longer videos for easy retrieval.

FCP wasn’t my first choice of editing software. Since I was making a simple video, I’d been advised to use the free desktop version of CapCut. While it’s favoured by a lot of creators, as soon as I opened it up I had my doubts: this was not a “Mac-ass Mac app” that behaved like other native Mac apps. It didn’t even have a button to hide the windows! After I abjectly failed to figure out its smart masking tool, I gave up and downloaded FCP. It’s not free, but now that it’s part of Apple’s Creator Studio bundle, I could try it for 30 days and it’d only cost £13/month if I liked it.

Reader, I loved it. I know FCP has fallen out of favour in Hollywood versus Avid, but once upon a time it was used for actual movies and TV shows. In fact, I was worried it would be far too complicated for my needs. Thankfully, it had a surprisingly approachable UI that followed standard Mac conventions.

Just as importantly, it was blazingly fast. I’m shocked at how quickly I can import and edit and scrub through hours of footage, and how I can preview new effects in real time. Transcribing audio into captions takes seconds; colour correcting video clips is instant. When I had to synchronise the audio from my microphone to the video from my iPhone (I didn’t have my mobile receiver yet), it took no time at all. Even rendering the full video only took a couple of minutes. Finally, I have something that really pushes my MacBook M4 Pro.

The process of recording my twenty-minute script took the best part of an hour. I ran through it all in one go, doing extra takes when I knew I’d flubbed a line. The main downside here is that I don’t have a dedicated space with fully controllable lighting where I can set up a fixed camera; that meant that when, during editing, I realised there were a few lines I could’ve done better, there wasn’t a good way to re-record them without distracting changes in angle and lighting. I can address this, but only with a bunch of hassle and expense, which I’ll leave until later (if ever).

Finally, editing. Is it strange that I found this incredibly fun? FCP’s ease of use helps, but there’s something deeply satisfying about assembling a complete video out of bits of clips and sound and titles, and timing cuts for the best comic effect. I was planning to edit over a couple of days but I got so into it, I did it in a single evening. Maybe it shows! But I’m pretty happy with where it ended up, as a first try:

It won’t attract a big audience, but I found the process pleasant enough to do at least a couple more. These will be harder in some ways since I won’t be able to lean on an existing movie, but the subjects will be much more unique, such that I think viewers will forgive me for not having great footage for centuries-old events.

As for this blog, don’t worry: writing is my first love. There’s plenty more to come!

So for anyone who knows me, it’s probably no surprise that my next game, Strandfall, combines all those notes. Strandfall is a highly physical outdoor larp that I’m co-creating with Alex Macmillan as part of our new collective, Experimental Social Scene, supported by Immersive Arts funding.

This September, 30 players will embark on a desperate expedition in a real park in Edinburgh to uncover the nature of mysterious storms that are ravaging the world. Over the course of three hours, they’ll use our custom solarpunk-style “spatial computers” to forecast and investigate the storms, track down missing scientists, connect a long-distance radio network, and make fateful decisions that will change them as individuals and a community.

As Alex notes, many larps involve science-fictional or fantastical gadgets. Usually, participants rely on the power of imagination and role play to collectively perform their functions. In Strandfall, we’re building our “McNair-Feldman Devices” (named after its fictional inventors) for real. They contain a low-power, long-range radio for mesh networking beyond cellular and wifi service, a GPS radio, accelerometer and compass, a small ePaper display, all housed in a custom 3D-printed enclosure designed to be mounted on a standard camera tripod.

This doesn’t make Strandfall “better” than larps with non-functional devices like the sci-fi blockbuster Eclipse, but it does allow us to introduce new kinds of systems and gameplay into the experience that would be much harder if done manually.

Players might deploy MFDs across the park to create a network, use them to forecast the invisible storms, relay that information back to players at the base, and then track and even “storm chase” them while in scanning mode. Other players might use MFDs like surveyors, pinpointing the effects of past experiments in the park or discovering the boundaries of a mysterious Stalker-like exclusion zone.

Wouldn’t it be easier to use cheap smartphones instead of going to the trouble of designing entirely new hardware? That depends. Putting aside their hardware limitations (lack of long-range radios, displays that suffer in direct sunlight, etc.), the problem with smartphones is that people inevitably expect to interact with them like smartphones, which is to say, instantly and effortlessly. If we gave players smartphones, they would expect to be able to use Google Maps to navigate and instant messaging to communicate, rather than dealing with the orienteering-esque challenges of paper maps and walkie-talkies. Even with those functions disabled, we’d have to deal with potential confusion and disappointment.

Smartphones are anti-enchantment devices. All too often during interactive theatre and ARGs, I see participants fixated on their glowing screens, to the wider experience’s detriment. Smartphones, as traditionally used, have no place in an immersive experience that seeks to bring participants together and get them to talk and argue and deliberate with one another. Instead, we’ve designed our devices to appear closer to scientific instruments, with a custom user interface to match.

Some MFD tasks will be fast, but many will take longer to complete and require intense co-ordination. Sometimes players will need to hurry up and run, and sometimes they’ll have nothing to do but think and talk. We’ve developed a whole backstory to the world, a lot of which will only be exposed in fragments and between different players.

Our players remaining at the base will be working with maps and receiving information via thermal printers. It’s not that we’re completely ruling out traditional screens and computers, but rather that we’ll only use them where they cohere with the overall atmosphere and intention of the experience. It’s low-tech, not no-tech.

We want Strandfall to be a highly physical experience that taps into the pleasure and exhaustion of movement, but we’re also mindful about accessibility. Ideally, every player will feel they have something vital and unique to contribute, not just the most athletic.

We also want Strandfall to incorporate role play. Just because everyone is part of the same expedition doesn’t mean they don’t want different things, or go about things in their own way. Hopefully we can give players the “alibi” to try out roles different from their normal selves, more courageous or argumentative or deferential. Since Alex and I haven’t designed larps before, we’ve brought on board veteran Nordic larp and RPG designer Juhana Pettersson as a consultant.

While Strandfall is debuting in Edinburgh, it’s a site-responsive experience, not site-specific. It would be fairly straightforward to adapt it to other outdoor spaces and increase its duration and player count. Even though we don’t intend for Strandfall to be played by millions of people – its custom hardware and unique demands prevent that, plus we have more than enough of those games already – we have plenty of ideas of how to add depth and complexity to make it into a highly repeatable and extensible experience.

Before any of that, we have to pull off our first three-hour run in September. It’ll be free to participate, and you can find out more details and follow along on our website – we already have posts up about our influences like Death Stranding and PUBG, the technology and capabilities of our MFDs, and what I learned from this year’s Nordic Larp conference.

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.