In 1920, just three years after the Russian revolution, the new government staged a re-enactment of The Storming of the Winter Palace. It was one of the biggest re-enactments in history, with almost ten thousand performers, many of whom had been involved in the actual storming, 320 military vehicles, and an honest-to-god warship. Watching all of this were 100,000 spectators, and actually, we probably shouldn’t call them spectators, because they got involved in the re-enactment too.

A lot of historians think the man behind it, Russian director Nikolai Evreinov, was just a Soviet propagandist, but the truth is much more interesting and complicated. In fact, I think the best person to compare Evreinov to is someone who became famous a century later: comedian Nathan Fielder.

I’m not saying this because they both created re-enactments so elaborate and spectacular, some people mistook them for reality. It’s because, in their heart of hearts, both men believe the way to be happy and to truly understand human behaviour is by turning life itself into theatre. And it’s that shared belief that I really want to drill into here. 

Now, you might be wondering why you’ve never heard of Nikolai Evreinov before. A big reason is that, as with Nathan Fielder, people in the early 20th century couldn’t tell whether he was serious or not. 

On the one hand, Evreinov was one of the three most important directors in Russia, alongside Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of realist theatre and method acting, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, the pioneer of symbolism in theatre. On the other hand, Evreinov was viewed as “just” a comedian. Some of his most popular works were his theatrical parodies, and his theory that all of life was just theatre was considered so bizarre, people assumed he was joking. As for Nathan Fielder, some people couldn’t tell whether his work on Holocaust awareness or aviation safety was just a joke, or something serious.

First, I want to tell you about Nikolai Evreinov. About what he believed, what he made, what he got wrong and what he got right, and why he was so far ahead of his time. Then I want to talk about Nathan Fielder and how his shows, Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, refract Evreinov’s ideas through the lens of neoliberalism and late stage capitalism. 

That’s a lot – but stay with me, I promise it’ll be fun.

Nikolai Evreinov was born in Moscow in 1879 to an upper class family and almost instantly fell in love with the theatre. As a child, he staged puppet shows, and at the age of seven, he wrote his first parody. 

This habit would get him into trouble at school, where he was almost expelled for writing a parody about his teachers. Another time, he played a prank by getting his class to pretend an absent student had actually died – he draped the entire room in mourning, covered the teacher’s desk in candles and crosses, and directed all the students to cry. Pretty elaborate work for a kid!

Evreinov studied law in St. Petersburg as a teenager and in his spare time, wrote and acted in plays. Everything in his life was about theatre – even his law school thesis was about the performative aspects of public executions. But when his parents separated, Evreinov had to get a real job in the civil service. In his spare time, he began writing his first full-length plays, which were starting to get noticed. Probably the best known of these is The Beautiful Despot, which debuted in 1906, when Evreinov was only in his 20s.

The play opens in the drawing room of a grand country estate where a master is chatting with his servants. Everything about it, from the props to the costumes to the furniture, looks like it’s from the early 1800s. It’s only when a journalist arrives wearing modern clothes from the 20th century that the audience realises this isn’t actually a period drama but actually a contemporary story. 

It turns out that the master of the estate was once a famous liberal, progressive journalist. After he became disenchanted by modern life, he decides to live as his great-grandfather did, recreating his lifestyle in perfect detail, and gets a bunch of likeminded friends to role play as his servants and companions.

To be clear, this is pretty unusual kind of story for its time. The master isn’t portrayed as a madman, like Don Quixote, nor is he forced into this imaginary world because he’s been marooned on an island like Robinson Crusoe. It’s not some passing whim, either – he’s put a huge amount of effort into this immersive role play, sustained it for several months, and he’s not doing it solo – he’s convinced other people to take part. It’s more like Westworld than anything else – but of course, Westworld wouldn’t come out for another seventy years.

So at first, the 20th century journalist can barely believe what he’s seeing. He pulls books down from the shelves – they’re all from 1808, just like the newspapers. He talks to the servants he recognises, and they won’t break character:

Journalist: I can’t quite recall where—but still—I don’t know, perhaps I’m mistaken. (Picks up book and reads): “The Political, Statistical, and Geographical Journal; or, The Contemporary History of the World. 1808. Third part. Third book. September.”—(Picks up another.)—“The Genius of the Times,” 1808.—“St. Petersburg Review”—“Northern Mercury”—all September, 1808.—Tell me, that is, er, tell me, what are these papers, old ones?

Maid: I don’t know; we don’t know anything about those things. (Lights the last candles.)

Journalist: I don’t understand what sort of candles these are. They’re funny.

Maid: Funny? They’re the best sort of tallow.

Journalist: Tallow? Listen. What does this all mean? Come, I entreat you, tell me what it’s all about? My head’s going round.—Oh! Why, you’re Baroness Nordman, or I’ve gone mad, or I’ve got hallucinations, or I’m dreaming!

Maid: But, sir!——

Journalist: You’re Baroness Nordman, whom I met only a year ago at the Sociological Society!

Maid: But, sir!——

Journalist: I’ve no more doubts. You’re Helen, Baroness Nordman.

Maid (withdrawing): Lord preserve us! What are you talking about, sir? I’m a serf, a chambermaid, my name’s Grusha, I wash the floor.

Journalist: A serf? (Pause.) But serfdom was abolished in 1861!!!

Maid: Lord preserve us! Why it’s only 1808 now!

Eventually, he figures it out and starts to argue with the master about why on earth he’s doing this. The master responds by saying that the modern world has destroyed beauty, it’s turned gardens into factories, torn apart ceremonies and rituals, made everything about money, and is being overrun by extravagant Yankee millionaires – so, basically just like today, then.

But the master isn’t interested in changing society any more. Instead, by retreating to a more private world, he and his fellow travellers get to walk and ride in the fresh air, look at the stars in clear skies, build bonfires and read books. It’s a world full of physical sensation – the same world that people want to find today, away from their screens.

One of the most shocking moments in the story is when you discover that the master’s chambermaid used to be a leader of the feminist movement. A few years ago I might’ve said it was unbelievable, then we got tradwives.

It would be easy to dismiss Evreinov as a cultural conservative, just another guy infected with nostalgia for a lost golden age. But this play is more complicated than that. His protagonist wants beauty and sensation and excitement, and the only place he thinks he can get it is in the past, not the present or future. He knows he can’t literally turn the clock back and doesn’t want to force his ideas on anyone else, so he builds his own golden age and, rather than living in it on his own, invites other people in to make it feel more real.

Now, The Beautiful Despot is not a great play. It has a great hook and it’s entertaining in its own way, but it lacks any kind of plot and its characters are completely flat. Luigi Pirandello does the same thing far better in his play Henry IV, and it’s likely Pirandello was influenced by Evreinov.

No, what makes The Beautiful Despot fascinating is that unlike practically every story where someone builds a make-believe world, this one is not a cautionary tale. Evreinov is saying that people should construct their own worlds to make themselves happier. And I think that earnest belief is something he shares with Nathan Fielder.

It’s not that illusion and performance can be just as good as the real thing, but that there is no such thing as the real thing – that it’s illusion and performance all the way down. This idea became the centrepiece of Evreinov’s grand unified theory, that everyone should seek to turn their lives into theatre to their fulfil their deepest desires in a way that everyday life cannot.

Before we go into that further, I want to pull the camera back a little bit. At the start of the 20th century, not only was Russia going through rapid industrialisation that was destroying the nature that Evreinov loved so much, but it had just lost a war with Japan. This was an international humiliation, the first time a major European power had been defeated by an Asian nation. 

Traditional class structures and hierarchies were breaking apart, realism in art was being overtaken by new forms like impressionism and cubism and futurism. Nothing seemed stable. And most importantly, there was the failed Russian Revolution of 1905.

So it’s not surprising that Evreinov, a man who came from the aristocracy but was no longer tied to it, a man who had to work for a living but resented having to lower himself to the masses, would both challenge authority but refuse to march alongside the workers.

Evreinov’s next big project after The Beautiful Despot was setting up The Ancient Theatre. The idea here was to reconstruct past forms of theatre, from 11th century medieval plays onwards, to try and understand and illustrate how different they were from modern theatre. In particular, he wanted to show how medieval theatre wasn’t just a show you bought a ticket for to amuse yourself, but an interactive artistic experience that was so tightly woven into the fabric of life that it felt like life itself. 

Probably the best example of this is his 11th century mystery play The Three Magi. You know the story – it’s about the birth of Christ in a manger, the arrival of the three wise men with gifts, and Herod ordering the killing of the firstborn. What’s unusual here is that after building a set that looked like an 11th century cathedral, Evreinov populated it with an 11th century audience played by actors. That on-stage audience gets so caught that when Herod appears at the end, they storm into the play itself. 

While the company did a lot of research for these plays, designing period sets and costumes and playing medieval music on period instruments, it’s pretty clear that for Evreinov, the real goal was to inspire modern audiences to get more involved in theatre, just like medieval audiences once did. He wanted to show that if you got sufficiently involved, theatre could transform life.

The Ancient Theatre only lasted for a couple of years. It received a lot of praise, but you can probably imagine that audiences weren’t fighting to buy tickets. As critics at the time noted, it’s basically impossible to do a true historical reconstruction of a play from a thousand years ago – no-one really knows how it was performed or received. Some people thought it ended up feeling too broad, like a parody.

Evreinov decided to lean into parodies with his next role, as principal director for The Crooked Mirror cabaret in St. Petersburg. This wasn’t a cabaret like you’ve seen in musicals or movies, though –  it was basically a high-brow sketch comedy night, similar to Saturday Night Live, with a massive 750-seat auditorium. 

Some of Evreinov’s best known plays are when he parodied the style of well-known directors, a bit like when SNL does a horror movie in the style of Wes Anderson, or Mario Kart in the style of The Last of Us, except way more personal. He loved mocking Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, which he thought was incredibly pretentious and overly fixated on recreating reality as accurately as possible, with its authentic 3D rooms and costumes and props. 

His ultra-realistic parody of Stanislavski’s production of The Inspector General starts with a sofa with its back turned to the audience – because why would the people in the play even know there was an audience to face? – and it takes forever to get going, because real life is slow, too. When there’s dramatic dialogue, it gets interrupted by church bells, because sometimes that happens in real life. 

Evreinov also parodied symbolist theatre and silent movies, but it was the one of Stanislavski that was the real hit. Tsar Nicholas II loved it so much he requested a command performance and gave everyone gifts. Of course, Stanislavski was pissed.

This might all seem pretty silly, but he had a serious point, which he was arguing in essays at the time. He thought that modernity had eliminated theatricality from people’s lives, by which he meant that adults were no longer able to role play as they once did as children. The styles and traditions and costumes of the past had also been banished by modernity, but nothing new had arrived. Worse, directors like Stanislavski were even driving theatricality from theatre itself, by insisting that everything on stage look and behave exactly like it did in real life, making everything boring and miserable.

One of his parodies addressed this attitude head-on – it was literally called The Fourth Wall. In it, a director obsessed with Stanislavski decides to improve the opera Faust by making it as realistic as possible. First, he removes the singing, because in real life, people don’t sing. Then, when an actor has to drink poison, he fills a cup with real poison. Finally, he builds a literal fourth wall on the stage, blocking the audience’s view of the actors, because in real life, rooms have four walls.

Of course, Evreinov thought that a certain amount of realism was necessary to get people to buy into a fiction, but if you went too far beyond that, you ended up limiting people’s imagination. Someone on a beach in bathing suit isn’t a believable king, but with a well-cut paper crown, silent courtiers, cardboard throne, and a bath towel as a mantle, then it’s convincing.

But his dislike of realism was just a prologue to his more fundamental theory. Evreinov thought that everyone is born with an innate drive, an instinct, for “theatricality”, which we might call role play. Everyone wants to transform themselves, which is why people wear makeup and buy clothes and pose in photos. Sometimes we do it knowingly, like politicians dressing up in military uniforms or in casual clothes, and sometimes we do it unconsciously, like when we go out to an important dinner and have to behave well. If you know about performance studies or you’ve read Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, you know all of this. 

But this is the point where Evreinov takes it a step too far for people in the early 20th century, and even for a lot of people today. He didn’t just want people to watch plays on a stage, no matter how theatrical they were. He didn’t even want people to wander around an immersive set, like in a Punchdrunk show. He wanted them to become stars of their own personalised dramas, where the story revolved around them, where they got to act.

Evreinov called this idea “The Theatre for Oneself”, and he wrote a book about it during WW1 while in Finland. Here are some experiences he recommended creating for yourself:

• Pretend to be a cab driver
• Be a chambermaid for research
• Steal things from your friends’ houses and then return them
• Be a detective

It’s like a list of larps.

One of his favourite examples of the Theatre for Oneself was actually designed by someone else, a famous Russian historian, Mykola Kostomarov. One day, Kostomarov’s beloved canary was eaten by his family’s pet cat after it broke into its cage. Kostomarov was devastated and decided to put the cat on trial. He got his friends to be the defence lawyer and the judge, and made his family into the jury (his mom, however, refused, saying “my son has gone mad”).

Kostomarov, of course, was the prosecutor. He started by talking about the role of cats in ancient Egypt and Rome, examined the moral aspects of the case, and gave what witnesses said was the best speech of his life. But then the defence said that the cat was the victim of a bad influence set by Kostomarov himself, who had written a book arguing that the weak must unavoidably become the prey of the strong, and so the cat was of course only acting according to his master’s ideas.

The jury filed out to discuss the case, and after just fifteen minutes, proclaimed the cat innocent.

Evreinov loved this example not because he wanted to do it himself, or he thought it’d make for a great play. He loved it because Kostomarov had created his own theatre for himself. No-one else was going to design an experience for him where his cat gets put on trial, he certainly couldn’t just walk into a theatre or cabaret in St. Petersburg and get a ticket to see it, let alone do it. 

No, Kostomarov had designed this experience, gotten other people to be part of it, improvised his own role, and taken it deadly seriously even as the whole thing was obviously meant as fun. And if you’ve seen The Rehearsal, you know that’s pretty close to what Nathan Fielder did in Season One when got kids to role play as his son so he could feel what it was like to be a father.

There’s one more example that I really like. Evreinov says that one of the best feelings in life is being taken care of and fussed over when you’re recovering from an illness. But what if you’re so healthy you never get ill? The answer is to stage a recovery. You get two friends to act as a doctor and a nurse, then for a couple of days everyone role plays as if you’re ill. 

You lie in bed, the nurse takes your temperature and makes you soup, she reads to you from the newspaper, then the doctor arrives and you chat about the news while he checks your pulse. He says you’re on the mend but you should really spend another day in bed. If you insist, you can sit in an arm chair for an hour or two, but only because he likes you. After all this action, you go to bed, close your eyes, and fall asleep.

“Now tell me,” writes Evreinov, “isn’t it charming when people nurse you and take care of you with a truly touching attention, when they talk of your health as if it were a treasure to them, when everybody’s  thoughts seem to centre around your dear self?”

Isn’t this all what we’re looking for? Why should we embarrassed for wanting to stage it if we can’t get it?

One of the problems Evreinov faced with The Theatre for Oneself is that people really didn’t know whether he was being serious or not. I think part of the problem is that his list of examples seemed silly and frivolous at the time – like, why is it so important that people pretend to be ill or put their cat on trial? 

He’d struggle with this for over a decade until his most popular play, The Main Thing, which I’ll come to later, but from Evreinov’s perspective, what looks silly and frivolous to one person can be deeply meaningful to another. So to give you a more modern example, let’s take Dungeons & Dragons. For some people, role playing around a table in a fantasy world full of orcs and trolls and elves is just as pointless as putting your cat on trial, but – hopefully – we now know that tabletop role playing games can be just as valuable as any other kind of experience. 

Here’s what Evreinov had to say about entering the transfigured reality of role play. “We remain the same as we were, and yet we become different, we see ourselves in a better, nobler, brighter light. You will admit that that is a considerable gain. A new sense of life — is that not more valuable than a new dress, a new bracelet, a new car?” 

Today, we call this the experience economy. We know people find it valuable because they cut back spending on everything else in order to prioritise experiences, like Disney fans going deep into debt for their theme park pilgrimages.

So for Evreinov, the Theatre for Oneself isn’t just some optional frivolity. It’s the most important thing in life. And to loop back, this is why he hated realist theatre so much. He thought it was an obstacle, a distraction from people being able to create and inhabit their own fantasies. In fact, he disliked most of theatre, full stop. He thought that because it had to make money, it always ended up appealing to the lowest common denominator.

But this is where things get a little contradictory. From one angle, he presents The Theatre for Oneself as a kind of populist, egalitarian idea, saying that we should do away with “impertinent actors feeding on our money play and enjoy themselves as they wish, while we are kept confined to the gloomy and motionless [audience]?” 

But from another angle, the Theatre for Oneself isn’t actually achievable for most people. Who’s got the money and time and space to take a couple of days off to pretend to be ill? Not the workers, that’s for sure. You can’t help but think that by atomising theatres into private experiences, he wants to make it so that that aristocrats and elitists like himself never need to mix or see or even think about commoners. 

And when you look at some of the examples that were left out of the English translation of his writing, then you start to wonder exactly what it is that he wants to transform into. He suggests pretending to live in Persia with a harem, or on a plantation surrounded by enslaved people played by your friends, costumed in gold bracelets. 

Now I’m sure Evreinov would’ve said that he didn’t want to enslave people in real life, he just wanted to know what that felt like. And there are definitely cases of larps where people role play as evil characters – I literally just did a video where teenagers larped as fascists – but usually there’s a point to that kind of role play, whether it’s for education or for other participants to play against. In Evreinov’s case, however, I’m really not clear what the point was, other than simply to have the experience in and of itself. And so – he might not have apologised for these ideas at all – after all, whose business is it what he does in the privacy of his own time with consenting adults?

But on that: I really do wonder whether Evreinov managed to get any of his friends to play as a nurse or as enslaved people for him. It’s one thing to write about it in a book and quite another to get someone else to role play for hours or days. And maybe that’s a big reason why his ideas were talked about but never really adopted, because the problem with the Theatre for Oneself is that it is literally a theatre for one person, not for everyone. 

You might be lucky enough to find someone who’s happy to role play as a doctor for a day, but it’s less fun when everyone knows the patient is the star. It’s very telling that the one example where multiple people get to have fun – Kostomarov’s trial of his cat – wasn’t even invented by Evreinov!

That’s the tragic thing. Everyone who knows about Evreinov and has studied role play and psychodrama and Erving Goffman and performance studies agrees that he was decades ahead of his time in realising the power of performance in life. He practically invented his own form of highbrow larp. But he just couldn’t see that larp needs multiple people to feel like the star, otherwise no-one will do it.

Anyway – not long after Evreinov published his theory of The Theatre in Life, a little thing called the second Russian Revolution happened in 1917, which this time, was successful.

After the revolution, Evreinov was invited by Meyerhold to become director of the second most important theatre in the Soviet Republic, but he turned it down, probably realising that his vision of the theatre was far too individualistic and elitist to work in a new socialist world. For the most part, he stayed out of politics.

There were two big exceptions. The first was in 1920, when he was invited to direct the re-enactment of The Storming of the Winter Palace, partly on the strength of his work at The Ancient Theatre. Even though he wasn’t in love with the new regime, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to stage what would be the biggest theatrical spectacle of all time, to turn life into theatre and theatre into life. 

The re-enactment wasn’t all Evreinov’s idea, though. The most direct inspiration comes from a man called Louis Napoleon Parker. In 1905, Parker staged a pageant – what we might today call an outdoor play or environmental theatre – in the English town of Sherborne to celebrate 1200 years of its history. It wasn’t a professional production, but more of a community endeavour: about one-fifth of the town’s entire population was involved – meaning 900 actors, musicians, and costume designers. 

No-one had seen anything like it before – 30,000 people turned up to watch. That fact that it was filmed at all shows how excited everyone in the country was:

The Sherborne pageant sparked a craze that swept across the UK and to the United States, with bigger and bigger productions featuring thousands of performers. One of their spectators was Platon Kerzhentsev, who was in exile from Russia before the second revolution. He saw a pageant in Hampstead, in north London, put on by 300 villagers about the legend of St. George and the dragon. Kerzhentsev thought that the villager’s collective production of their own story reinforced their collective ownership of the land, so you can see why he was interested. What’s more, the story wasn’t just about kings and queens, but about commoners. He called it the most intense theatre experience he’d ever seen. 

By 1918, Kerzentsev was back in Russia and wrote a book called The Creative Theatre, where he talked about these pageants. It became highly influential in the Proletkult movement, which was essentially about fulfilling the cultural needs of the working class through things like amateur theatre. “Why confine theatre to the proscenium arch,” he wrote, “when it can have the freedom of the public square?”

That’s why there were several massive re-enactments in Russian after the revolution, with The Storming of the Winter Palace being the biggest, and it’s why, despite his politics – or lack of politics – Evreinov ended up involved.

But even though it was a fantastic example of his ideas from The Ancient Theatre, that audiences should become more involved in theatre and that life was theatre and theatre was life, it wasn’t exactly the Theatre for Oneself. Everything was tightly choreographed, there was no room for improvisation, and definitely no room for individuals to feel like the story was about them specifically.

It was Evreinov’s last play staged in Russia, The Main Thing, that was the second exception to him staying out of politics. When he wrote it in 1919, he was clearly trying to reconcile his love of the Theatre for Oneself with the new socialist reality. It was by far his most successful play, and it was adapted into a 1940 movie, The Comedy of Happiness (La Comédie du bonheur):

In the play, an eccentric director decides improve the lives of unhappy people in a boarding house through role play, or what he calls “theatrotherapy”. He hires one actor to play a maid and cheer up a suicidal student; another actor plays a handsome lover to bring a shy secretary out of her shell, and a comedian makes friends with a lonely old man and romances a prim teacher. The scheme is so successful that by the end of the play, the people living in the boarding house do their own role play in order to help the other people in their lives. 

The moral, if it wasn’t obvious, is that the Theatre for Oneself doesn’t just deliver cheap thrills, it literally makes life worth living. These people’s lives aren’t improved by a book or play or movie or their jobs or even their friends and family, they’re improved by a personalised live action role play that feels like it’s real. Of course, it’s not real – the scheme gets revealed soon enough – but Evreinov’s point is that when it comes to happiness, there is no difference between reality and illusion. 

In fact, he thinks that happiness itself is a state of illusion. Because illusion is created by make-believe and role play, that means role play is most direct and effective way of attaining happiness. That was “the main thing” in life. 

Surprisingly, the play was a hit in Russia, probably because it felt like a high concept, warm-hearted comedy on the lines of Jury Duty more than anything else. Critics were not best pleased, though. They thought that the idea of theatrotherapy as an actual practice was completely unbelievable, that there was no good way of introducing theatre and role play into life – and to be fair to them, even a century on, a lot of people would agree with them, despite the fact that we have psychodrama and larps and table top role playing.

Mixed reviews were one thing, but the political reaction was harder to deal with. In the play, the eccentric director who does the theatrotherapy gives a speech saying that while socialism is wonderful because it can deliver the material needs of life:

…there are millions of people on this earth deprived not only of material needs but also of personal joys, owing to impoverishment of the body or spirit, millions of our fellow men for whom the equality of Socialism isn’t enough.

You can just imagine what the Soviet regime thought of that.

During the 1920s, The Main Thing expanded across Europe and to the United States, with a production on Broadway starring Edward G. Robinson; Robinson said it wasn’t a work of art, but it was highly theatrical and stirring. Interestingly, the play described itself as “a comedy for some, a drama for others”, which once again, made it hard for people to know whether to take Evreinov seriously or not.

Thanks to the play’s decent success and because Evreinov was in town, he got a decent amount of press coverage and his writing was translated into English as a book. It’s interesting to see the reactions – some reviewers took his ideas seriously. Many thought that his idea of role play was obnoxious and annoying. Others found it “exceedingly interesting” but actually quite dangerous and liable to lead people into madness – a bit like the moral panic around Dungeons & Dragons during the 1980s. 

Still, Evreinov never achieved that level of popularity again. In 1925, he left Russia and moved to Paris with his new wife. He directed opera, wrote history books, but as far as the theatrical world was concerned, he basically disappeared until his death in 1953. His theories about how role play was central to all of human social life were forgotten, which meant that they could rediscovered, in much more rigorous ways, by people like Jacob Moreno and Erving Goffman and Eric Berne and Victor Turner and Richard Schechner. It do be like that sometimes.

Now let’s fast-forward to the present day, over a hundred years after Evreinov was working. There are plenty of people examining performance and role play in life, but for me, Nathan Fielder stands out because he’s doing it in such a sustained and funny and popular way, just like Evreinov did. 

Of course, they’re not the same person. Evreinov saw the Theatre for Oneself as an escape from modernity and rationality, while Fielder, at least on the surface, uses role play as a way to optimise individuals for a neoliberal, late-stage capitalist world. Also, Fielder isn’t trying to advance an explicit theory of theatricality as Evreinov did.

But there are obvious parallels in their practices and their journey. Both started out doing pranks and parodies:

They’re saying: look at what I can make you do, what I can make you believe, with just a little nudge. And quickly, they realise that this is a way in to deeper and more interesting ideas:

There’s an episode in Season Three of Nathan For You called Smokers Allowed that I know Evreinov would’ve loved.

Fielder suggests to a bar owner that allowing smoking indoors would help attract more customers. Of course, that’s against the law – unless the smoking is part of a theatrical production and integral to the plot. So to get around the law, he turns the bar into a theatrical space where the patrons are actors in a freeform play where smoking is allowed, and to make it even more legitimate, he invites an audience in. And they find it surprisingly interesting.

Clearly this is Fielder doing a bit, but it also exists within a  tradition of experimental theatre and seeing the real world as a theatrical space, as Evreinov did. 

After the first showing, Fielder decides to turn the play into a scripted performance, essentially re-enacting the original “improvised” reality to the most minute detail, this time with professional actors. The result is an unholy mix of Evreinov’s Ancient Theatre and Stanislavski’s realism.

There are two moments where I think Evreinov would have been falling out of his seat if he were watching. The first is when Fielder steps in to help two actors practice their parts:

The second happens after the bar’s owner says she didn’t care for his scripted play, which is obviously disappointing!

This is Evreinov’s Theatre for Oneself and theatrotherapy all rolled into one. It isn’t a deception or a prank played on someone unwitting, it’s someone saying, “I want this particular feeling of happiness and satisfaction and being loved, and I will accept the illusion of it because it feels real,” – and if it feels real, that proves there is no distinction between illusion and reality.

Smokers Allowed is a perfect encapsulation of Fielder’s shtick, and it also highlights the big differences between him and Evreinov. Fielder almost always starts out by using role play to help people with very specific, everyday, mundane concerns, like making more money, or helping someone apologise for a lie. The role play is there only as a means to an end, rather than being a good in and of itself. 

And honestly, it’s probably the smartest way to get modern TV audiences to buy in. In our hypercompetitive neoliberal world, it feels wasteful and self-indulgent to do things just because they’re enjoyable. Instead, we’re only allowed to go for a walk or listen to music because it improves our health and makes us more productive. He treats immersive role play in the same ways – sure, it looks weird, but it’s a useful tool that can be perfected.

This always comes across as a bit ridiculous in the moment, but only a bit, because we understand that this is just a part of life now – that we’re all expected to be as efficient and adaptable as possible. That’s what Fielder is doing when he attempts to eliminate the role of chance and contingency in life through endless rehearsals – it’s why he has these decision trees that map out every possible outcome in a kind of calculated and predictive process. 

Sociologist Anthony Giddens wrote that late modernity is characterised by our need to constantly evaluate all possibilities of action, calculating risks and selecting between different counterfactuals and possible worlds at every moment. The idea isn’t just that we can shape the future, but that it’s our individual responsibility to do so. That’s what Fielder is doing with these decision trees, always thinking about what could have been in order to control the future:

With five exact replicas of Colin’s studio apartment and five fake versions of him and Emma inside of it, I could use this as a predictive tool that would hopefully reveal every possible challenge a new couple might face, allowing Colin to have a sneak peek at his own life.

It’s hard to express just how alien this would have seemed to Evreinov a hundred years ago. The point of his theatrotherapy was to deliver spiritual needs, not to make increase sales at someone’s bar. That was what socialism was meant to fix. But given that the United States is not a socialist republic, you could argue that Fielder might actually be more on the side of the workers’ immediate needs than Evreinov.

Then again, Fielder follows Stanislavski in his belief that realism is essential in achieving the kinds of results he’s looking for. He’s obsessed with precisely mimicking the physical details of reality.

Fielder argues that this is because he can’t stay in the moment otherwise:

When your three-year-old son goes into his room and emerges as a six-year-old a minute later, it can be hard to stay in the moment.

So, you need to have custom digital mirrors installed that allow you to see yourself age at the same pace as your child. But that means the world around you has to move faster too. Seeds that are planted one week have to be plump vegetables the next. Nature’s time line has to be accelerated… and your brain desperately tries to adapt to your new reality.

And then every now and then, there are these glimmers, these moments where you forget, and you just feel like a family. That’s when you know the rehearsal is working.

Clearly, a big part of the reason for this is that it looks good on TV. It’s just exciting and impressive and absurd to see someone build these epic sets.

At the same time, Fielder understands there are parts of experience that cannot be precisely mimicked, and that results in some of the most interesting and funny moments, like when he tries to re-live Captain Sully’s childhood to figure out how he became such a good pilot: 

Like, there is just no good way to do this “for real”, so the only option is to do it as best you can given the circumstances and use your imagination to fill in the rest. Evreinov would have approved, just as he would have by Fielder being forced to compress Sullenberger’s life into just a few scenes.

In fact, there are plenty of times where Fielder doesn’t actually need detailed sets or real time simulations to get into the moment, like when he practices “chair flying” by using his imagination rather than an elaborate motion simulator:

You could argue that these are exceptions for this or that reason but I think it points to the fact verisimilitude can be helpful to ease people into a new world but it’s not strictly necessary, especially when you have practice.

I don’t really have a problem with Fielder contradicting himself here, though. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t have a coherent theory of performance given that he isn’t presenting himself as a theorist. At the end of the day, he’s got to pay the bills.

That’s why he’s less interested than Evreinov in arguing that everyone should create their own Theatre for Oneself, even as he discovers what they can give to people. A constant theme in Fielder’s work is that he starts out with some silly prank or rehearsal for a mundane situation, then in the process of creating a ridiculously elaborate theatrical experience, he realises it can provide a deeply meaningful personal experience, usually when he becomes the protagonist because other people have given up or not been up to the task. It’s like he’s backing into the Theatre for Oneself.

In Season One of The Rehearsal, we see this when Fielder enters a simulation of being a father. This is transparently not “for” any functional purpose other than pleasing himself – you can tell because unlike his other work, it’s not rigidly scripted, there are no repeats, and it’s incredibly solipsistic. 

And because this is a TV show, Fielder gets to use HBO’s money to hire a fake family for his Theatre for Oneself rather than asking his friends to do it, like Evreinov did. 

For me, what makes Fielder and Evreinov distinctive amongst artists doing similar work is how passionately they believe that all emotions and relationships are the product of illusion and performance, and how far they’ll go to prove their point. 

It’s one thing to say, like Fielder does, that, “I believe that any human quality can be learned or at least emulated. Sometimes it just takes time,” and another to carry through on that premise. It’s almost inevitable that the result looks bizarre and comical, so when you look at Evreinov and Fielder, you’re always left wondering whether these guys are actually serious. 

For Evreinov, the answer is in the description of The Main Thing, which he called a comedy for some, a drama for others. And for Fielder:

Angela [Fielder’s fictional wife]: So, is this silly? Or is it something that I should take seriously?

Fielder: It’s silly and serious. I mean, it’s complicated! Life can be more than one thing, right? Life’s complicated.

Some people find this confusing, but the world is silly and serious at the same time. 

Ultimately, what I appreciate most about Evreinov and Fielder is that they aren’t mean-spirited. They both seem to have realised that you can only get so far by deceiving participants. Not only can it harm them, but it’s incredibly hard to keep up a con for that long. 

So while they both started out making pranks, they ended up creating transparently fake simulations and re-enactments. Everyone knows they aren’t real but it still triggers a genuine emotional response, like the woman role playing as a mother in The Rehearsal, or the actors in Smokers Allowed. 

I think there’s a refreshing honesty in that. And after all, that’s really the basis of modern role play, both on tabletops and in larp.

There’s one, final, strange parallel between these two men. While Fielder’s work has been highly documented, Evrienov’s life is mostly lost to history.

So much of his early work has vanished completely. In fact, of the very first full-length play he ever wrote, the script is gone. We don’t know what it was about. We only know two things. Evreinov wrote it when he was 14 or 15. And he named it The Rehearsal.

References

Inke Arns et al., Nikolai Evreinov & Others: The Storming of the Winter Palace (Diaphanes, 2017)

Stefan Aquilina, Platon Kerzhentsev and His Theories on Collective Creation, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 28, no. 2 (2014), 29-48, https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2014.0008

J. Brooks Atkinson, Bitters of the Month of May, The New York Times, 5 June 1927

J. Brooks Atkinson, The Play, The New York Times, 23 March 1926

H. I. Brock, Play-Acting Viewed as a Fundamental Human Instinct, The New York Times, 15 May 1927

Sharon Marie Carnicke, The Theatrical Instinct: Nikolai Evreinov and the Russian Theatre of the Early Twentieth Century (Peter Lang, 1989)

Nicolas Evreinoff, The Theatre in Life, ed. and trans. Alexander I. Nazaroff (Benjamin Blom, 1970)

Spencer Golub, Evreinov: The Theatre of Paradox and Transformation (UMI Research Press, 1984)

Edward G. Robinson, All My Yesterdays: An Autobiography (Hawthorn Books, 1973)

Inga Romantsova, ‘Evreinov and Questions of Theatricality’ (University of Newcastle Australia, 2017), https://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1389595

Sylvia Sasse, ‘Theatricality’, in Central and Eastern European Literary Theory and the West, ed. Michał Mrugalski et al. (De Gruyter, 2022)

Laurence Senelick, Nikolay Evreinov’s “Inspector General”, Performing Arts Journal 8, no. 1 (1984), 113-118, https://doi.org/10.2307/3245415 

RUSSIAN AUTHOR CROWNS BUFFOON, The New York Times, 21 March 1927

The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, King’s College London, 10 September 2024, https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/spotlight/the-redress-of-the-past-historical-pageants-in-britain

So here is my list of shows I’m keeping an eye on. There’s no strong guiding principle – don’t ask me why this or that show is or isn’t included, I will refuse to explain myself.

Except where noted, I haven’t seen any of these, so they might be terrible. Prices are approximate. Most are around one hour. Descriptions lightly edited from official show info.

• My Date with Pierce Brosnan (Alistair Aitcheson, free): Mademoiselle Cafetière is a lonely clown who meets the man of her dreams: Hollywood actor Pierce Brosnan. There’s just one catch. Pierce Brosnan is a talking dummy piloted by you, the audience. Scan a QR code and type what you want Pierce to say. If you type it, he will say it – he has no filter! Play matchmaker or wreak havoc in the most bizarre love story ever to grace the stage! – I know Alistair, he’s an excellent game designer and very nice guy.
• Hamlet (an experience) (Brite Theater, £14): Hamlet has the questions. Do you have the answers? A prince of Denmark needs your help. Take on the roles, journey through the play and resolve the great questions of life together, immersed in the story as never before – Starring Emily Carding, whom I’ve seen in the impressive Key of Dreams.
• Mark Vigeant: OUT THERE (Mark Vigeant, £14): Meet Larry: a burnt-out engineer on a mission to gain fame by livestreaming a survival adventure from the Alaskan wilderness … blending live video, immersive tech and fearless clowning.
• DeepFake (404 Theater, £12, 15 min): You’re head of PR preparing for the launch of a new product that lets anyone make fake videos that look perfectly real. As sole audience member you’ll video chat with co-workers, investigate the materials in your office and argue for your own perspective on the appropriate use of AI.
• The Secret Society (The Chandeliers, £12.50): An immersive comedy experience. Step into the world of a very serious, very secret, very important secret society.
• Cult (Nevermore Theatre, £5+): A fully immersive experience where the audience are initiated into their own unique cult. Incorporating real world recruitment tactics … interactive, ridiculous and dark.
• Mason King – The Mind Spy (Elite Entertainment, £13.50): An immersive, theatrical, magic and mind-reading experience inspired by real Cold War psychic experiments. Could you be a psychic spy? Expect impossible predictions, thought transmission and unexpected connections as the audience becomes part of the test.
• The Speakeasy Experience (Pickering’s Gin, £20): Surrounded by animal skulls and illicit research, you are invited into the medical underground’s inner circle. Sign the ledger and swear a binding oath of secrecy before being administered two potent, gin-based trials.
• 0% Faithful: Can You Solve The Traitors Murders? (Tommy Jollyboat, free): You are the detective in this high-tech immersive murder mystery! Use your phone to guide the investigation, and choose which suspects and clues to follow up.
• Dystopia 26: The Rock Opera (Beldon Haigh, £17.50, 2 hours): An immersive political satire and electrifying rock spectacle. You’re not just an audience – you’re a Dystopian, summoned to join a state “Dystopiation” event where you will vote.
• Channel (Wet Hands, £13): Step inside a transformed shipping container and enter a fully immersive, interactive electronic soundbath designed for deep rest and radical listening.
• Trainspotting Live (£22, 80 min): The audience are literally part of the action, including the notorious ‘worst toilet in Scotland’ scene.
• Werewolf (Binge Culture, £17): A gripping blend of thriller and comedy that pulls you into an immersive world of suspicion, survival and uneasy laughter.
• Murder at The Speakeasy (Not Cricket Productions, £16, 2 hours): Meet and mingle with the staff and performers and when the killer strikes, follow the clues and interrogate the suspects to work out whodunnit. A lively and immersive evening of suspense and sleuthing with 1950s dress encouraged.
• Extra Lives: The Interactive Video Game Concert (£13): Vote to decide what happens next while a live band performs the soundtrack! Inspired by classic video games … blends live music, storytelling and interactive gameplay into an epic journey.
• I Was Never Here (Leo Lion, £8): A highly interactive, gonzo spy thriller featuring an overzealous secret agent searching for activation phrases which will help him regain sections of his memory. Play along, decode cyphers, answer phones.
• Robot Vacuum Fight Club (International Ghost Society, £15): Form a team, select a knockoff Roomba, customise it, then clean house in a series of knockout competitions that test balance, agility and suction power … an anarchic, fully-interactive game show put together on an extremely tight budget.
• Off With Your Head! (Bowtie Productions / RGB Monster, free): Enter a 12th-century throne room, where you decide the fates of two guest performers trying to rule your kingdom. Play peasants, warlords, dragons or just sit back and cheer for their demise! An interactive comedy game show that merges video games and TTRPG.
• Nude Parade (WIP) (Creepy Boys, £15): Roll up your sleeves, and go under the knife as we enter into an anaesthetic world turned upside down. Like a live theatre version of the game of Operation – but make it trans … combining live-feed video, interactive surgery and trash puppets.
• John Robertson’s The Dark Room (£13.50): Fuses improv, gaming and stand-up into the Fringe’s most deranged gameshow! – I’ve seen this, it’s very fun!
• COMA (Darkfield, £15, 30 min): An immersive audio experience in complete darkness … lying on a bunk bed inside a shipping container. The most surrender-driven of the DARKFIELD shows, and the one that asks you to let go completely.
• FLIGHT (Darkfield, £15, 30 min): An immersive audio experience inside a shipping container … resembling a full-scale plane cabin. Exploring the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the experience unfolds across two parallel realities and two possible outcomes to the same journey.
• ARCADE (Darkfield, £15, 30 min): As above, using the nostalgic aesthetic of 1980s video games … invites participants to guide an avatar through a series of branching paths. – I’ve interviewed Darkfield for my book.
• Ludomachy! The Summoning of Games (free): Join the eccentric Ludarch for a journey into the realm of games, and bring back a new game of our very own!

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.