Trends Forecast №4: Immersive Theatre & Room Escapes
Movies and video games were born out of a desire to translate our hopes, dreams, fears and anxieties into a narrative form that we could enjoy, engage with, and learn from. Audiences get to escape from the pressures — or banality — of the day to day, into new frontiers, and examine the complexities of our times through a lens of fantasy and possibility.
Now, we’re bringing those experiences back to the real world they’re based on. The joy of multiplayer games and the allure of being transported into the middle of a story are being re-envisioned as real world experiences, in the form of immersive theatre shows and room escapes, that blur the line between performance, enactment and game.
Even the lines between these new forms are starting to blur, as escape rooms develop stronger, more engaging narratives in an effort to continue to push the new medium further, and engage a wider audience.
If the champions of augmented reality say that the allure of the medium is that “we like it here,” the allure of immersive theatre and room escapes is that we like to be together, too. These forms are just two examples of a new era of narrative that borrow from film, theatre and video games, to create story-inspired experiences that we get to be part of, collectively.
When so many of our experiences have become digital, a return to analog is an opportunity to differentiate from the sea of images, video and information, online.
Douglas Rushkoff, media scholar and cyber pioneer says IRL “meat space” is now the place to be, and low tech treatments have the most potential to be counter cultural and subversive, now that the digital world has been corporatized and mainstreamed. He says, “The things that I was excited about in digital, have reversed. Now real life is the place where we can retake our narrative.”
When it comes to designing for this new wave of analog narrative experiences, it’s worth remembering, “interactive” isn’t something that tech invented. It’s how we read each other, and how we navigate social encounters. From eye contact to posture, body language to tone of voice, the design of analog interaction was established long before we started developing digital interfaces and touch screens.
