“Required is the voluntary, well-informed, understanding consent of the human subject in a full legal capacity.”

— First Point of the Nuremberg Code, established after World War II to prevent unethical experiments on human beings

For any sort of audience interaction within an immersive event, creators should consider the engine of informed consent. It can make or break your experience — possibly both, between different attendees. Let’s look under the hood and examine the parts, capabilities and approaches to this critical aspect of participatory experiences.

Defining terms

In States of Play, the official book of Finland’s 2012 Solmukohta live action role playing (larp) conference, Simo Järvelä’s essay “The Golden Rule of Larp” states:

The primary basis of larp ethics is: things informed adults do consensually amongst themselves are acceptable. The idea is that if everyone involved knows what they are getting into and they voluntarily participate, whatever then happens is morally acceptable.

Informed consent means the participants know what is happening or going to happen to them on a real-world level, and they still choose to participate.

Informed consent has a legal definition for doctors and nurses, who must obtain consent before treating a patient. When fiddling with the emotions and social aspects of people, the use of informed consent can be beneficial. Even psychiatrists also have an ethical mandate to have it:

Fundamental to a person’s dignity and autonomy is the right to make decisions about their psychiatric treatment, including their right to refuse unwanted treatments…Consent may change over time and for different conditions and circumstances. Consent must be an ongoing process.

Immersive entertainment can deeply affect audiences in ways that mirror therapy, and while it should not replace actual treatment, borrowing principles from those practices can help creators navigate issues they may not otherwise be ready for during project development.

Being properly “informed” varies between each participant. Some people want to know about stair-climbing before buying a ticket, others might want to know if the plot involves simulated gunfire. A good assessment tool can be derived from Evan Torner’s essay “Transparency and Safety in Role-Playing Games” in the 2013 Wyrd Con Companion Book (eds. Sarah Lynne Bowman, Ph.D. & Aaron Vanek, MFA). Torner describes transparency, or revealing information to participants, and describes two types, transparency of expectation and transparency of information. Although Torner refers to tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), these same precepts apply to any interactive or immersive experience.

“Transparency of expectation would be the clear framing of what can and cannot be introduced into a role-playing session. We often operate under a myth that ‘anything is possible’ in a tabletop RPG, which is not at all true. Games are naught but systems for incentivizing human behavior. Not only are there some undesirable human behaviors in RPG play, but there is also some content that just won’t ‘fit’ into a given group’s horizon of expectation for play. When I pitch a session of the dating RPG Breaking the Ice, for example, players can be reasonably certain that if they were to play this game, baby cannibalism will not come up as an immediate theme…Transparency of expectation lets players make informed decisions about what play might look like…Transparency of information, on the other hand, means that there are minimal plot or game elements unknown to the players and gamemasters (GM) alike. No player, GM, or designer plans are made deliberately secret as part of the game…Transparency of information generally sets up transparency of expectation (and not vice versa): the Dungeons & Dragons players know they won’t encounter anything outside of the module, just like a previous visitor to a haunted house knows they’ll be guaranteed a comparable experience on consecutive nights. Transparency of information lets players know what facts can be considered immutable (beyond the hazy ‘horizon of expectations’) and the players can plan accordingly.

— “Transparency and Safety in Role-Playing Games” by Evan Torner; The Wyrd Con Companion Book, 2013

Expectation tells the audience what might happen, information specifies what will happen. In immersive art, informed consent may not be a legal concern — maybe — but it is at least a moral issue worth examining by designers.

There’s a saying coined by Epidiah Ravachol for a certain type of larp that is rare but not unique: “Surprise! You’re Hitler!” In this type of larp, a player is given a character that seems to follow certain expectations, but the designer/writer has formulated a plan to frak with the player — at a certain point, the player is dramatically ambushed with the fact that they are playing a person they (probably) do not like, and, had they known who their character really was, would not have played that role or even that larp. In some instances, the player is not even informed that Hitler was or could be included — surprise! More often than not, these larps are not well-regarded, especially by the rudely awakened player. Yet were the players informed that this larp dealt with Nazi Germany — they have transparency of expectation — they could self-select into participating, and if it turns out they’re role-playing Adolf, their reaction is less likely to be negative. Even exposing the expectation of “we are going to do some really weird, nasty, politically incorrect, offensive things here” sets the table and allows the participants to emotionally brace for whatever gets thrown at them.

Providing your potential audience with expectations could avoid headaches and heartaches further down the road. Whether or not you want to reveal all the information (the plot) is another question.

Questions for designers

For immersive designers, you might want to think about the following lines of inquiry. These aren’t rules, these are considerations.

Why ask for participant consent?

  • Does the experience involve something that in another context would be considered abuse, harassment, or upsetting? Are there aspects of the content that might traumatize or offend audience members?
  • Did a participant have an unexpected bad experience, and should that experience be prevented for future participants?
  • Was information withheld from the participants in the name of art? Not all experiences deserve total transparency to all attendees, but what should participants know, when, and why? (Additional reading: Let’s Play with Fire — Using Risk and its Power for Personal Transformation).

When to ask for participant consent?

  • Ideally, consent should refresh throughout the experience. Having someone sign a waiver or offer consent without fully knowing what they are consenting to can lead to problems when the participant is confronted with something they don’t want to consent to and didn’t know was part of the show. Is it worth risking a functioning show on the hope that not one person, for whatever reason, gets distressed and doesn’t know what to do?

What happens if consent is not given or is rescinded?

  • In many immersives, saying a safeword (revoking consent) means ejection without refund. This can be perceived as exceptionally punitive, and some consider this frame to be coercive, especially when the ticket was expensive. A participant forced into a binary choice between “dealing with it” and losing $150 is unlikely to walk away satisfied. An option to revoke consent for a specific interaction that does not jeopardize the patron’s entire experience can at least in part address the issue of coercion.

How do you acknowledge the participant’s consent and any revocation of consent?

  • Immersive participants should know how to clearly offer their consent to the performers and how to revoke it. Audiences can be further empowered if they have techniques to not only de-escalate a scene, but also to ask to escalate the interaction.
  • If a paying participant has a problem with a scene, for any reason, is there a process for them to avoid that episode yet stay in the narrative? This link leads to safety tools from role-playing games. Note that some of them require prior agreement between designer and participant.
  • What do participants need to say or do to indicate to the performers that they are unnerved, triggered, or simply wish to dodge this scene, yet stay engaged in the event? These avoidance actions or words should be simple, easily achievable both verbally and non-verbally, and at best meshes with the underlying content. For example, a horror larp in Denmark where participants played pre-teens sneaking into an (actual) abandoned Nazi hospital could cover their eyes and count aloud to ten, and the monsters would (probably) go away. This action worked within the fiction, was easy to remember, and also appeared obvious enough that actors playing monsters could see and hear that their scare worked and move along to another victim.

Who bears the burden of knowing when to stop?

  • Are the participants supposed to signal to the actors when they revoke consent, or are the actors supposed to read the participant’s body language and make a split-second decision if the scene should continue or not? If something triggers a participant, it may be too late for them to revoke consent through word or gesture. But putting the onus onto performers to calibrate the experience without participant feedback yanks agency away from the audience and can overburden a cast trying to remember their marks and lines. One common larp safety technique is the “OK” check in, which is a non-verbal call and response: one person holds their hand in an “OK” symbol, and the other person is obligated to reply with the same or a nod to indicate they are OK. Doing this can crack immersion, but its subtlety and swiftness doesn’t break it. This sign can also be voluntarily held out to indicate that a participant is not in real trouble, only role-playing, say, choking on poison.

Different strokes for different folks

  • 99% of an audience might be fine with what the experience does to them. But 1% might not. Is it worth upsetting 1% to satisfy 99%?

There are many answers to the above questions, and none are objectively right or wrong. However, designers are encouraged to ponder these questions and communicate their answers to the audience.

Whether intentional or not, many audience members feel that they must go along with the narrative, no matter how much they hate it, or risk ruining everything for fellow audience members and performers. The other option often appears to be leaving the show entirely. Larps have tools to adjust interactions on the fly to help keep the narrative running. These tools allow people to adjust interactions without permanently breaking immersion, i.e., leaving entirely. (Check out Johanna Koljonen’s Safety and Calibration Toolkit.) One downside to repeatedly calibrating involves potentially yet temporarily breaking immersion; e.g., asking permission for physical contact before shaking someone’s outstretched hand seems unnatural. However, persistent calibration shields people from damage while allowing the overall experience to continue — you can stay in the show, but evade offending scenes. In some cases, too, calibration allows participants to ask for more intensity. You can say “Yes, please continue,” as well as “continue and escalate.” The actor might not want to escalate any further, so talent’s safety and consent must be accounted for as well. Actors and participants all deserve equal respect and protection in an immersive show (Sleep No More actors have had to deal with non-consensual touch for a while). Oftentimes they are one and the same. If you immerse the audience as much as the actors, or ask them to perform as an actor, the same protections actors fight for should apply to the audience.

Consenting to being informed

Some people hate spoilers. They don’t want to know what is coming even if it is extreme and personal, and in some cases, they attend the show because they want to be shoved off an emotional and possibly physical cliff. People attracted to extreme emotional larps are called bleedhunters (see “How Bleed is Ruining Larp” by Rasmus Høgdall in issue #6 of Playground). Bleedhunters seek to maximize the drama (trauma?) in any event. Within extreme haunts, some desire to push themselves beyond their limit. These people offer their blanket consent to anything the production brings without being informed prior.

Get Aaron V’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

SubscribeSubscribe

This New York Times article talks about trigger warnings posted before stage plays, and some theater directors are pushing back, asking “what’s the point of experiencing art if you don’t expect to be surprised?” (Susie Medak, managing director of Berkeley Repertory Theater). But not all surprises are equal: a plot twist, earthquake, or an unexpected punch to the ear are not the same.

If you make “being informed” optional, the audience is empowered to glean the information if they choose.

For example, there are two spoiler pages for One Last Thing Before You Go (an immersive play I co-created for the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2018), one for physical and one for emotional elements. Links in the main event description allowed audience members to access a web page detailing those aspects of the show. If someone wanted to see it cold, they shouldn’t click the links. Preliminary research suggests that spoilers do not detract from audience enjoyment. In an ideal world, those who want minimal foreknowledge and those desiring more information before participating are treated the same by the production.

Audience-empowered transparency is good for both parties — people who want x can get x (or XXX), and people who want y can get y. If an immersive theater company manhandles audience members without warning, people who hate that will have a miserable time, and people who like that could bind your company into always doing that — the audience’s expectation is set, and a future show sans manhandling could upset your existing fan base.

Your waiver might suck

Many immersive shows require signed waivers before participants enter the event. Most waivers are boilerplates with small type and intense social pressure to sign without reading, because the slow reader holds up the line. Some shows offer waivers online ahead of time, a small but notable improvement.

How specific is the waiver? A document that says the show contains nudity and mentions “you will be touched by the actor” can be easily misinterpreted — does this mean there will be a naked performer and a different clothed actor holding your hand? Or are those two things combined, and the audience will be unexpectedly kissed by a naked actor? People who consent to the first compartmentalized information may not consent to the combination of the two effects.

No one creates in a vacuum

Currently there’s no mandate to include informed consent. However, avoiding informed audiences and assuming their persistent consent increases the risk that someone will be physically, emotionally, or socially traumatized. This could imperil a production to criminal charges, a lawsuit (waivers do not block legal action) and bad press. In Los Angeles, obtaining a permit for an immersive show requires fortitude, luck, and convincing a bureaucrat that it’s not a drug rave, sex party, or a severe tragedy waiting to happen. A poor reaction from an immersive audience member, if it reaches the Powers That Be, could hinder not only your future shows but the shows of others.

Immersive experiences are arguably the only artistic medium that can adjust on the fly to spectator needs. When a movie contains a disturbing scene, people walk out. Maybe they demand a refund. Yet immersive experiences can soften or harden their scenes depending on the people involved. That’s tremendous power, tailoring the art in real time towards the patrons. All performative artists — comedians, stage magicians, musicians — learn to read their audience and adjust as they go. Immersive and interactive experiences should consider borrowing from those forms of Performative Art as well as scripted theater.

Unfortunately, a participant could ache minutes, hours, or days after the experience. It’s not unheard of in live action role playing for a player to cry long after the wrap. There are documented cases of post-larp blues. Informed consent lessens the possibility of wounding, but doesn’t remove it. Checking in with participants afterwards might alleviate any lingering effects.

Conclusion and advice

Informed consent gives an audience forewarning and control in how they engage with the event, precluding unwanted surprises and producers asking for forgiveness. An analogy: a computer crash necessitates buying another device, usually an upgrade. But the choice of when to buy was taken from you. Instead of shopping around for the best deal on a well-researched make and model, you unexpectedly had to get what you didn’t know you wanted (a new computer). Informed consent works in a similar fashion — even with a positive outcome, some audience members may feel bullied into a situation, which could predispose them towards an overall negative experience.

Informed consent means trusting the audience. They might not know what they want, but they likely know what they don’t want. Trust between artists and audiences allow both to push harder, engage stronger, and play safer.

Additional Resources

No Proscenium podcast episode 117, featuring “sex-positive psych Dr. Liz Powell — a licensed therapist and coach who specializes in LGBTQ/Poly/Kink-Friendly therapy joining us to talk about the mental side of safety and emotional risk.”

No Proscenium podcast episode 116, “The Safety Talk.”

No Proscenium podcast episode 103, featuring Jason Carl of By Night Studios, makers of World of Darkness larps, with talk about consent and safety.

The BBC released a short video about consent that the House of Yes club in Brooklyn demands before patrons enter, and why.

The author wishes to thank Kirsten Hageleit and Lauren Bello for their feedback and assistance on this article.

NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today!

In addition to the No Prosceniumweb site, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Slack forum.

Office facilities provided by Thymele Arts, in Los Angeles, CA.