Those Who Play: Notes On Building The Immersive Audience
Finding a new paradigm on old paths
Some days it feels like the aspects of immersive design that we love — that sense that you’re a real part of an imaginary world — won’t ever manage to spread outside the little biomes we’ve made for it in the great cultural capitols. That instead what tends to attract funding and make an impact on social media feeds is the mere semblance of immersive: projects that are more interested in chasing valuations over value.
There are a lot of obstacles to bringing fully realized immersive experiences to the masses. Even entertainment monoliths struggle with the balance of interaction to spectacle just right.
Those of us who have experienced a great immersive work first hand know that you can’t really understand what the experience is truly like until you’ve experienced it yourself. You can have it described, but it’s not the same. Those who have never been exposed to the best immersive experiences can’t understand its power… until they are exposed to it.
So for this industry to grow, there need to be ways to stoke the appetite for immersive experiences to broaden the audience for the work. There is a path that just might lead us into developing a whole new audience, using an existing framework: games.
Class Systems: Audience Edition
Back in high school, our history teacher explained the structure of society in Medieval Europe was broken down into three classes: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. A stable (albeit oppressive) structure that put warring nobles on the top, peasants on the bottom, and the clergy over to the side.
The idea of three classes built around not just their economic status but also by what they do spoke to me when I was trying to get a handle on modern culture.
Which brings us to the culture around games.
Now there are plenty — plenty — of problems in game culture. Leaving those out of the mix for a moment, we can see it is possible to lay down a three-part structure on the totality of gaming.
This would be: Those Who Make, Those Who Play, and Those Who Watch.
These classes aren’t as rigid as medieval society (intentionally), but are still useful as general organizing concepts to understand how games are created, discovered, and consumed.
Let’s define these classes before we get into how the ecosystem works and what this paradigm could tell us about the culture of immersive arts.
Those Who Make
The game makers. Be it two indie developers in a dorm room, a multinational corporation, or a boutique role playing game company. Their function is to provide something for the next class to do.
Those Who Play
This class is flexible in the extreme, but of special interest are those who play in public. That means tournaments and streams: anywhere that the act of playing is made into a spectacle or a spectator sport. So that can mean the local arcade (they still exist, usually as bars) as well as online and the tabletop renaissance, which is itself fueled in many ways by streams of people playing in entertaining ways.
Those Who Watch
This class can both passively consume and, thanks to the Internet, lightly participate in the playing by commenting. Online, this takes the form of chatrooms attached to streams but the tradition is deep: from couch commentary to full on body paint in the stands. Okay. Maybe not that last one. Yet.
Two of these “classes” map onto the current landscape of immersive in obvious ways: Those Who Make and Those Who Play. That’s the majority of the current dynamic of immersive.
As they exist today, Those Who Watch are mostly limited to people following Instagram hashtags who get unintentionally battered by selfie palace tsunamis as well as people who are passive fans of alternate reality experiences (ARX), following along with evolving stories that slip on and offline.
This is, in part, because selfie palaces and ARXs are the immersive works that bake digital footprints into their design from the start. For a palace, the #hashtaglyfe is the point. For an ARX, aside from the rare piece that’s meant to be played alone, designs that don’t anticipate the hive mind approach to solving the story’s mysteries generally break down, drive the creators to exhaustion, or both.
So, to incorporate that third class into the mix, the big question we are asking is: Could the immersive field as a whole benefit from creators intentionally designing ways for broader, more passively-engaged audiences to also experience and enjoy their works as much as those who are actively engaged? Even if that experience plays out somewhat vicariously?
We know that series like Escape The Night, Critical Role, and Vampire: the Masquerade — LA By Night have created fans of the underlying games. The RPG streams drive sales of rulebooks, which gets more people to play games of their own. The game masters of some streams are able to hire their own services out to paying customers, while the biggest celebrities — and yes, they are celebrated — make their own supplemental materials which fans are then able to buy and use.
There would be two parts to making this gambit work:
First and most fundamental, experiences need to be designed to accommodate a satisfying “third person” perspective. And the key there is to make it satisfying. Here the fun comes not from audiences watching the hired actors, instead watching the actions and reactions of their proxies: Those Who Play. The key is to encourage creators to swing away from making more traditional performative work, creating an engaged but ultimately passive playing audience which in turn are no fun for Those Who Watch to, well, watch. The more passive the live audience is, the less of a case for actually attending the piece in order to watch other people would make. But Those Who Play “come alive” and become part of the experience, they become highly entertaining for Those Who Watch, and thusly make the experience well worth attending for those who choose not to engage.
That brings us to the second part: “Professional players.” In order for Those Who Watch to properly be entertained by Those Who Play, immersive experiences need to attract personalities who are engaging, friendly, and who will welcome Those Who Watch. This offers an “in” for those who wish to see what an extreme haunt or challenging ARX is all about, without having to surrender their body and/or entire life over to it.
Just as in gaming, there are those who love to play everything, all the time. But there are many more people who simply enjoy watching. It is highly entertaining with very little effort or planning required.
In order to cast a wider net to support all genres and depths of immersive experiences, it would be beneficial for all creators to design for Those Who Watch.
Indeed, without a concerted effort to make more widely accessible work, we’re liable to watch a whole generation of creatives become burned out on creating for small audiences and decide to abandon the form in order to do the things that life in late capitalism ultimately calls upon all of us to do: crawl out from under a mountain of interest debt long enough to rack up some more principle debt.
Barring a total upheaval of the system of the world, that means finding a way to reach broader audiences. Big audiences, after all, are what studios and financiers understand when it comes to the entertainment business. The trick will be not diluting the power of connection that makes immersive what it is at heart. That’s a damn tricky needle to thread, and plenty of smart creators have the scars to show how tricky it is. The often intimate nature of immersive can be washed away by a deluge of attention.
Yet we know that it is possible to harness the powers of mystery and FOMO to reach audiences. That’s how it’s always worked. Immersive even has advantages over gaming when it comes to these tools, as the “one on one” practice of pulling aside guests in Sleep No More attests. With the right design it will be possible to entice Those Who Watch to become Those Who Play, and along the way get Those Who Make paid.
Special thanks to Ricky Brigante for editing.
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