This post is part of four posts about the writing of Nightvision which we are crowdfunding at the moment.

A massive nod to Matt Locke for his conference The Story. It started with the first Story conference and Coney’s presentation about Small Town Anywhere/ The project is great, the audience takes on different characters from a small town, the Mayor etc. On stage they play out a WWII scenario. What stuck in my head was the audience was encouraged to meet in the bar afterward and email a response to their theatre experience. Coney explained that this fundamentally changed the experience for the audience when they were given this space to create their story.

This year Mary Hamilton’s gave a fantastic presentation about Zombie LARPing and explained froth. (read it now) By not trying to inject to big a narrative into the LARP she realised the players afterward (over a beer) would create their own stories about the game they just played “oh it was you who was hiding under the table!”.

The two presentations talk about something very exciting.

It reminds me of a Ralph Koster quote “Games are not stories” and therefore can we say experiences are not stories? So with NightVision we’ve tried very hard to end the story. And that ending naturally pushes the audience to a discussion about what they just experienced. What they think just happened. What the story is, what their story was. We may add characters into this Froth, we’ll see and experiment.

As a final point a lot of this thinking came about because we decided to make NightVision a time locked event. An experience with a start point and an end point. By doing this it has opened up a lot of possibilities we’ve been conceptually struggling with. It was very freeing.