Immersive Theatre and Westworld, Part Four: Audience Experience
This article is the last in a series of four. I recommend starting with Part One.
“It’s not a business venture, not a theme park, but an entire world. We designed every inch of it. Every blade of grass.”
– Season 1 Episode 3: ‘The Stray’
I said in Part One that a trip to Westworld begins with a train ride into the town of Sweetwater, after which guests are free to roam. This isn’t quite true. The Westworld experience begins much earlier. We see the full introductory experience in Episode 2, as William arrives at the park. He’s greeted at the entrance by Angela, an employee who takes him to a dressing room. He’s introduced to the world of the theme park, given some pointers on how to act, and chooses an outfit from a number of wardrobe pieces. Then, he emerges into a carriage on the steam train that will take him to the park proper.
This kind of introduction to the fictional world occurs in a number of experiential theatre pieces, although most are often far less overt in their exposition than the encounter we see on-screen. These sequences, sometimes called Scene 0 or a pre-show, serve to make sure the audience are placed in the world of the show before the main action begins. However, I prefer to think of this whole action as a funnel, or that we start the show by ‘funneling’ the audience. We take them step-by-step from one reality to another, from theirs to ours, a gradual transition rather than an abrupt one. The audience may be coming from all sorts of experiences (a dentist appointment, a giddy first date, a stressful day at work) and will be thinking about all sorts of things. By slowly preparing them for the show, we help make sure that by the time things are really happening, they’re going to be primed and ready to go.
In the still images from Westworld above, we can see this transition from regular world to Westworld… world… happening on three different levels. First is the change in the space: starting with a cavernous public space, then a smaller public space, then a closed off room, then a corridor, then a train car. This gradually takes the audience from the wide outside world into a narrower, focused experience. We also see a gradual increase in the presence of the fictional world. The guest starts in the ‘real’ world, then encounters a screen that shows Westworld images. Then the guest is taken a room filled with the kinds of objects and clothes they’ll see in Westworld. Then the guest is dressed to be loosely ‘in character’, becoming ‘of the world’ of the show, before arriving in a fully immersive version of that world. Bit by bit, the audience frog is boiled in the narrative pot.
Finally, this funnelling process teaches the guest some essential things about how to interact with the world by presenting smaller versions of them, not unlike the tutorial sections at the start of most videogames. William has a conversation with a host, teaching him he can talk to hosts. He makes a small binary choice, teaching him he’ll be making decisions throughout the experience (the choice of black or white hat also represents that he’ll making moral choices). He opens a door into the train car, teaching him that doors open and that he’s able to physically explore the world he’s about to enter.
A textbook example of this kind of funnelling is Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More. Audience members begin by queuing outside the building, not unlike a nightclub, before entering, travelling past a coatroom, to a reception/box office desk, up some stairs and through a series of winding corridors, before emerging into a glamorous 1930s-style bar, from where people are called to an elevator to begin ‘the show proper’. These multiple stages of liminal space ]serve to gradually break the audience’s sense of direction, making the ‘show world’ space difficult to relate to the ‘real world’ space they came from.
So when, then, does the Westworld experience start? When guests first arrive at the entrance? When they’re dressed? When they emerge onto the steam train? When they disembark in Sweetwater? The first time they talk to a host? To some extent, the answer is all of these. Or rather, the guest is continually discovering new dimensions of the Westworld experience, hopefully becoming more and more immersed as they continue to engage with the world.
Put more strongly, the Westworld experience (or, any immersive theatre show) begins the first time the audience member hears about it, and ends the last time they think about it. I first heard this philosophy from Johannah Koljonen’s writing on LARP design — not only does the experience of the show extend out this far, but we should attempt to design for this length of journey as well. This is a critical function of your show’s marketing, especially when the language to describe experiential theatre is still being developed, and varies from company to company, country to country, communicating what the experience will involve is critical. (Of course, this is all true for non-immersive shows as well — how many times has your experience of a theatre production been impacted by an excellent or terrible experience at the box office or the bar beforehand?)
It’s important to note here that the crucial counterpart of the introductory funneling experience is the check-out process. How do people exit the show or experience? How do they move back from the immersive/interactive world to the real one? What time do they have to decompress and discuss what happened? Depending on the nature of the show, this could be as simple as a room (in a theatre space, usually the bar/foyer) where they can stay and chat with other audience members after the show, or a tightly designed series of activities/reflections that gradually returns the audience to the real world with a chance to unpack what took place. In the Westworld series, we never see the ending of someone’s Westworld experience, so we can only guess at how the park treats this aspect of the process. Instead, I recommend Maury Elizabeth Brown’s excellent Post Play Activities for LARP.
In Part One, we saw how there are a number of story beginnings packed into Sweetwater that guests can encounter. The stories themselves don’t always stay in Sweetwater, though. Many lead guests outwards into the further reaches of the park, where they will often find other invitations to stories that lead them even further afield. As Angela tells William during his introduction,
“You start in the center of the park. It’s simple, safe. The further out you venture, the more intense the experience gets. How far you want to go is entirely up to you.”
– Season 1 Episode 2, “Chestnut”
This is a useful way of managing the difficulty and tone of the park. Guests who want a more intense experience (dangerous, dark, explicit) are unlikely to encounter it unless they go looking for it. Or, as one of the guests in Episode One puts it, “You ride out of town, that’s when the real demented shit begins.” We see families in Westworld who know that certain parts of the park will be more suitable than others (“We shouldn’t cross the river, it’s too adult for Jacob.”), implying that this is explicit information they’re given as part of their introduction experience.
This spatial arrangement of different types of experiences reflects a principle that I use in designing any sort of interactive work. Broadly speaking, the majority of an audience will want the simplest, easiest path through an experience. They will happily sit back and watch where possible. A small section of audience members will enjoy reacting to the work, and being in response to it. Only a handful will actively take agency without being invited. This is a variation of the 1–9–90 principle from social media, where 1% of a website’s users will actively create ~content~, 9% will comment or respond to it, and 90% will lurk, or like/upvote/react.
I find this a crucial lens through which to think about designing audience experiences through worlds. There needs to be depth in the world, so that if the Active 1% go looking for it, they will find it. There needs to be space for the Reactive 9% to provide input. And there needs to be a clear path for the Passive 90% to follow. Providing all three of these makes for a multi-layered experience that meets the audience where they are, rather than asking them to play on our terms. Ignoring one of these approaches is likely to either break immersion, or leave people feeling uninvolved or lost, none of which is constructive.
By way of demonstrating the 1–9–90 principle, in 2015 I directed a show named Where Your Eyes Don’t Go, where one person at a time explored a maze filled with characters and mysteries. One of the rooms had a filing cabinet in it. The vast, vast majority of the 81 audience members who saw the show saw it and walked past, or didn’t even see it was there. There were just over half a dozen who approached the filing cabinet and opened the top drawer. And there was only a single audience member who not only opened the top drawer, but then picked up and read one of the files to see what was inside (very fortunately, he picked the only one that had in-world documents in it). If the filing cabinet or the file had been empty when an audience member inspected it, the artifice of the production would be revealed, and the immersion of the show would have been broken ever so slightly. But for the remaining 90%, they simply needed to see that the filing cabinet was there.
This is phrased, somewhat pejoratively, by Charlotte (Tessa Thompson), that:
“Ford’s stories are engaging. For some, downright addictive. But for all of Ford’s obsessing with the hosts’ verbal tics, and convoluted backstories, most of the guests just want a warm body to shoot or to fuck. They would be perfectly happy with something a little less baroque.”
– Season 1, Episode 9: ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’
She’s right, of course, that the 90% just want the most straightforward experience, but the experience desired by the other 10% is still equally important. In fact, the depth of the world will likely whet the curiosity appetite of some of the more passive-leaning audience members, and tempt them to explore just a little further beyond what they might normally.
It’s worth saying that these three approaches, Active, Reactive and Passive, shouldn’t necessarily be mutually exclusive. Audience members don’t choose one path that they are then beholden to. If someone didn’t think to look in the filing cabinet in one room, but their curiosity was piqued in another and they were inspired to look in the pockets of the jacket on the coat stand, then great. I like to think of these different approaches as being like the holds on the wall at a rock climbing gym. They come in a range of difficulties, and each climber can choose the one that’s right for them — you can just choose the easiest ones, or see what might happen with the harder-to-reach ones.
We also see that the Westworld staff can change the stories on the fly to create bespoke experiences for the guests. A number of staff in the park’s control room monitor the actions of guests and hosts alike, and we see them making changes in response to things happening in the park. For instance, in Episode 2, the Man in Black uses his expert knowledge of the park to murder a number of people very easily. We cut to a staff member asking Luke Hemsworth (sorry, I mean Ashley Stubbs) if they should try to ‘slow down’ the Man in Black, presumably by sending more hosts to try and kill him.
In game design, this idea is called Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment. The enjoyment of many game experiences comes from overcoming a challenge — if it’s too easy, then you haven’t overcome much, but if it’s too hard then the player is unlikely to overcome it at all (at least, not without their experience being soured). One way around this is to adjust the difficulty of the game, so that if they’re struggling the game gets easier, or if they’re succeeding then the game gets harder (enemies have more health, the player gets fewer resources, etc).
The principle of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment applies pretty smoothly to experiential shows that have some sort of gameplay element to them (escape-room types, LARP-types), but less well to those without it — are you going to make the metaphors of the show easier to understand? Complexify the motivations of the romantic subplot? Instead, it’s also useful, if not more useful, to think about interactive and improvised shows in terms of Dynamic Tone Adjustment: playing the show the way the audience wants to play it. In Jetpack Theatre’s show Art Heist, we had some audiences who had come to the show for a fun, casual group night out together. We had some audiences who were committed, serious players who wanted to win. Because the show had a range of tones that it was able to accommodate, the cast could recognise these different audience intentions, and tailor the show to match as they went along. The giggling group of friends would get a screwball romp, where they could come in dressed as the janitor, wearing a fake moustache, or pretend to be a statue in the middle of the gallery. The group of Army Reserves, who used the show as a training mission, replete with secret hand signals, would get a tense, thrilling affair, where the cast caused as much suspense and near-misses as possible.
We see this same idea of Dynamic Tone Adjustment in Westworld, when a worker in the control room announces that two family groups are twenty minutes away from arriving back into Sweetwater, just as a major and bloodlustrous shootout is underway. Luke Hemsworth (Ashley Stubbs) makes the call to bring in extra reinforcements on one side of the gunfight, and to jam the weapons of the other side, ensuring the fight wraps up quickly and the evidence will be gone by the time the families roll in. This demonstrates the importance of adjusting a show to meet the safety needs of its players, of building that flexibility and plasticity into the show to allow such changes to be made (or better still, to be a feature of the show, not an afterthought), and of having each cast member keep these needs in mind. Where possible, it’s also highly beneficial to have directors or stage managers outside the show, who are able to observe how the show as a whole is running and make top-down calls about how to proceed in each performance.
Conclusion
What I find compelling about the way Westworld demonstrates these ideas is, well, let’s be honest, the budget. After many years of producing shows on hardly any money, I’ve come to realise how much would be possible if only I had unlimited funding, an audience of the hyper-rich, lived in the future with a cast of replicants, and had no ethics. But apart from those few things, by translating many artistic principles into the language of code, it allows us to see these principles in a new light. We see how to lead an audience into a world, how to make room for them and tell stories alongside them. We see how to structure different narrative paths and build characters that support the creation of new narratives. We see how to tailor bespoke experiences, how to hold the audience’s hand, and when to let go.
One of the things that excites me about experiential theatre is that it’s not one thing. There’s no one way of doing it. Certainly, there are styles of shows that have become very popular, and very imitated, but there’s no reason that they must be the only way of creating these kinds of work. What we have in front of us is a site of exploration. A labyrinth, full of tools and principles and goals and inspirations. We get to walk through it, meeting, examining, collecting and discussing these different aspects, and building new and exciting things as we go.
The theatre is a maze. And it was built for you.
This series of articles (and all the theatre I make and things I write) are supported by my beautiful patrons. Won’t you join them?
A big thank you to Chloe, Davey, Kirsty, Mark, Max, Paul and Tali for reading various early versions of this article, and to everyone I’ve had the pleasure of working on shows with, who have all taught me and inspired me and helped me. This series wouldn’t exist without any of them.
