I’m Making Strandfall, a Solarpunk Orienteering Larp

In the twenty years I’ve been making games, I keep returning to the idea of blending the digital and physical worlds through ARGs like Perplex City and location-based games like Zombies, Run! It’s as if the act of mixing worlds enchants them both. That impulse is probably why I recently became fascinated by Nordic Larp (live action role playing), the closest thing we have to a fully embodied, truly participatory avant-garde art form today. So for anyone who knows me, it’s probably no surprise that my next game, Strandfall, combines all those notes. Strandfall is a highly physical outdoor larp that I’m co-creating with Alex Macmillan as part of our new collective, Experimental Social Scene, supported by Immersive Arts funding. This September, 30 players will embark on a desperate expedition in a real park in Edinburgh to uncover the nature of mysterious storms that are ravaging the world. Over the course of three hours, they’ll use our custom solarpunk-style “spatial computers” to…