“Smartphones are Anti-Enchantment Devices”

From I’m Making Strandfall, a Solarpunk Orienteering Larp by Adrian Hon:Smartphones are anti-enchantment devices. All too often during interactive theatre and ARGs, I see participants fixated on their glowing screens, to the wider experience’s detriment. Smartphones, as traditionally used, have no place in an immersive experience that seeks to bring participants together and get them to talk and argue and deliberate with one another. Instead, we’ve designed our devices to appear closer to scientific instruments, with a custom user interface to match.This is an explanation for why the game-desitner, Adrian Hon, uses custom-designed pieces of hardware in a Larp, but it could also be a general description of the role of phones in our life: they are, more often than not, anti-echantment devices.