There has been a recent rise in ‘audience-centric’ and immersive storytelling. This indicates audiences are gaining interest in experiencing real adventure and everything it encompasses: the struggle, the new friendships, the skill development, and the growth. This paper examines two playable theatre experiences
created by a group of students, including the author, at the University of Southern California as an experiment in how to design an adventure and to evaluate its impact on participants. The experiences combined immersive improvisational theatre and live-action role-playing to create socially aware, one-night
experiences, using Harry Potter and mythology as themes. In each experiment, over 500 players simultaneously embarked on quests — a series of challenges including puzzles, scavenger hunts, and character interactions. Participants were asked to choose faction alignments based on the characters they
interacted with, as well as their own backgrounds and moral values. During the narrative finale, the impact of individual choices on the larger story and game was revealed. After the conclusion of each experience, participants filled out questionnaires and were interviewed. Through this, it was discovered that participants developed transferable problem-solving, team-work, and persuasion skills. The realization that their actions had consequences caused participants to reflect on their own moral values and judgement-making abilities,
inspiring some to make changes outside of the experience. This reveals that playable theatre experiences can lead to socialization, educational development, and real-world change in a variety of contexts when implemented correctly. This experiment has begun to discover the value of playable theatre experiences in a real-world context and to develop a reproducible format to continue to create such an impact.
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