Room Escape Artist

Never Stop Learning

What it was

In early April, I attended the Playable Theatre Symposium hosted by IndieCade. This virtual two day event hosted on April 4 and 5 brought together creators from different areas across the immersive entertainment community. Speakers and attendees included LARP creators, podcasters, installation art creators, and immersive puzzle and theater makers.

Structure 

The 11 talks were in a variety of different formats from lecture style, to something more similar to a round table discussion, to other talks that were more participatory for the audience, allowing them to actively engage with the speaker throughout the session in a workshop-style format. At the conclusion of each talk, there was time allotted for a Q&A between attendees and the speakers.

My Personal Highlights

Day 1:

• Adrienne Mackey from Swim Pony took attendees through an exercise where we crafted the bones of an experience that used the setting and location as its own character.
• Ryan Hart’s talk about LARPs provided new perspective as it’s outside my usual scope with immersive entertainment. 
• Alistair Aitcheson’s Artholomew Video’s Stream Challenge ended Day 1 and was a really fun and low-pressure way to interact with other attendees.

Day 2:

• Risa Puno described how she uses AI to brainstorm designs with fabricators.
• The Pod Has Been Cast crew opened up about their decision making process as a large team, and it was really insightful to understand how that works!
• Our very own David Spira gave a talk about escape rooms, lending insight into nuances of the industry that other immersive creators may not be aware of.

The full event lineup can be found here.

Room for Improvement

Perhaps it’s because I am new to the Playable Theatre community, but I couldn’t seem to find a published theme or intent of the Symposium. While I would have preferred to see some sort of through line (answering the question “what will I takeaway from attending”), it wasn’t strictly necessary. 

Additionally, at least for me, not all sessions were created equally. Some sessions were far more engaging, entertaining, and enlightening than others. 

Final Take Aways

The broad learning I took away from the event was “let’s continue to get cool people together and talk about cool immersive things”. 

Go to the next IndieCade Symposium. Tickets for this past one were quite reasonable. Included in your ticket cost, you get access to the Discord and eventually the recorded sessions should be made available (no timeline on this right now). While interest for virtual conventions has waned post-pandemic, I really appreciated the low barrier of entry to attend this event. I only found out about this symposium two days before it started, and it would have been really challenging to attend in person if it wasn’t happening where I lived. Because this was hosted online, it meant ticket prices could be kept low, and there was effectively 0 barrier to entry… people had very few excuses of why they couldn’t attend! 

Getting together to meet and learn from other creators makes our entire industry better. I am so glad I went, and the next time you’re on the fence about attending a professional event, you should go too. Speaking of…

Have you purchased your ticket to RECON LA yet?