Adrian Hon

In 2008, Six to Start made We Tell Stories for Penguin Books: six experimental online stories by six authors in six weeks. It won Best of Show at SXSW Interactive and ended up in MoMA. With the 20th anniversary approaching, I wrote about how we built it...

We offered to keep it online for free, but no dice. While Mohsin Hamid's story still largely works on the Internet Archive, the Google Maps story and others are broken. So many web experiences are ephemeral, just like live theatre. Maybe that's why I liked making them.

In 2008, Six to Start made We Tell Stories for Penguin Books: six experimental online stories by six authors in six weeks. It won Best of Show at SXSW Interactive and ended up in MoMA. With the 20th anniversary approaching, I wrote about how we built it...

Plus we had to convince six Penguin authors to write digital stories for us for *free*, as marketing for their books. Still, my favourite part was designing a spatialised Choose Your Own Adventure format. Mohsin Hamid read it and sent us a 37-page manuscript in PowerPoint that required zero edits.

In 2008, Six to Start made We Tell Stories for Penguin Books: six experimental online stories by six authors in six weeks. It won Best of Show at SXSW Interactive and ended up in MoMA. With the 20th anniversary approaching, I wrote about how we built it...

Tickets for next year's Nordic Larp conference in Denmark (March 4-7) are on sale! @x13n.com and I will be there talking about all things Strandfall, with hands-on demo units of our fully-functional "storm detector" computers!

I’m a little skeptical about the specifics of what is likely AI-assisted decompilation here, but none of this is at all surprising - game devs have been doing this for decades, back to early arcade games. People have even written books and papers about it!

It’s an impressive video but people calling this Pulitzer shit… I mean, honestly. Sure, if Pulitzers were awarded to journalists wrote wrote 100 words asserting “I found a video proving Trump is a Russian agent”! Variable names, man. Enjoy your entertainment, folks!

Great bit of pre-immersive theatre history here! The tips for audience members could've come from a Punchdrunk show, but the intro is pure 80s: "Choices surrendered to traditional theatre are returned … every whim or dedication will be rewarded in its own way.”

In fact, I have to tweak a bit in THE AGE OF IMMERSION after watching this, given how the passport advises audience members to split up. I knew it happened but didn't realise it was this explicit. (Shouldn't I have already known this? If I took another three years to write the book, maybe!)

"It’s like Stanislaw Lem's The Star Diaries!” I thought, reading the blurb. And that’s no bad thing since I love that book and I love Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, and it’s not like Lem has a monopoly on funny short stories about an interstellar traveller. But Trafalgar isn't quite that...

Gorodischer is a character in these stories, the friend of trader Trafalgar Medrano, who recounts tall tales of his interstellar adventures in between endless coffees. She's wry and skeptical and loving, and there's a lightness and speed to the dialogue that's just like Ursula Le Guin, but funnier.

"It’s like Stanislaw Lem's The Star Diaries!” I thought, reading the blurb. And that’s no bad thing since I love that book and I love Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, and it’s not like Lem has a monopoly on funny short stories about an interstellar traveller. But Trafalgar isn't quite that...

RIP Thinking Allowed. The format was getting creaky but it was immensely valuable to have a weekly show dedicated to sociology. I learned a lot!

A new development in the "LARP as slang" wars! Witness someone make a distinction between larpers (who "actually have to research what they're LARPing") and posers (who "have no idea"). Better yet, this reply has lots of upvotes!

Fascinated by this micro-history of Pangea, "the first true Civic Network of Varese", a real virtual square from 1996 where the people and associations that live and work in Varese, Italy, and its province can meet. Umberto Eco had the same hopes for the internet... github.com/l3nz/pangea-...

I have no reason to believe the RSC is *actually* doing an immersive theatre version of Piranesi, which makes its choice to market the play as "an immersive theatrical world that invites audiences to turn detective in a treacherous place of shadow and illusion" both amusing and misleading

Every time I hear people (like me) argue the BBC should do public service internet stuff, or try to compete with YouTube et al by hosting 3rd party content on iPlayer, I reflect on the fact that in this year of our lord 2026, the Sounds app *still* doesn't remember I want to play podcasts at 1.25x

To "inauthentic", I would add "performative" and "naive" – which is, of course, contradictory. But zooming out, I think the growth of "larping" as epiphet says something about an expanded understanding of performance in everyday life.

Not long ago, people would say "oh that's just theatre" or "she's being theatrical" and now they might say larp. But no-one really goes to theatre any more, and larp seems more appropriate anyway because it's something anyone can do.