What is it about Alternate Reality Experiences (ARXes) and cults?
Since The Tension Experience introduced the form to a new audience in early 2016 with its tale of a shadowy organization that turned out to be a front for demon worshippers,* we’ve seen more than one ARX pop-up in LA with a cult-based storyline.
The lure for creators is somewhat obvious: cults and ARXes both thrive on secrets and mysteries. The fog of uncertainty at the edges of a narrative involving a cult is a feature and not a bug. It also gives the storytellers time to build out the world even as the players turn over every visible stone.
Enter The Society/The Boanthropic, an ARX that takes a novel approach to setting up its storylines while mining some of the same cult territory as others in the current wave.
The first major difference between The Society and the ARXes that have emerged from the haunt/horror world is one of tone. Here cult doesn’t necessarily mean occult, as the aesthetic is more in line with 70’s California sexual exploration/exploitation than it is a wizards and warlocks, dark robes and eldritch “horror” scenario. Sure, it’s creepy that the members of The Society refer to each other as “sister-brothers” and “uncle-aunts,” but for the moment that’s the kind of creepy we’re getting. No gore or simulated blood rites.
At present, I’ve stuck to The Society side of the dual narrative, with The Boanthropic storyline being that of a resistance which is looking to rescue a member of the cult before things get out of hand. Both storylines involve taking walks through parts of Los Angeles that the participant may not normally traverse.
In the case of GENESIS, the first in the series, this meant a hike around the Mount Washington area. The hike was guided via an audio playlist that had to be downloaded via Soundcloud. (Which reminds me: I need to cancel my Soundcloud subscription because that feature isn’t free anymore.) The playlist was a richly layered piece of audio production that did a damn fine job of transmitting the vibe of The Society while guiding me from station to station. For the most part, the instructions were clear and the path well marked, although a point midway through the adventure could lead some to confusion.
What impressed me the most about the playlist was how the tracks progressed in tone and content, creating the connective tissue for the activities at each station so that the tone of the story was sharply conveyed throughout. The stations varied enough in type and length — both self-directed and encounters with members of The Society — to make for a meaty adventure through the first seven levels of The Society’s mysteries.
The whole design of GENESIS did an excellent job of feeling like an initiation (albeit an abbreviated one) into a mystery cult rooted in free love. I left the path with my curiosity engaged and an extra swing in my step from all the innuendo summoned up along the way.
DIVULGENCE, which comprised the eighth through sixteenth levels of The Society, brought back the audio to get participants to the starting location of the experience. Instead of a winding path, DIVULGENCE brought new initiates into an encounter with The Society that resembled a kind of demented adult day care center.
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A cluster of cult members was gathered around card tables, playing board games and eating snacks as Tad (co-creator Thaddeus Shafer), The Society’s much put-upon administrative assistant, doted on them. A clothesline separated where the lounging members idly played and ate from where initiates were put through their paces in the eighth through sixteenth levels of the order. At one point that clothesline fell, prompting cries of “Tad. Tad. Tad.” from the seated members, sounding like the seagulls in Finding Nemo. These people seemed fully dependent on Tad.
When it was my turn to join the other initiates one of the more advanced members came for me. I had snipped off the string bracelet I had received at the end of my GENESIS journey, and while this caused a brief bout of consternation for my guide (co-creator Eric Hoff), it wasn’t a barrier to entry.
On the other side of the line, two more senior members (Kari Lee Cartwright, Alana Dietze) took me through the stations. These were split fairly evenly between the experiential — crystal meditations and rituals — and what is best described as workbook assignments. I was asked to elaborate on the “sexual animal” that I had written about during GENESIS. This is a kind of anima/animus figure that The Society seems particularly interested in. It led me to craft some fairly poetic smut, as the guides asked me to explain more about the animal in greater detail. While it was somewhat awkward to be crafting quality dirty talk just a few feet away from my friends who were doing similar things, I’m still always up for some reckless literary abandon.
Level 16 culminated in a “rebirth” ritual, and then I was invited to either mosey on out or sit at the edge of the circle where the cult members were enjoying their Tad-enabled idyl. I chose the latter, waiting to see if something particularly dramatic might occur. While no serious drama broke out, I was able to observe that the moment of “rebirth” prompted Tad to shepherd members from the circle up to the line, where they were then collected to participate in the rite. They then waited to be collected by Tad and sat down again. I walked away with the distinct impression that Tad might be something more than the put-upon assistant.
The 70’s sex-cult vibe kept up at a low simmer amongst the game playing cult members. At one point Tad dropped off two popsicles for the young ladies who were playing speed Scrabble at the table where I sat. One woman (Grief’s Rachel Rivera, having a bit of fun as a day player) took full advantage of the popsicle’s form to make things as awkward as possible. It was comic in the extreme, but also fully in step with The Society’s almost laser-like focus on sex.
Somehow The Society, as a pair of shows, manages to be lewd without being uncomfortable with a literary focus on the sexual that is played just this side of comic. Perhaps it’s because while participants are encouraged to think for themselves as sexual beings, we’re never made the object of a sexualized gaze. There’s a kind of innocence about the whole thing, a naïveté that almost certainly conceals something more.
What’s most interesting to me about The Society’s design is the emphasis on gentle ritualized moments. There’s a current at play in certain circles — between Whisperlodge and the more Zen veins of Screenshot Production’s work — which can read as almost a direct retort to the extreme haunt side of the immersive spectrum. While the story of The Society may ultimately prove to be a sinister one, the path by which we reach there is as gentle as a spring breeze. Which gives a potential dark turn all the more room to play with.
As a whole, GENESIS was a more cohesive experience than DIVULGENCE, which did a fair job of advancing the idea that The Society might not be all that it is cracked up to be. The group setting and confined playground of the latter detracted from really getting into the gentle body-presence that the DIVULGENCE rites seemed to be calling for. If anything the eight levels of the event felt more like early drafts of what the experience could be, compared to the polish of GENESIS. Of particular note in the first piece were the encounters with Hoff and a final interview with a beguiling Corryn Cummins.
Taken as a whole, The Society/Boanthropic project intrigues. Shafer and Hoff are borrowing elements from massively multiplayer online games and transmedia projects to create a storyline that rides a line so that players are driving the narrative without locking new guests out. It is arguably the most difficult puzzle facing ARX creators at the moment, and so far Shafer and Hoff seem to be finding some success with a structure that allows for discrete instances of story beats to be revisited.
Just what the final form of the project will look like remains a mystery.
The Society’s story continues, with new installments debuting soon. Prospective members can contact them via this form.
*That’s the simple version.
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