These are taken from our own vocabulary for describing immersive work, and we’ve “borrowed (without asking)” from just about everywhere to come up with this lexicon. You’ll find many of the terms used in No Proscenium in the “Tags” which go with each listing, aside from the really obvious stuff like “Dance.” Unless you want to argue about what constitutes “Dance.” Please, don’t.
Updated: 2/26/2024
For an even deeper dive, check out the Immersive Reading List.
First up, let’s deal with the “I” word.
Immersive — that which meaningfully puts the audience on the same level as the primary action in a story/environment, usually physically and/or narratively.
For example: the audience is part of the world in an immersive piece, even if it is mainly as a physical obstacle.
See also:
Expanded Definition (since it’s so important to us here and we are nerds)
Immersive is a quality of a given piece of work, which can be pursued across different mediums including but not limited to theatre, games, music, visual art, dance, and even cinema. A given immersive experience often mixes multiple mediums to create the total effect of the work, and immersive design calls upon creators to consider both the intended effects and unintended consequences of their plans. (Scholars are encouraged to compare to the concept of “gesamtkunstwerk.”)
In any work, some small amount of agency, be it traversal, narrative, or emotional, is afforded to the audience. The degree of agency afforded is the depth of immersion. Agency is not the endpoint of an immersive design but a cornerstone of the palette. (A more apt metaphor derived from visual art might even be to say it is the “brush.”)
Inside an immersive theatre piece, for example, every where an audience member turns her head is part of the show. The design may or may not include physical/emotional interaction with characters. This is distinct from theatre in the round, theatre in the “surround,” cabaret staging, monologues that directly address the audience, actors making entrances in and out of aisles, or performers placed on balconies, tabletops, platforms, etc.
Regardless of medium, the audience is part of the world in an immersive piece, even if it is mainly as a physical obstacle. They are always more than mere observers. In an immersive theatre piece (again, for example), audience members acknowledge the presence of other audience members and performers also acknowledge the presence of the audience. Even if only begrudgingly. The only real question is the degree to which the audience are present.
Immersive also applies to virtual, augmented, and mixed reality experiences that create the illusion of physical presence. (see Presence, below)
In short when it comes to theatre, our initial discipline…
Immersive Theatre — a play that you play.
For more: see Webster’s definition of the adjective “immersive” which both informs our own terminology and the public’s sense of what the word means when making judgments about whether or not something is “really immersive.”
And now the rest (in alphabetical order):
Activation — an event, usually a free marketing event, which transforms a brand or story from a different medium into an immersive experience. Almost always temporary — aka a “pop-up” — and usually of a short duration. Activations usually value throughput over depth of experience, but not always.
Agency — a quality of the measure of the freedom that participants have in an experience. There are different types of agency: traversal, narrative, emotional, and the like. Generally, what the audience is doing in the piece: their purpose.
- Traversal Agency: the freedom to move around the environment
- Narrative Agency: the freedom to impact the outcome of a story and/or the fate of its characters
- Emotional Agency: the freedom to impact the meaning of a experience by shaping the performance(s) therein
ARG/ARX — alternate reality game/experience. The latter is taken from the transmedia world: multi-platform narratives that may or may not have culminating/tentpole performances. To counterbalance a tendency for the audience/players of an ARG to factionalize and compete among each other in order to archive a win-state, we often use the term “ARX ”(alternate reality experience) to remove any shades of competitive framing.
(Note: here are plenty of wonderful co-op games in the world, and “game” in the sense of “play” is a boon to humanity, but not everyone has gotten that memo.)
Augmented Reality (AR) — a digital interface that transposes digital elements on to the real world. Most commonly experienced via a smartphone’s camera; popular uses include location-based games like Pokémon Go or camera filters on social media apps.
Big “I” Immersive (aka The Big “I”) — used by NoPro publisher Noah Nelson to denote the spectrum of openframe work. (Because if you can’t beat ’em, detour them.)
Clockwork — a structure that rotates audience members through a set of scenes — e.g. “A,” “B,” “C,” “D” — so that the entire audience is engaged in at least a portion of the scenes in a linear fashion. This structure manages to create alternate timelines/experiences for the audience members depending on their starting point.
For example: ABCD/BCDA/CDAB/DABC would be a four scene clockwork. Each participant would have an entirely different timeline based on their starting point.(See also: scramble)
Dark Ride — from rides at Disneyland like Peter Pan and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. These are “on rails” guided experiences, ala Then She Fell, that give you the feeling of having stepped off the “track ”and into the sets of the ride. Like Sandboxes, Dark Rides are almost always fully immersive.
Deep “I” Immersive (or Deep Immersive) — theatrical (and theoretically digital) work that creates an emotionally grounded illusion of presence that borders on the hyperreal. (This is the stuff we are constantly chasing.)
Digital Immersive — experiences that predominantly, if not exclusively, use digital technology (e.g. virtual reality) to create a sense of presence. ARGs that don’t have a physical component can be considered digital immersives.
Escape Room/Escape Game — a game that invites a team of participants to solve puzzles in order to achieve a goal in a set duration of time. Can often feature the conceit that the participants are “trapped” in a physical room, hence the “escape” part of the phrase, although the overall format is rapidly evolving. Most modern escape rooms no longer physically lock participants inside a space due to safety concerns. (See also: Location Based Entertainment)
Embodied — media that physically engages the audience in an active fashion. Embodied media transcends frames and brings the audience onto the same level as the action of the narrative/experience. (Credit to Sara Thacher.) An embodied experience typically occurs in real time and leverages the audience member’s physical body in some way.
Experience — a catch-all term for immersive work whether it involves a narrative or not. It requires a direct perception of events.
Experiential — another term used to define the field of work that centers audience/player/users in the design of the work. While the immersive design axis is often concerned with the space around the audience, and the depth of their connection, the experiential design axis is concerned with the agency of the people inside the work. What are they doing? How can they affect that world and how is it affecting them?
Framed —media like TV, comic books, film, novels, or traditional theatre on a stage, one that exists within a frame of some sort. This media is objectively “over there,” somewhere separate from the observer. The opposite of embodied. (Credit to Sara Thacher.)
Hyper-Reality — coined by The VOID to refer to their hybrid Virtual Reality/experiential sets. Audience members traverse an IRL stage while wearing VR equipment and headphones which in turn alters their perception of the physical set pieces and props. This kind of experience uses objects, obstacles, and other special effects like vibration, temperature, wind, scent, etc. to create the illusion of a world larger than that on the stage.
Installation — used in both theatrical and large scale sculptural work to denote a piece that people may physically move through/around/within.
Interactive — an experience that gives some degree of agency (or the illusion of agency) — to members of the audience. In other words: when a particular participant does something, the world/environment should respond back in some way to that individual’s specific action. (This is not necessarily restricted to narrative agency, though it is commonly used in that way.)
Intimate — experiences intended for one person at a time or just a few people at a time.
Live Immersive — an immersive event — be it theatre, dance, a game, or some other form — that takes place predominantly, if not exclusively, in person, in real time.
Location Based Entertainment (aka LBE) — industry term for a form of entertainment that involves going to a specific place/type of establishment. VR centers and escape games are two examples of immersive LBEs, however LBEs are not limited to immersive entertainment.
magic circle — A term coming from the game design world. The magic circle is a space where the rules of the everyday world are temporarily suspended and replaced by different rules and and a new reality. A concept first described by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in Rules of Play state: “To play a game means entering into a magic circle, or perhaps creating one as a game begins.” The magic circle can be physical but does not necessarily need to be a physical space, as it can also exist virtually or as a state of mind.
Metaverse — from “meta” meaning “beyond” and the back-formation “verse” derived from “universe.” Coined by the science fiction author Neal Stephenson in the seminal Snow Crash. (Published 1992, while it’s great, we like his The Diamond Age even more, see “ractor” below.) In its purest form, “metaverse” means the sum total of spatialized Internet constructs including augmented and virtual realities, or “the sum of all virtual worlds.”
Often used by corporations as a buzzword to hype up a given spatialized social platform that they control, metaverse — like our beloved immersive — has a real utility beyond its marketing value. In its most potent usage, there is a single unified metaverse, which exists as the technical protocols and social norms that allow users to have agency and persistent identities (plural) across multiple virtual spaces with minimal friction.
Mixed Reality (MR) — virtual and physical realities blended together in real time to create a hybrid; separate from augmented reality in that the digital and physical objects are “aware” of one another. See also Augmented Reality, Hyper-Reality.
One-on-one — a scene in an experience that features a single actor and a single audience member. One-on-ones are coveted in larger experiences like Sleep No More. (In Britain this is known as a “one-to-one.”) May also be used in the phrase “one-on-one train” where a single audience member is encountering a series of actors, one at a time.
Ontological Vertigo — the sensation that sometimes occurs when you step outside of an immersive environment and into another, be it a themed or unthemed space, that has a strikingly different base reality. (Coined by Zay Amsbury, Sep. 2019, after leaving Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland.)
Openframe — a term coined by director Mikhael Tara Garver in a series of essays meant to embrace the spectrum of productions (site-specific, promenade, installation, and immersive) which are often grouped together under the label of “immersive” work.
Participatory — productions that invite audience participation without necessarily invoking narrative agency on their part. Often the audience is participating as a whole or in aggregate (i.e. clapping, voting, polls, etc.) as opposed to having agency as individuals. See also: Interactive.
Playable Theatre — coined by Celia Pearce and defined by the non-profit she co-founded of the same name as broadly describing “participatory, immersive theatrical events — embodied experiences where audiences have meaningful agency to influence the outcome — that bring together aspects of games and theatre to create new forms of art and entertainment.”
Presence — the illusion that one is physically, and emotionally, in another space. This can be a fictional or virtual space, or a recreation of an actual space.
Promenade — a production that requires the audience to move from space to space, but may still use the principle of the fourth wall to separate the audience from the action. (Aka: mobile, processional.)
Ractor — a contraction of “interactive actor,” which first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (published 1995). This is an actor who performs in interactive virtual entertainment. While actors might perform plays in VR or AR for paying audiences to watch, it is the direct interaction between audience and performer that makes a ractor a ractor.
Sandbox — from “sandbox video game.” A show that gives audience members all but free reign on moving about the performance space. Sleep No More is the archetypal sandbox show. Undoubtably immersive.
Scramble — similar to a clockwork (see above) structure but non-linear in nature. So that in a four scene scramble audience members might experience ABCD/DBAC/CABD or anyone combination thereof. Would be more natural to a sandbox format, but still workable as a dark ride. I’d hate to see the flow chart on the later, however. (Credit to Venetia Harpin)
Site-specific/site-adaptive/site-responsive/etc. — productions that are not set inside a traditional theatre space, and use the unique properties of that space to shape the production, be it a park or a boat or a shopping mall. (There are subtle shades here that most audience members won’t spend time worrying about.)
Site-evocative — a production that seeks to recreate a “sense” of a space as opposed to fitting the work into the space that’s given to them. Can range from being a perfect recreation to an outline, and all the uncanny stops in between. This type of work can often be found being staged in existing theatrical spaces that have been converted.
Spatial Audio — an audio system, such as ambisonic microphones or Dolby Atmos, that allows sound to be recorded and/or mixed so that elements (voices, instruments, effects) appear to surround the listener and happen at different depths around the listener in 360 degrees. (For further research, look up binaural and object based sound recording, and positional audio.)
Storyworld/StoryWorld/storyworld — the fictional space in which a experience is set.
Themed — an environment (park, bar, etc.) that has been designed and decorated to evoke a particular idea or story-world. The prime example of this is Disneyland, but many bars and other establishments are following the practice. Immersive in the sense of physicality, but more of a platform for immersive experiences — emergent or designed.
Throughput — the number of patrons that can be accommodated in an instance of a production. Often expressed as a function of guests per hour.
Track—a physical and/or narrative through-line in an experience or event. This can apply to individuals, small groups, or the audience as a whole. (As in a tracked event, or story tracks. See also: Dark Ride.)(h/t to Ashley Steed for reminding us to get this in.)
Virtual Reality (VR) — an artificial reality accessible through either projections or head mounted displays which completely surround the viewer.
XR (Cross Reality or Extended Reality) —a catch-all term for VR, AR, MR, and pretty much any other “reality.” If digital tools are being used to create, interact with, or augment a play space, you’re in XR.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today!
In addition to the No Proscenium web site, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Slack forum.
Office facilities provided by Thymele Arts, in Los Angeles, CA.
Discussion