In this new series, we’re inviting outstanding creative people working at the edge of their sector to answer five questions – about influence, struggle, ambition, chance and the strange intimacies of technology. Each person is someone whose practice we admire, whose problems feel adjacent to our own, and whose answers might tell us something about where things are heading.

We’re kicking this series off with Adrian Hon. Matt says, “Ever since I learned about the audacious nationwide game Perplex City that he developed with his brother Dan, I have admired Adrian as an original games designer and trenchant critic. I read his MSSV newsletter religiously.”

Adrian Hon is a writer and game designer working at the intersection of immersive experiences, games, and storytelling. He co-founded Six to Start, where he designed Zombies, Run! – the world’s bestselling smartphone fitness game, with over ten million players – and led design on Marvel Move, The Walk, and We Tell Stories, which won Best of Show at SXSW.

He’s the author of You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All (Basic Books, 2022) and A New History of the Future in 100 Objects (MIT Press, 2020). Hon is also an Associate Artist at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, and is currently making Strandfall, an outdoor solarpunk LARP, with Alex Macmillan as part of their new collective Experimental Social Scene. He writes about games and immersive art at mssv.net, and has recently started making video essays on immersive art and experiences.

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1. Who changed the way you see the world?

There was a science fiction writer when I was a teenager – Kim Stanley Robinson. I was really into science fiction at the time, reading a lot of golden age stories by authors like Arthur C. Clarke. I got this book club mailer through the letterbox: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy was coming out. I’d never read science fiction that engaged with politics and art and life in that kind of way. I can literally pinpoint reading that book to changing my life and changing my politics, which just shows how important it is to read at that impressionable age. It also got me interested in how technology and humanities flow together. So, definitely Kim Stanley Robinson.

2. What’s the creative problem you’re struggling with right now?

I’m making a new LARP with my collaborator Alex Macmillan called Strandfall. The way we’re describing it today is a solarpunk orienteering LARP. Unlike a lot of LARPs, it has quite a lot of technology in it that simulates how these things would work within the fictional society we’re creating. In a lot of LARPs, you might say, “we’ve got these special devices that can do X and Y,” and because it’s expensive and they break, you just pretend the technology works – which is very sensible and it engages the imagination. What we’re doing is an outdoor experience where the technology really does work, in the fictional world and in reality. But I’m worried people will get too distracted by this cool technology and this cool gameplay, and there won’t be enough room for them to roleplay – because that’s why we’re making a LARP. We’re not just making a pervasive game.

It’s a really interesting problem to have. I guess if we had the answer then maybe we wouldn’t need funding. That’s what we’re grappling with – talking to LARP experts and designers to figure it out.

3. If you could launch a project into the world tomorrow, what would it be?

I’m really interested in how to do something scalable that engages kids (and that isn’t expensive). I’m not working on that personally, but I know people who have done some really cool stuff around magic schools and things like that. How do you build something for kids that is as fun as Roblox or Minecraft, that isn’t them just looking at screens? Not that I think screens are always bad – sometimes screens are good – but how can you bring that into the real world? Something that doesn’t cost a hundred pounds for a two hour experience. Something more local, that can be run and customised by local groups. That would be a cool thing to do at some point.

UI mockup for Strandfall. Credit: Experimental Social Scene

4. Matt picks a card from Oblique Strategies: it reads “Breathe more deeply.” For you, is that helpful or unhelpful?

That’s a good reminder not to be running around all the time, feeling like we need to give people things to do, to press buttons, to have agency. Right now, a lot of talk within the immersive world – or within interactive, or whatever it is we do – is about giving people agency. I talked about that with Strandfall. You need to balance that with reflection. It can’t just be people hammering buttons, trying to do stuff without thought.

Creating art that gives people space to breathe – to pause – is important.

5. Would you let a robot wash you?

Normally I’m the earliest of early adopters, so normally I would say of course. But I’d feel kind of concerned – what if something went wrong? Even if I thought it was going to be fine, I wouldn’t be able to relax. And I want to feel relaxed when something is washing me, rather than highly strung. So that’s my answer.

Next month, we’ll be joined by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, an extraordinary media artist working at the intersection of architecture and performance art.

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