A few years ago – before the pandemic – I worked with Katie Day and John Sear of ‘The Other Way Works‘ to devise an immersive theatre piece where the audience became spies, staking out a car park and passing judgement on the actions and behaviour of a government minister.

It was a fun piece to work on and was a neat way to allow audiences to become an active part of an unfolding drama taking place both inside and outside a theatre. I blogged about here.

Sadly, the pandemic struck and productions such as this simple were not feasible. In the meantime Katie and John have secured a small amount of funding from The Space to create an ‘on demand’ version of A Moment of Madness.

It’s available to play for free and takes just over an hour to complete. You’ll need 3 or 4 of you, ideally, since you not only have to monitor activity in a remote car park  via CCTV, hunt down facts and keep up with the emerging storyline, but you also have to gather up critical info on your phones and solve various Escape Game style puzzles along the way. You’ll be kept pretty busy.

Technologically at its core, this game is a very smart adaptation of the interactive video platform Stornaway, which is worth checking out if you’re looking for a very accessible prototyping tool for developing complex branching narrative projects, aimed at YouTube or TV output.

My input on AMOM On Demand has, I have to admit, been fairly minimal – although I did offer the first draft scripts for the Michael Makerson MP viral videos that you might see cropping up on Twitter and Facebook. 

Initial feedback on the project seems to be positive – here’s a review from the I Choose Birmingham website. Given it’s free, the best thing to do is simply try it yourself – https://www.theotherwayworks.co.uk/play-a-moment-of-madness/