Tassos Stevens, aka the Coney Doctor, with another piece from The Playbook, also for Coney’s blog as part of a series themed around Better Conversations Across Difference. This piece is called Round The Table.
Adventure One was a project that Coney developed in 2014, and opened publicly in spring 2015. I’m going to talk you through the playing experience of the adventure, and how it ended up with the players sitting around a table.
So any experience starts when you first hear about it, and only ends when you stop thinking and talking about it. So in that sense, Adventure One started with Coney releasing tickets and very basic information online. You were told that this would be an adventure in which you would be tailing somebody who worked in the heart of the City of London in the financial sector, and it would be taking place in a secret location, somewhere in the financial district in the City of London, secret because we didn't have permission to be there, and we wouldn't get permission if we asked for it.
And that was pretty much it, until you clicked on the Eventbrite and were given a bit more information: it would take place on a weekend afternoon, Saturday or Sunday; it would last around three hours; the starting point would be somewhere within a 15 minute walk of Bank tube station.
You decide to buy your ticket and Coney thanks you. And then introduces you by email to one of our associates, who is, in fact, fictional, called Josh Smith. Josh then emails to say that he'll be in touch with you by email on the Monday morning before, say it's a Saturday afternoon when you're going on the adventure. And he'll send a series of messages by email and by text, and it will be important that you can complete this exchange of messages in that week running up to the adventure, otherwise you won't be able to go on the adventure.
So Monday morning, you get the email, and Josh introduces himself as an associate of Coney, and he's going to be leading you on this adventure. And first of all, he asks you what we term an ‘opening question’, a question that will resonate with the themes of the piece and prime the audience in some way for what is to come.
And the opening question originally, when we did a scratch performance at the end of development, was: what do you think of the financial system and the people who work inside it?
And the refinement by the time we finished the piece was: what’s your relationship to the financial system? Are you very on the inside, like, maybe you work for it, or a bit on the inside like you do another job, but through your daily actions, you're always taking part. Or are you somewhere more on the outside of the system? And wherever you are, is there a story as to why?
You write your response to that opening question. And whatever you say, Josh says, thank you. And then he asks you to send a text message saying, Hi, Josh, it’s… and then just your name. When you do, five seconds later, your phone rings from the same number, and there's then a phone call from Josh, where he in a recorded message, talks you through some of the risks that you're going to be taking on the adventure. This call is designed to make the adventure feel scarier than it was actually going to be. In part as a filter so that people who might be too nervous for the experience, might just decide to check out now. And that would absolutely fine.
Ultimately Josh asks you in the call: are you willing to take responsibility for your actions and their consequences, even though you don't know what you're going to be asked to do? And only if you accept responsibility, then you can continue.
If you can't for whatever reason, that's absolutely fine, it’s welcomed, great to the know. But then Coney takes you back to the beginning and you're given a refund.
So imagine you say: yes, you accept, and then Josh thanks you. And next Josh sends you a zipped folder of music tracks to upload onto your smartphone. And you're gonna be guided by your smartphone and by Josh via that, and then finally, the night before, he sends you a little map online with a start location and instructions: to be ready soon after 12 noon; to maybe wear one earpiece in, one earpiece out; and although you may recognise other players, people you think might be playing, best to assume that they're not. And remember: we don't have permission to be here.
You send the text, your phone pings: VAMOS. And then an instruction to listen to Track 1. The voice on the tracks introduces herself as Fiona. She works with Josh, is also an associate of Coney, and first of all she takes you into the location to give you the lie of the land, and also to teach you how to play. As you're going to be playing basically undercover, what in Coney we dub 'playful secret agent mode’. Play in a way so that nobody who's not playing can tell that you're playing, which can be passersby, people who work in shops, etc. But also it includes, like, security and police. There are real security, real police, quite a heavy presence here in this location, which I'm afraid I'm still not going to reveal to you what that is, I never do.
And then Fiona sends you a map with various locations pinned. And basically the play of it is to find yourself in one of those locations. Then there's instructions to send a text message. You send a text say, because you're in Starbucks, it then responds to say, if you're in Starbucks, and listen to track 13. And track 13 then say, is an interview between a surveillance agent and the barista who serves the person that you're going to be tailing his daily coffee. This person is initially called Mr. X, later the target.
You’ll be listening to this in the Starbucks, you've probably bought a coffee so that you can blend in, not draw attention. And, you are imagining the kind of the interaction described between Mr. X and the barista, whilst you watch real baristas - maybe it's one of them! - going about their business, doing this discreetly in a way not to draw attention yourself. This mode also has the value of not being disruptive for other people. So hopefully nobody is aware that something else is happening.
Through all these tracks you discover you are learning more about Mr. X and his role, precisely in the finance system and also more of the character of the man. You learne that he is a programmer, and that he programs code - what are called high frequency trading algorithms, which can process, millions of transactions in less than a second. These power 90% of the financial markets, and occasionally they're thought to have caused completely unforeseen and sudden crashes in the market.
And all of this is real, this really exists. And, I should have said at the beginning, Adventure One was co-authored by myself and William Drew, who's a real Coney associate and a brilliant interactive writer and game designer.
Myself and Will followed a principle of ‘minimum fiction’ in writing Adventure One. So we did a lot of observation and reconnaissance around the location, stitching story onto real details that we discovered through that. We also did a lot of quite deep research, both desk research and conversations with people that we knew, who had some kind of connection to the financial system, building up the world in that way.
Anything that we invented had to be as plausible as possible, so that it would blend in with what was real. People wouldn't be able to tell, then, necessarily, what was real and what was not, which then adds to the level of stake in the adventure. And so you're learning more about Mr. X and what he does and the kind of person that he is: Is he cruel? Is he kind?
And then suddenly you get another phone call from Josh. Shit is about to get real. Mr. X is turning up in person, and he's expecting to meet Josh, but Josh is going to send you: you meaning the probably 11 or 12 people who are now gathered together, as you’ve discovered that you are all on the same adventure.
And he challenges you all to do something which is illegal, for which there's a genuine risk of arrest. Again, I'm not going to say what this is, but I will say there's quite a strong clue in the photograph at the top of the page. I'll leave you with that.
So you're challenged to do this action… skipping over what that is… a little bit later, you find yourself in the upstairs room of a pub, and you're invited by a man who you recognise as Mr. X, the target, but he is now very friendly and seemingly knowing you all by name. eH invites you to sit around a table.
But what is now put onto the table is basically you, every choice that you've made, everything you've written, including the that response to that original opening question is now on the table unpacked from a briefcase. This is what it's all been about all along. It's all about you and with that, he asks you to arrange yourself around the table. So sitting on his right will be the person who's most inside the system, and sitting on his left will be the person who's most outside the system.
It's up to you how you arrange yourselves, and that is crucial. And most importantly, Mr. X indicates that everybody is welcome no matter where you're sitting, you all carry equal voice.
The man that you recognise as Mr. X also introduces himself as Josh. He is the one that has been guiding you, and also that you've been tailing.
And he opens up a briefcase, and inside there are files on each of you, which detail all your responses. And the discussion which follows is where the meaning and the politics of the piece literally get unpacked.
When we first scratched this in December 2014, one of the players who is well known to Coney, one of our most valuable players, and indeed a Friend of the charity - this player sighed and said:
Looking at the skyline of the city, I'm just reminded of the end of Fight Club, and just like in that film, I want to blow it all up.
And a woman who had said nothing till this point, who was sitting beside him, visibly winced and explained:
I actually work in one of the buildings that you just fantasised about blowing up.
And then a really interesting, initially awkward, but growing warmer and warmer conversation grew between them. And that was the moment that inspired a refinement of the opening question to be - where do you place yourself in relation to the system? - rather than what's your view of it, then recognising that, by asking people to arrange themselves around the table in relation to their answers, that then opened up transparently the different perspectives that were held in the room.
I should point out that I would often be sitting on a nearby table in the pub on my laptop, and would wave when Mr. X Josh introduced me as one of the backroom Josh’s. Josh is the code name for anybody who's operating the adventure. So I was sitting there and was lucky enough to witness a conversation between a person who was most on the inside, actually a high level financier in Barclays Bank, and the person most on the outside, who had spent six months in the Occupy protest camp outside St Paul's because they'd been pushed out from Paternoster square by the Stock Exchange, where they'd originally planned to protest.
So very, very inside the system, connecting with very, very outside the system. And although it's fair to say there was some needle in the conversation, they had a conversation which would never have happened otherwise.
I felt there was really great power in being able to bring people bonded by the same common heart-racing experience, then in a culture of ‘everybody's welcome, everybody’s equal’ transparently to show where they are in relation to the financial system, and then to be able to spark conversation around questions, which included:
What agency do we have in the face of these big hyper object systems like the financial system that's too vast for us to grasp, yet it pervades our lives. What agency do we have to challenge or change those?
Which is a big part of what Adventure One ultimately was trying to grapple with and these conversations, while still part of the playing experience and still heightened because of the presence of the actor who was both Mr. X and Josh, were really highly charged.
This sparked thinking for Coney more broadly around how facilitating and designing reflection to be part of the experience rather than a bolt-on, is a more powerful way for people to engage with what that experience means to them, individually and collectively.
I'll leave you with a question as a poser. I overheard one player in another adventure talk around the table about some rather interesting perspectives, which led me to google him on the spot and discover that he worked for an incredibly interesting organisation. And if you like, you can make a guess in the comments as to what that organisation was. Whoever gets closest, within a week, will win a small prize, the nature of which shall remain a mystery for now.
This has been Tassos Stevens aka the Coney Doctor. And this has been Round The Table, a piece from The Playbook, and for Coney’s blog. Thanks for listening, you.