PART ONE OF FIVE
STRIKE
Enactment
What did the person actually have to do?
Play does not mean frivolous. It means a move can be tried before the move becomes evidence of whether you are smart, competent, professional, good or right.
That matters because when every unfinished response has to arrive looking respectable, creative range gets very small.
Some things become easier to understand once you participate in them. This series is built on that.
The distinction at Strike is consequence. Something happened because the person acted, and it would not have happened otherwise.
This is worth being precise about, because the most interactive experience ever made can sit here and ask almost nothing of anybody. A film with hundreds of branching choices is still Strike if none of the choices are about the person making them. Pressing a button is an action. It is not necessarily a consequence.
The failure at this depth is fake agency.
Controls that do not change anything. Choices that return to the same place. A participant learns very quickly whether an experience actually needs them, and once they have learned it does not, nothing later in the experience recovers.
A well built Strike experience can be exactly the right thing to have made. Most attractions correctly live here.
What play looks like here
Play looks like consequence.
I do something and the world answers. Nothing profound has to happen. Touch the system, make a move, see what answers back. The pleasure is simply that the move was real enough to change what came next.
Try this on your own work
List every moment in something you have made where the participant appears to act.
For each one, write down exactly what changes because of it.
Anywhere the honest answer is nothing, you have decoration rather than enactment. Pick one and design a single real consequence.
Once the person's action matters, a second question becomes available. Not what they did. What they saw.
