Imagine you’re a kid, chewing Bazooka Joe bubblegum, walking down the sidewalk with your friends, and you’re looking for clues to a neighborhood mystery. What piques your curiosity?
Is it the scraped fender on that old car? The Mystery of the Junky Jalopy.
Is it an old man’s yard that has a bizarre amount of dead car batteries? The Case of the Collection of Car Batteries.
Is it a tree that is perfectly maintained, but no one has ever trimmed? The Mystery of the Ghostly Gardener!
Think about the snacks that you’re eating when you all sit on the curb and talk about the evidence you’ve found.
These are good details, but what happens when we eschew the standard practice of passive consumption and instead are asked to put ourselves in the story and speak out loud, take action, make decisions and interact with the narrative?
We are Jeff and Andy Crocker, a.k.a. Mister and Mischief, and we are experienced designers that create interactive work whose goal is to connect you with a story, first-hand, IRL, and surprise you with the results that can only come from your participation.
Take the Plunge
We like to define interaction as a narrative where you are present in the story and have the ability to engage with characters, settings and themes. In the current era, interactive can mean so many different things, from video games to pop-up books. Truly, fully interactive stories (virtual or in-person) allow guests or participants to affect the outcomes of the stories.
The work we create typically foregoes full audience agency because we’ve got a story that we want you to experience, but stop just short of turning over entire control to the audience’s every whim.
Make no mistake, these stories we create cannot happen without you. A pool without water is a professionally tiled hole in the ground. Without participants to engage with the story, there will be no adventure.
In our example above, you’re in our neighborhood, looking for clues with your other kid detectives, and when you feel like you’re inside the story — maybe you’ve adopted a persona, or maybe you’re very similar to yourself — you are more likely to act in a more truthful and empathetic manner.
Active Empathy Over Passive Consumption
We primarily consume books and movies and theater passively, with only a small percentage of storytelling outside of videogames being interactive.
When we introduce the ability to have a conversation with characters, to be moved by them — to laugh together, to cringe together, to cry together, to make eye contact — we increase the humanity involved by an exponential quantity.
Interactivity, the ability to make a real connection to a story, is a mechanism of empathy. When you feel like you’re part of the experience and feel like your choices matter, there is room for mischief, but it will always require a moment of self-reflection. When we exercise these muscles and think outside of ourselves, for one moment, whether that is how your actions will affect a character, setting or story, we fire the neurons of logos, pathos and ethos.
Law Breakers, Risk Takers
In 2022, we developed a piece called 40 Watts From Nowhere based on the book of the same name. In it, we ask the audience to collectively become the owner of an illegal radio station where they will learn about the rise and fall of KBLT Silverlake over the course of an hour.
We used wireless headphones to deliver the story via audio voiceover and allowed participants to play whatever music they wanted (that was available in our mocked-up radio station). Participants had the experience of illegally broadcasting on public airwaves, and when they hear the sound cut to static, indicating the FCC has shut the station down, they are made to embrace the loss as their own. But not just watching from a seat in the audience — this was their station, too.
The work we do is made to make you think thoughts and feel feelings, and through that process, see the world through a different lens, considering not just how you might feel, but how others may be experiencing these same things. At the very least, we want to think about what’s going on in the world around you.
Playable, Touchable, Memorable
Whether it’s written, performed or experienced, designing a way for folks to interact with stories will immediately create a connection that is hard to break. That connectivity is an anchor — to your characters, your setting and your plot. This creates a very unique and personal touch to the narrative. As Mister & Mischief, we aim to create impactful stories, put guests inside them, and instead of asking them to sit and watch, we ask them to lean in and engage with their hearts and their heads.
And when we make work that people can touch and play with, just durable enough to withstand rough-housing, we activate humanity and connection in our guests that they can share and magnify with the world.
Because the stories that live the longest aren’t the ones we’re told — they’re the ones we help tell.