Round the Table: The Story of Adventure One

Posted on September 27th, 2024

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 together.

Any experience starts when you first hear about it, and only ends when you stop thinking and talking about it. 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 in the financial district in the City of London – secret because we didn’t have permission to be there, and we wouldn’t get it if we asked. 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; it would last around three hours; the starting point would be somewhere near Bank tube station. 

You decide to buy your ticket. 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 the adventure. He’ll send a series of messages by email and 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 participate. 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 for what’s to come.

The opening question originally, when we did a scratch performance, was: what do you think of the financial system and the people who work inside it? By the time we finished the piece, this had been refined to: 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. Josh says thank you, and asks you to send a text message saying, Hi, Josh, it’s… and then 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 in a recorded message, he 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. Ultimately Josh asks: 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 know. But then Coney takes you back to the beginning and you’re given a refund.

So imagine you say: yes, you accept. Josh then sends you a zipped folder of music tracks to upload onto your smartphone. 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. 

The day arrives, you send the text to kick off the adventure. Your phone pings with a text: 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 to teach you how to play. As you’re going to be playing basically undercover, which in Coney we dub ‘playful secret agent mode’ – playing 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 people 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; I never do. 

Fiona sends you a map with various locations pinned. The play of it is to find yourself in one of those locations. Then there are 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, listen to track 13. And track 13 is then 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. You are imagining the kind of 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 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 learn 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 unforeseen and sudden crashes in the market.

All of this is real, it 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. 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. In this way, we built the world. 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? Suddenly, you get another phone call from Josh. Shit’s 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. 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.

So you’re challenged to do this action, and 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. He invites you to sit around a table.

This is what it’s been about all along. It’s all about you. With that, he asks you to arrange yourself around the table. Sitting on Mr X’s 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. Crucially, it’s up to you, the players, how you arrange yourselves. 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. He has files on each of you, which detail all your responses. 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 his briefcase. The discussion that follows is where the meaning and the politics of the piece get literally unpacked. 

When we first scratched this in December 2014, one of the players who is well known to Coney, 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. 

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.

Then, a really interesting, initially awkward but increasingly warm conversation grew between these two people. That was the moment that inspired the refinement of that opening question so that it asks ‘where do you place yourself in relation to the system?, rather than ‘what’s your view of it’. We recognised that, by asking people to arrange themselves around the table in relation to their answers, that then transparently opened up the different perspectives that were held in the room. 

I should point out that I would often be sitting at 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. Sitting there, I 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. 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 these people together and to spark conversations around questions, which included: 

What agency do we have in the face of these big, hyperobject 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? 

These were a big part of what Adventure One ultimately was trying to grapple with, and these conversations, while still part of the playing experience and heightened because of the presence of the actor who was both Mr. X and Josh, were really highly charged. This sparked thinking for Coney 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, both individually and collectively.

Read the 2015 write-up of Adventure One on Time Out here.

 

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