Updated: 5 days ago
issue 2
fall 2026
Everyone Is Invited (Some Assembly Required), Or The Myth of Total Freedom in the Architecture of Belonging
How the art of audience hospitality can combat the FOMO created by completionists.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Broadhurst Theatre, New York City, NY. May 15th, 2026. Photo by author.
Editor's Introduction
Timothy Braun is a wonderfully gifted essayist who hones his writer’s eye on the completionists: those repeat visitors who can’t stand to miss any component of an immersive experience. Tim explores how a completionist’s level of expertise can often sideline the newbie and make them feel like they’re doing an experience “wrong.” With comical flourishes, he highlights the art of immersive hospitality as an antidote to a completionist takeover.
Prelude: An Introduction to the Rules
I should probably introduce myself before I tell you that I don't know what I'm doing. My name is Timothy Braun, but you can call me “Timmy.” I am a writer and professor in Austin, Texas. I spend a significant portion of my professional life putting people into rooms where they don't know what they're doing and then asking them to make something anyway. I teach playwriting. Screenwriting. Creative nonfiction. World Building. Classes about failure. Classes in which I routinely ask students to write things they have never written before, try forms they don't understand, and occasionally make something spectacularly terrible on purpose. I am interested in what happens when people encounter uncertainty.
I am also the guy who will stand inside an immersive theatre production thinking, “Am I supposed to open that drawer?” This is important, because the first thing nobody tells you about immersive theatre is that there are rules. Not written rules. Nobody hands you a program explaining how close to stand to an actor, whether you're supposed to open a drawer, follow a stranger down a staircase, interrupt someone, touch something, or remain quietly where you are. Traditional theatre has spent centuries teaching us how to behave. Sit down. Stay quiet. Don't climb onto the stage. If Patti LuPone stops the show to yell at someone, try very hard not to be that person. Immersive theatre takes that contract, cheerfully sets it on fire, and says ”Welcome! You're free!”
Free to do what? Shenanigans?¹
When I attended Sleep No More in 2018, I assumed figuring that out was the point. The sprawling hotel mashed Shakespeare's “Scottish Play” (Don’t say the cursed real name. Everything is a theatre, even the phone you are reading this on) with 1930s film noir. We wore masks. We wandered. Every hallway suggested another secret. Every staircase promised another story. I loved it, and then I started noticing people who were better at it than I was. A woman positioned herself outside a doorway several minutes before anything happened. A man hurried down a staircase. I followed him, convinced we had both stumbled onto something unexpected. By the time I reached the bottom, he was standing exactly where he needed to be. Seconds later, an actor appeared. Dangnabbit. This wasn’t fiddlesticks or tomfoolery. He knew. Suddenly I wasn't thinking about Shakespeare or noir or the architecture of the McKittrick Hotel. I was thinking about that guy. How did he know? Worse: What else does he know that I don't? I had paid for the same ticket. I wore the same mask. Technically, we possessed the same freedom. We were not having the same experience. I was annoyed. There. I’ve said it out loud, or at least on electric paper. I was also jealous. And fascinated. And experiencing the particular form of anxiety produced when everyone around you appears to understand something nobody bothered to explain.
Later, I learned that Sleep No More had developed an audience of repeat visitors who mapped character routes, debated hidden scenes, compared one-on-one encounters, and knew precisely where to stand to catch moments most first-time visitors would never discover. The internet has a name for people like this: Completionists. I know Completionists because I am one in other parts of my life. Give me enough time, and I can tell you the history of the Indianapolis Colts in considerably more detail than either of us needs. Expertise isn't a flaw. It means somebody loved a world enough to keep returning to it, but standing inside Sleep No More, I began wondering about the person who had just arrived. Because every Completionist was once that person, and every invitation into an immersive world contains a design problem: How do you preserve mystery without turning mystery into exclusion?
That question has followed me through immersive performances, festivals, classrooms, museums, theme parks, games, and practically every other complicated human system I have wandered into since. I no longer think the central problem is freedom. I think it is hospitality. Agency is not something audiences simply bring into a room. It is something designers cultivate.
Moment I. My 1991 Zelda: A Link to the Past
Long before Sleep No More, video games taught me that entering a world and understanding how to live inside the world are different things. In 1991, I encountered The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. There were two enormous interconnected worlds, dungeons, secret passages, hidden items, and places I was certain I had explored until somebody told me about something I had completely missed. Finishing the game wasn't necessarily finishing the game.
Disney does this too. A family's first visit to Disneyland might involve a few rides, a photograph with a princess or giant mouse, and an overpriced churro. Someone making their fiftieth visit enters an entirely different park. They know which attractions to rope-drop, which lines disappear after the parade, where to eat, where to stand, and which paths quietly avoid afternoon crowds. Neither visitor is doing Disney incorrectly. They're inhabiting different versions of the same world.
The same thing happens at museums, escape rooms, festivals, conventions, and academic conferences. Come to SXSW with me, and I can show you. Every sufficiently complicated system eventually develops insiders who know where to go, what matters, and which conversations are actually important. Immersive theatre does the same thing. Productions reward return visits with hidden scenes, alternate pathways, one-on-one encounters, and fleeting moments no single audience member can experience in one evening. Artistically, that's exhilarating. Economically, repeat audiences can keep productions alive. But rewards create strategies. Strategies become habits. Habits become culture. Eventually newcomers enter a world where everyone insists there are no rules while quietly following dozens of them. Completionists don't create those rules.
They expose them².
Moment II. The Hidden Curriculum, or Why I Tell Students It's Okay to Fail
I spend most of my life teaching. Every August, universities welcome a new class of students with remarkably similar promises to immersive theatre: Welcome. You belong here. This university is your home. The invitation is sincere. The experience is more complicated. Within weeks, students discover dozens of rules nobody put in the brochure. Office hours aren't merely hours when professors happen to sit in offices. Asking a question after class can become a relationship. Recommendation letters begin long before someone asks for one. Internships sometimes emerge from conversations rather than applications.
Also, perhaps don't come to class in pajamas.
I should put that in the syllabus.
Educational researchers call this the “hidden curriculum”³: the habits, expectations, rituals, assumptions, and social norms institutions teach without formally announcing them. Faculty members frequently forget these rules are invisible because we have lived inside universities for decades. I see the same thing in immersive theatre. Experienced participants know uncertainty isn't necessarily failure. They know initiative may be rewarded. They know when following a performer is acceptable, when proximity is part of the experience, when curiosity is expected.
Then someone like me walks into the room carrying a lifetime of training as a “good audience member.”
Sit.
Listen. Don't interrupt. Don't touch. Suddenly the performance tells me:
Move. Choose.
Follow. Participate.
We call that agency, but agency isn't simply permission. It is a practice. Practices have to be learned. I know this because I ask students to take creative risks for a living. I can tell a room full of eighteen-year-olds, “There are no wrong answers. Be fearless.” That doesn't make them fearless. If anything, announcing that there are no rules sometimes makes the room more terrifying.
So I do something else. I start small. I model the behavior. I give them an exercise where the consequences of failure are almost nonexistent. Sometimes I deliberately make something ridiculous myself. Sometimes I deliberately write the worst dialogue I can think of on the board. “I love you, but sometimes love isn’t enough.” “I know. Sometimes love is too much.” “What does that mean?” “I don’t know.” I am a professional writer. I have two graduate degrees. This is what they were for. We laugh. Someone takes a slightly bigger risk. We laugh again. Somebody else follows. Eventually, the room understands something I could never have established simply by announcing it. Being wrong will not get you expelled from the community. That's when agency begins. Not when I give students freedom. When they trust the room enough to use it.
Moment III. Mystery or Exclusion?
This distinction has changed how I experience immersive work. Mystery and exclusion can initially feel almost identical. Both involve not knowing, but they produce completely different questions. Mystery makes me ask: “What's behind that door?” Exclusion makes me ask: “Am I allowed to open it?”
Those questions matter especially for immersive work intended to create social impact.
If an experience hopes to generate empathy, civic engagement, conversation, perspective-taking, community, or social change, participation cannot be treated as a neutral condition audiences either possess or lack. Who feels authorized to participate becomes part of the meaning of the work. This does not mean every participant needs the same experience. They shouldn't. Mystery matters. Discovery matters. Partial knowledge matters. Two people can enter the same immersive world and leave carrying completely different stories. That's one of the medium's great pleasures.
Immersive artist Koryn Wicks has written about what she calls “onboarding the audience”⁴: how participation is communicated before and during an experience through advance information, direct address, design, choreography, and the relationship between performer and participant. In other words, somebody has to teach us enough of the grammar to let us begin speaking. That doesn't require explaining the plot. It doesn't require spoiling the surprise.
I don't need a laminated instruction manual. In fact, please don't give me one. I will lose it. I need the theatrical equivalent of somebody at a party pointing toward the kitchen and saying, “Beer is in the fridge. Bathroom is down the hall. Don't worry about the dog.” Suddenly, I know how to be there. These things sound tiny, but they aren't. They answer the question underneath the question: What kind of room have I entered?
An email tells us what might happen. A host demonstrates the rules. A performer offers a hand and waits for us to take it. We are given just enough information to begin. At the WOW Festival in San Diego this past spring, I encountered another kind of onboarding, one I have started thinking of as emergent onboarding. Nobody explains the rules because the rules emerge as we watch other people discover them. Somebody goes first.
Handle With Care, by the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed, may have been my favorite example. There are no traditional performers waiting to take control. The audience has to make the performance happen around a box. At first, nobody quite knows what to do, and then somebody does something. The rest of us watch. Nothing terrible happens.
That person's action becomes information for the next person. Someone else tries something. Slowly, the room teaches itself how to be the room.
Handle With Care by Belgian artists Ontroerend Goed, La Jolla Playhouse WOW Festival, UC San Diego campus, La Jolla, California, April 23, 2026. Photo by author.
The mystery remains. The social terror diminishes. To me, that is hospitality done well. A host establishes the rules of the world. The physical environment suggests where a body belongs. The audience learns by watching other audience members. That last part matters. Because sometimes watching is participation.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball, Broadhurst Theatre, New York City, NY. May 15th, 2026. Photo by author, as he struggles with a simple hand fan.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball gave me a wonderful version of this problem, and before I get started, I must say I can't believe this show has already closed. The production invited audiences into ballroom culture with enormous warmth, celebration, and joy. Audience members familiar with that tradition recognized gestures before I did. They anticipated responses. They knew when to make noise. Everything else had been remarkably subtle. The Jellicle Ball taught me how to watch ballroom by letting me watch ballroom. Categories revealed themselves through repetition. The dance judges taught me what counted by reacting to what they saw. The emcee gave me vocabulary without stopping the evening for a glossary. I learned the rules of the room because the room trusted me to pay attention.
And then I got the fan.
I was sitting in the front row watching people around me snap their fans at precisely the right and wrong moments. Meanwhile, I held mine as if I had recently discovered an unfamiliar agricultural tool. It wasn’t. It was just fun. Cats understood something my thirty-dollar fan was slowly teaching me: being surrounded by a story is not the same thing as being invited inside it. Cats let me watch until I was ready to play. Sleep No More occasionally made me wonder whether everyone else had received an instruction manual I had somehow misplaced.
Nobody stopped the show to teach Timmy how to operate his fan. Nobody needed to. I could watch. I could listen. I could try and fail with the fan over and over again as cats sang and danced in front of me. I could see how other people responded and decide when, or whether, I wanted to join them. So I retreated a little. I watched, and that mattered too. This show taught me that there can be a way to kung fu the completionist need for mastery into meaningful onboarding for others. The Completionists weren't ruining it for me. They were teaching me how to play.
Moment IV. Can I Trust This Room Enough to Look Stupid?
This may be the question underneath all participatory art. Can I trust this room enough to look stupid? At Burnout Paradise, the chaotic work by Australian collective Pony Cam, four performers run on treadmills while audience members help them complete an increasingly bizarre series of tasks, like cooking a three-course meal, painting their nails or applying lipstick, and managing emails incorporating information sent to them live by audience members (such as having an audience member email their resume to the laptop). Participation is part of the machinery, but asking someone to participate publicly means asking them to become vulnerable publicly.
That request lands differently for every person in the room. Some people volunteer instantly. Others need evidence. I need evidence. What happens to the first volunteer? Does the room laugh with them or at them? Does the performer protect them? Can they say no? What happens if they misunderstand? What happens if they fail? These are not merely personality questions. They are design questions. Hospitality answers them through what happens to other people before I ever have to decide what happens to me. A performer models an interaction. Someone else tries it. Nothing catastrophic happens. The performer responds generously. The audience learns that “wrong” will not be punished. Curiosity is rewarded before vulnerability is required. The next invitation becomes slightly easier to accept.
Wicks’s collaborators describe a similar reciprocity. Performers Morgan Embry, Brittany Tran, and Robyn O’Dell emphasize that immersive performers must read the audience as carefully as the audience reads them, adjusting choreography, physical contact, and even their own intentions in response to what an audience member communicates. Participation, in this model, is not something a performer extracts from an audience. It is something performer and audience negotiate together. Somebody has to go first.
I understand that instinctively as a teacher. If I want students to risk being ridiculous, occasionally I have to risk being ridiculous first. If I want them to share unfinished work, I cannot behave as though unfinished work is embarrassing. If I want them to experiment, I have to build consequences that make experimentation survivable. The invitation isn't “be brave.” The invitation is “watch.” This is what happens when someone tries. Then you decide. This is what game designers understand through onboarding. A good game doesn't hand a new player a controller with fourteen buttons and say, “Freedom!” It teaches the grammar of its world. Jump. Move. Open. Try again. Only then does it release the dragon. Onboarding is not the opposite of mystery. It is the architecture of confidence.
Moment V. Hospitality Has a Price
There is another complication. Sometimes you can buy confidence. The first ticket buys admission. The second may buy knowledge. The third buys fluency. By your third visit, you no longer wait to see whether everyone else follows the performer through the door. You recognize the invitation before it is spoken. You know when to move closer and when to give the scene room. You stop watching other audience members to figure out what you are allowed to do. The experience has not changed. You have. You have learned its language. Return frequently to an immersive production, and you begin learning its geography, rhythms, social expectations, and hidden pathways. Confusion becomes confidence. That's wonderful if you can afford the tickets, but the cost of participation isn't merely the price printed on one. There is transportation. Parking. Childcare. Time away from work. Lodging for destination productions. The discretionary income necessary to experience something repeatedly until its rules become familiar.
The Immersive Experience Institute's recent research into immersive audiences reminds us just how much commitment can surround attendance⁵. Its interviews with immersive enthusiasts include people who regularly travel specifically for experiences and return to this kind of work again and again. Those people are valuable. They love the form. The question for designers is what happens to the person who has not yet learned to love it. If repetition becomes the unofficial onboarding process, if the only reliable way to understand how a world works is to pay to enter it four times, then the architecture of participation has begun quietly sorting its audience. Hospitality cannot guarantee equal experience. It shouldn't, but it can give the first-time visitor a viable first experience.
That is different.
I have felt the opposite kind of hospitality at Sleep No More, a production I admire enormously. On my first visit, I was given a mask, told not to speak, and released into the McKittrick Hotel. The mystery was exhilarating, but mystery has a close cousin called confusion.
I still think about that man on the staircase at Sleep No More. I don't think he did anything wrong. This took me a while. He had learned the world. He loved it enough to return. He had developed fluency. I was jealous because I hadn't, but I have been asking the wrong question about him all these years. The interesting question isn't: How did he know where to stand? It is: What would have helped me trust not knowing? Because I missed rooms. I missed scenes. I probably walked directly past something someone else considered essential.
That's okay.
The job of hospitality wasn't to make my first visit look like a fiftieth. It was to make my first visit feel like it could belong to me. Every expert was once uncertain. Every professor was once a freshman. Every insider once stood somewhere wondering whether they belonged. The first experience matters because it is the moment someone decides whether to come back. The most generous immersive experiences I've encountered haven't made me feel clever.
They've made me feel welcome.
They don't give away every secret. They give me enough confidence to search for one. That's hospitality, and perhaps that's the responsibility carried inside every invitation. If we build immersive experiences because we want people to encounter one another differently, reconsider the world, experience another perspective, participate in a community, or imagine something that did not exist before they entered the room, then opening the door is only the beginning. We have to think about the stranger standing on the other side. The person who doesn't know the rules. The person watching everyone else. The person holding the thirty-dollar fan incorrectly. The person wondering whether they're allowed to open the drawer.
The person who has never been here before.
Not because everyone needs to experience the same thing. Not because mystery should disappear, but because mystery should make us wonder what lies behind the next door. It shouldn't make us wonder whether we were invited to open it. The best immersive experiences don't merely build worlds worth entering. They teach strangers enough about those worlds to risk belonging inside them. You don't need to know all the rules. You need to trust that being wrong won't revoke your invitation.
You have to be in the moments.
You can trust that from a fifty-year-old man who calls himself “Timmy”⁶ and still can't work a thirty-dollar hand fan.
Dangnabbit.
The End
Endnotes, because I'm just that kind of guy.
[1] At some point in my life, I decided to replace a certain common four-letter expletive with increasingly ridiculous substitutes. “Dangnabbit,” “shenanigans”, “fiddlesticks,” and “tomfoolery” are apparently where that decision has led me.
[2] For a much deeper examination of repeat immersive audiences, see the Immersive Experience Institute's 2026 Understanding the Immersive Audience series, a collection of white papers examining how immersive audiences discover, purchase, travel to, return to, and develop relationships with immersive experiences.
Understanding the Immersive Audience
[3] “Hidden curriculum” is an educational term for the unwritten expectations, norms, behaviors, and institutional knowledge students learn alongside the formal curriculum. I'm borrowing it here because immersive performance creates its own version: audiences learn not only what the experience is, but how someone is expected to behave inside it.
[4] Koryn Wicks, “Crafting Immersive, Pt. 2: Onboarding The Audience,” No Proscenium, May 18, 2021. Wicks considers how immersive makers communicate participation through advance information, host characters, direct address, design, choreography, and performer/audience interaction.
Koryn Wicks, “Crafting Immersive, Pt. 2: Onboarding The Audience”
[5] Understanding the Immersive Audience. Another section of this research features one-on-one interviews conducted with twenty immersive enthusiasts in April 2026 and examines the customer journey around discovering, researching, purchasing, traveling to, and returning to immersive experiences.
[6] I have been “Timmy” for fifty years. At this point, changing it to “Tim” would be like putting a necktie on Fozzie Bear. Technically possible. Spiritually incorrect.
Timothy Braun
Timothy Braun teaches Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, Santa Fe Art Institute, Edward F. Albee Foundation, and Ucross, among others. His plays and projects have been produced at Lincoln Center, HERE Arts Center, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and The Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, among others. The New York Times, American Theatre Magazine, Huffingtonpost, Austin Monthly, The Texas Standard, and Austin Chronicle have published his essays. He is the writer behind The Braunologue, a digital essay project combining memoir, performance studies, film criticism, pedagogy, and cultural commentary, focusing on storytelling, failure, and collective memory. More at timothybraun.com.
Affiliation: St. Edward's University