We have started building something odd: a game that cannot be played by one person.

The idea came out of watching audience-participation technology fail in the same way for years. Someone gets on a microphone, asks everyone to take out their phones and scan a code, and a room that was looking at the stage starts looking at its hands. The activity technically works. The room gets quieter, flatter and more separate — which is the opposite of what the person on the microphone wanted.

The thing worth building

What makes a crowd interesting is that it is a crowd. Several hundred people in one place, aware of each other, capable of doing something together that none of them could do alone. Handing everyone a private screen throws that away in order to collect individual answers.

So the brief we have set ourselves is narrow: the input has to be the whole room, and nothing may be installed by anyone in it.

That rules out phones immediately. It leaves two channels — how loud the room is, and how the room moves. Volume is a single number, which is enough for a tug-of-war and not much else. Movement is richer, and a camera can see it.

What we are actually trying to cause

Not engagement metrics. A specific moment.

When the thing on screen responds to the aggregate of everybody, one person standing up moves it barely at all. That is deliberate. It means the first thing anyone learns is that this is not about them, and the second thing they do is look at the people beside them. Within about thirty seconds you get spontaneous instruction — people telling their row what to do, laughing at whoever is out of sync.

That look sideways is the product. The game is the excuse.

Where we are

Early. We have a prototype that reads a camera and drives an orb, and a long list of problems: rooms are dark, cameras are badly positioned, lighting desks change the picture mid-game, and a crowd is much less synchronised than you would think.

We are going to write those problems up as we hit them, because the constraints are the interesting part and nobody publishes them.