User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-6032121-20190121193310

So — Doctor Who: The Live Escape Game. It's now open, as I understand it (and if I got it wrong someone please correct me, and be my guest at deleting all mentions of this specific story from this thread, especially as I am saving the text just in case).

What do we do about it? Because the thing is, there's never really been anything like it in Doctor Who before. The closest was the interactive story (or, as it were, stories) at the Doctor Who Experience, but that's not quite it either, since the interactive story there was a sort of bonus show to tie together what was already an exhibition in its own right; and indeed, we have separate page for Doctor Who Experience itself and the interactive story within; whereas here the interactive story is all there is.

My instinct is, first and foremost, that it shouldn't be valid; I've got two different potential rationales, too. The first is that it's basically "a stage-play of which you are the hero", where you are invited to play the companions live and as improv; as such it should be disqualified as a stage play. The second way to look at it is that it's more of a real-life video game, a story where part of the fun is that you get to choose what is done by the characters and in what order. Either way, it's out.

It is secondly that it seems plenty narrative enough to cover it as a story, albeit an invalid one; complete with pages about Alastair Montague and ChronosCorp, with requisite tags.

It is thirdly that since the interactive story is all there is, we shouldn't let the Doctor Who Experience precedent confuse us, and instead create just the one page about the story, just like we don't have separate pages about a video game per se (gameplay and all) and about its plot.

It is fourthly that holy Rassilon who art in the Matrix, how do we dab this thing? It's this unique beast of a new story format we've never really encountered before. Is it a "(game)"? A "(live show)"? An "(interactive story)"? Heck, could we just cut the Gordian knot and call it an "(escape game)" or "(escape room)", no matter how thin the chances there'll be another one in the near future?