Modelling Planetary Boundaries

image by Peter Newman

David speaking.This week I was lucky enough to attend a CSIRO workshop on Modelling Planetary Boundaries. For three days I got to sit in the room with a swathe of 12 very smart people, listening and learning as they moved toward crafting a new science paper.As well as being fascinating in and of itself, this kind of workshop provides a really valuable perspective on the work Boho is currently doing, and for that reason I thought it might be worth trying to unpack a couple of the broader ideas that lay behind it. I'm afraid I won't do any justice to the depth of concepts the group explored, but hopefully I can illustrate some of the general principles, if for no other reason than to indicate why I found it so valuable.Unpacking the title of the workshop 'Modelling Planetary Boundaries' is illustrative in itself. To put it in rough terms, it's about conceptualising the earth as one linked system - a holistic view of the whole planet and all the processes within it. That includes everything, from the atmosphere to the oceans to the cities to the economy to culture to education to the behaviour of families.A model, in a scientific sense, is some kind of representation of a system that helps you understand it. There are many different kinds of models: some of them are physical, some are software, some are pen and paper and some exist entirely in our head.The kind of model you use depends on what you're interested in. At the more complex end, detailed software models such as global climate models (GCMs) calculate huge volumes of data in order to generate predictions of weather patterns under different future trajectories. At the simpler end, conceptual pen and paper flowchart models help us visualise the links and connections between different parts of the system, and help to bring incredibly complex phenomena into the realm of what we can understand.This workshop was about creating a conceptual model at the simpler end of the scale, but something that could in future be added to and enriched with quantified data. What these scientists were seeking to create was a model of the human-earth system that they could use to better understand the dynamics of the earth, and where we're heading as a species and a planet.One of the things distinguishing this particular workshop, and the model these scientists were seeking to make, was the focus on social dynamics. There are lots of conceptual models that describe the behaviour of the earth from a biophysical perspective - ie. as a functioning system without human involvement. The idea is, you put together a model of how the earth works without humans, and then you add humans to the model as external drivers, or you borrow the models of human behaviour created by economics.This approach is useful up to a point, but for many (most) people, one of the important questions is not, 'How does the earth behave without human involvement?' but, 'How does the whole earth work?'One idea which has been gaining significant traction in recent years is the idea that we have recently moved into a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This is a period in the earth's history in which humankind has become one of the most significant drivers of the planetary systems. For decades, if not centuries, humans have been altering the composition of the earth's atmosphere, changing the biosphere by driving species extinct and transporting new species around the planet, altering the activity of river systems and changing land use, all at a global scale.In hundreds of million of years' time, when humanity's existence has been reduced to a thin smear of rock in the geological record, future species or alien visitors will still be able to detect our presence through the spike of radioactive minerals resulting from humanity's nuclear weapons tests.(This has been a preoccupation of Boho's for a while now, to the extent that we called our 2010 show True Logic of the Future a 'Parable for the Anthropocene'.)Given that the choices and actions of human beings now has such significant consequences for the behaviour of the planet, it is more and more important that a model of the earth system include human social processes, not as an add-on but as a fundamental part of the system. This workshop sought to capture some of these social processes: What humans want, need and aspire to, and how they go about satisfying those desires.The challenge was to put all these elements - the biophysical and the social - in one model. One of the jumping-off points for the workshop was this conceptual model, put together by my dad.There needs to be a reason to create a model such as this; a question you want answered or an issue you're grappling with. That helps to focus your attention, prioritise what's important and clarify what's relevant and what's not. In this instance, the goal was articulated by Doug Cocks, CSIRO Research Fellow in Human Ecology (and collaborator on Boho's Food for the Great Hungers) as 'Quality Survival' for humankind.Given that the world population is predicted to peak at around 9 or 10 billion in the next few decades, Quality Survival means, roughly, 'the removal of hunger and poverty and their attendant ills as expressed for instance in the Millenium Development Goals. These aspirations imply a significant increase in food production and wealth creation, all of which we hope to accommodate without crippling the ability of the planet to support future generations.'Achieving Quality Survival means, in the language of the model, staying within the 'safe operating space for humanity'.The idea of a safe operating space, expressed in this way, draws a lot from the idea of Planetary Boundaries, first introduced in 2009.The Planetary Boundaries paper identifies nine different boundaries which, if crossed, run the risk of tipping the planet into a different state - one that we cannot be sure will be amenable to human existence. It might be possible to transgress one or two of these boundaries temporarily, but crossing any of them means incurring serious risks.The original Planetary Boundaries research focused on biophysical dimensions - ozone depletion, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss and so on. The workshop this week looked at identifying potential boundaries in the social dimensions as well - wealth inequality as one possible example.Finally, the workshop reached the question of trade-offs: In order to stay within these boundaries (both social and biophysical), what trade-offs will we have to make? How can we measure and assess those trade-offs against one another, and who decides between them?As an off-the-cuff example: What if, in order to save billions of people from starving to death, most of the Amazon rainforest and African savannahs were turned into farmland? Would saving the elephants (along with all the other biodiversity loss) and preventing those huge sinks of carbon from being released into the atmosphere be worth the death of billions?Whether we like it or not, these kinds of trade-offs are already occurring, as the cumulative outcomes of many small-scale decisions made unconsciously (or more or less unconsciously) by people unaware of the larger picture. By bringing some of these trade-offs into focus, the workshop aims to help us better choose between difficult options, or to help us seek for alternatives when the only available options are bad ones.I'd never seen the inside of a science workshop like this, and watching how a group of scientists collaborate (at least in this one instance) to produce something new was incredibly informative. There are a lot of similarities to the creative process, though it was unlike any devising workshop I've ever been part of. Still, it hit home watching these scientists work how much of that job requires inspiration, creativity and innovation, alongside all the knowledge, technique and technical discipline I took for granted.This sort of conceptual modelling process took me very much out of my depth, but it's this kind of work that Boho is drawing on with the Best Festival Ever project.Rather than create a global model which includes everything in the human-earth system, Best Festival Ever presents a conceptual model of a much smaller system - a music festival. And instead of a model which is used to predict or to guide policy, the Best Festival Ever model is intended largely as a demonstration of some of the key principles and techniques used in modelling.Best Festival Ever presents a participatory hands-on model in which players get to construct and manage their own complex adaptive system, using tools from boardgaming as the levers and inputs. The behaviour of the music festival explores the concepts of feedback loops, tipping points, phase transitions, interconnectivity and resilience.Best Festival Ever is the first of a series of new interactive performances based around systems models. We're now looking for new partners with whom we can collaborate to build participatory models of specific systems - from cities to ecosystems to companies to institutions. If you're interested in working with Boho to develop a new playable model, please drop us a line.The first iteration of Best Festival Ever will be presented at the London Science Museum from 10 - 21 November 2014.

Word Play

Something is wrong.In the last few months, a new disease has emerged that is transmitted not by water, by air, by contact – but by speech. Language. Via text messaging and email, telephone or video.This disease attacks thought itself, undermining our ability to think critically and resist other people’s influence. This is an epidemic of harmful ideas and broken logic. And it’s spreading. Whole communities of people, highly contagious, wandering about, unable to talk, unable to take care of themselves, looking for things to believe in.Don’t believe everything you hear.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Boho’s new show Word Play is performed on-screen from across the city. The audience are situated in the CSIRO Discovery Centre lecture theatre, while the performers are live-streamed from a laboratory across the city using a high-speed video broadband connection.Using text messages and a purpose-built phone app, the audience are able to interact directly with the performance, communicating with the performers and controlling them through a series of live computer game sequences.Word Play is a performance lecture exploring concepts from epidemiology, a live cinema experience and a hands-on video game in the survival horror genre.Bring your phone.Where: CSIRO Discovery Centre, Clunies Ross street, ActonWhen: 7:30pm Wednesday – Saturday 15-18 May, 22-25 May, 29 May-1 JuneTickets: $20 – buy tickets here.Images by Rohan Thomson.This is a Centenary of Canberra project, proudly supported by the ACT Government & CSIRO.

Showing of New Work by Boho Interactive

We are very excited to invite you to a work in progress showing by Boho Interactive, on Saturday 27th October at 12:00pm, at the CSIRO Discovery Centre Theatre in Acton.Following several months of intensive research and script development, including visiting the Australian Animal Health Laboratories in Geelong, we are presenting a development showing of our project based on concepts from epidemiology, microbiology and antibiotic development.Conceptually Transmissible Aphasia: Current understandings of pathogenesis and modern methods of control is a performance in the style of a scientific lecture with videoconferencing, that looks at the emergence of a novel disease agent. At this showing we will present a small suite of ideas that we are hoping to get your input on. This showing is the culmination of research and development work that has been undertaken with the support of an ACT Arts Fund Project grant for 2012, CSIRO and Centenary of Canberra.Following the showing there will be a Q&A session, where we would very much appreciate your feedback to assist in the ongoing development of the work. Refreshments will be provided and we will be happy to have a chat with you in person at the end of the Q&A.

In coming months, we will be heading back into script development to prepare for the presentation of the work in its full iteration as part of the Centenary of Canberra program in May 2013, once again generously supported by the ACT Government and CSIRO.  You can see our program listing here. RSVPs are appreciated, to info@bohointeractive.com or through the Facebook event. We hope you are able to attend and help us shape the future of this work.About the project

As a result of widespread use of antibiotics below effective levels, every type of harmful bacteria has become stronger and less responsive to treatment. Antibiotics that were once reserved as drugs of last resort are now being routinely used, and bacteria are now showing resistance to these medicines. Meanwhile, dormant animal reservoirs of novel diseases such as Hendra, SARS and Ebola are increasingly brought into contact with people through evolving networks of human behaviour - agriculture, travel and urbanisation.We use systems of antibiotic resistance and pathogen emergence as a jumping off point to apply to other resistances – our inherent ability to resist external social and cultural influences. We consider the potential ramifications of epidemic failure of critical thinking and an unstoppable spread of harmful ideas and broken logic. For instance, were a disease to emerge that was transmitted person-to-person via text messaging, email, telephone or video, what steps of biocontainment could be taken to identify the pathogen, halt its spread and develop a cure?The format of the showing draws on conventions of scientific lecture. This repurposing of an existing presentation style for narrative theatre offers the potential for a hyper-real experience wherein a seemingly mundane and credible presentation is contrasted with a surreal and highly speculative scenario.The showing employs elements of theatre, film and video gaming. The performance will be viewed by audiences in the CSIRO Discovery Centre lecture theatre, with one character in the theatre and one in a second venue, elsewhere within the CSIRO Black Mountain facility. For part of the showing, this second performer is visible on a large screen in the theatre via high bandwidth videoconference. The audience interact in real time with the other stage using mediated communications channels. The audience as individuals and as a group solves a series of puzzles within the narrative to resolve an immediate crisis.With the advent of accessible, high quality live video transfer, new methods of performance interaction have become possible. Given the pace of the National Broadband Network rollout, these techniques are likely to be ubiquitous within the next three years. The use of lecture theatre spaces opens up a vast new resource of readily available, high capacity, low cost venues which are otherwise underutilised for creative works.Videoconference is essentially scale-free, offering the potential to tour nationally or internationally with minimal cost, with the performance set, cast and crew remaining in place in Canberra and performers travelling with nominal technical equipment to venues with appropriate broadband capacity. Future implications of this or similar work include the presentation of the work to multiple theatres simultaneously, vastly increasing our potential reach, and it would be a trivial step to simulcast performances to desktop computers anywhere in the world.The development of this showing is supported by the ACT Government through the ACT Arts Fund 2012 project funding. The upcoming major performance season in 2013 is supported by the ACT Government through the ACT Arts Fund 2012 project funding.This is a Centenary of Canberra project, proudly supported by the ACT Government. 

This room contains: Ebola | Hendra | Nipah | SARS

The CSIRO Australian Animal Health Laboratories (AAHL) is a world-class biological research, diagnosis, surveillance and response institution situated on the outskirts of Geelong, Victoria. As part of our research into themes of epidemiology and disease as part of our upcoming 2013 production at the CSIRO Discovery Centre, we visited AAHL and met with some of their most experienced staff over two days. AAHL works on a broad palette of animal health issues, ranging from those with potentially catastrophic economic impact, such as possible foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in livestock, to issues whose impact predominantly concerns human health, including their high-profile discovery of and research into the Hendra virus. In the case of an outbreak, AAHL has the capacity to screen ten thousand samples per day, and offers laboratory space that operates at the highest level of biosecurity possible in order to work with pathogens of appalling lethality.We visited AAHL as research for our upcoming production, which will explore the consequences of a fictional disease outbreak. We predominantly focused on the emergence of novel diseases from animals, and the response from an organisation such as AAHL in case of an outbreak to isolate, characterise and neutralise the threat. We also wanted to know what sort of interagency cooperation would be needed to coordinate an effective response.Foot-and-mouth containment and the pigeon-fancier problemDr Sam McCullough, Diagnostics Services Manager "If foot-and-mouth disease comes in, it's a big problem. If it comes in we could not export."Foot and Mouth Disease is the most critical and plausible situation that the AAHL is designed to respond to. A scenario similar to the UK's outbreak in 2001 would be a massive blow to Australia's livestock trade, which would then majorly impact on the entire economy. AAHL have a massive capacity to deal with this issue. As soon as a report of potential FMD comes in, virtually all the building's resources and staff can be swiftly dedicated to coordinating a response.Sam's role also includes recommending appropriate responses to different outbreaks. One issue that occurred in the last several years was an outbreak of Pigeon Paramyxovirus in Victoria. Pigeon Paramyxovirus initially appeared in fancy pigeons which people keep in their backyards and lofts, not for eating or flying, but for their looks. According to Sam, "the birds are red and have feathered legs and apparently look quite pretty." The issue with this outbreak was that unlike farm animals and livestock, the owners of fancy pigeons are usually city-dwellers who don't make their livelihood through their birds. This means that they don't traditionally have a relationship with AAHL, which makes it harder to provide recommendations.This is an example of one of the key issues with containment - the number and variety of different groups who must work together and in coordination in order to contain and respond to an outbreak. To prevent the spread to wild pigeon populations and subsequently farmed animals, the action in this case was to quarantine to prevent any movement of show pigeons, which minimised contacts between groups but led to greater die-off within infected coops. Somehow, the disease did manage to jump to wild birds, and so management of the relationship with the pigeon fanciers became quite difficult - the disease was already out there, so what was the point of maintaining the quarantine? Put together, Pre-border, Border and Post-border surveillance gives us a realistic overview of the risk vectors and can help frame an appropriate and fluid response to situations like these.Foot-and-mouth as a bioterrorist act Dr Peter Daniels, Leader Diagnosis, Surveillance and Response Group"Worst case scenario would be an act of bio-terrorism using foot-and-mouth disease, multiple outbreaks around the country, different strains of the disease."We asked every scientist we spoke with in AAHL for their 'nightmare scenario', their worst-case vision for an outbreak in Australia. Dr Peter Daniels described a deliberate series of deliberate FMD infections, targeting cattle at different locations around the country with different strains of the disease. This would entail a massive hit to Australia's economy and be the hardest kind of outbreak for any authority to respond to. However, this kind of action appears not to align with the methods and intentions of most terrorist groups - causing damage to infrastructure and hurting people - which is good news for us.A more mundane but common concern is people evading quarantine to smuggle animals in and out of the country. Peter told us a story about a man who'd smuggled in ten green pythons stuffed down his pants, taped to his belt. One of them died mysteriously, and on investigating this, AAHL isolated a new virus which targets snakes. This virus is now known in-house as the Trouser Snake Virus.That's Ebola, BabyDr Alex Hyatt, Head, AAHL Biosecurity Microscopy Facility"For each disease there’s an image, a eureka moment – it’s like being in a darkened room and you see what is the cause of this major disease – major in that it has economic, environmental health impact, and everyone – politicians, trade, newspapers are demanding to know what’s going on – you’re the only one to see it – alone in a darkened room. You feel pretty good – briefly – then it’s back to reality."Dr Alex Hyatt told us about the role of electron microscopy. When an infected sample taken from some sick animal is sent in to the AAHL, one of the key things to take place is that Alex and his cohorts will example those slides under the microscope. There's no computer substitute for the human eye when it comes to identifying the tell-tale shapes of specific viruses. Ebola, apparently, is shaped like a shepherd's crook. Another description I've heard is that you'll see a slide full of what look like little question marks, like they're asking - "What are you going to do now?"When we dropped by, Alex was examining a sample taken from one of the four white rhinos to recently fall ill and die at Dubbo Southern Plains Zoo. At this stage, there is no clear answer to the question of what killed them, though the three surviving rhinos are apparently doing okay.I reckon probably don’t Bomb the Bats Dr Linfa Wang, CSIRO CEO Science Leader/Senior Principle Research Scientist"Maybe there’s a symbiotic relationship between the bats and the viruses"We were fortunate to get to chat with Dr Linfa Wang, whose study into bat viruses has had some fascinating results. When a new virus broke out in a suburb of Brisbane in 1994, killing a number of horses and several humans, Dr Wang was the person who discovered that it was a virus which had originated in bats, and gave it the name of Hendra, after the suburb of its origin. Examining the source of Hendra, Dr Wang and his colleagues discovered that bats are major reservoirs of viruses.AAHL's research into bat viruses, which also included investigation of the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia, meant that when SARS erupted in 2001, they were able to advise authorities in affected areas to begin testing bats. Recently, Dr Wang's team have demonstrated that SARS is a bat coronavirus - from the same family as one of the most common cold viruses - most likely transmitted to humans from bats, via civets."People wanted to take bat-related matters into their own hands, with guns. But it’s almost certain that particular stress factors are responsible for causing virus levels to go up."With the news that farmers will receive permits to shoot at bat populations, and in light of the Courier Mail's famous newspaper heading in response to Hendra 'BOMB THE BATS', Dr Wang told us about a range of poorly thought out system-wide responses like colony moving. Many of these have had unintended consequences. With the recent spate of Hendra cases in 2011, there is the possibility that human responses to bats have in fact exacerbated the issue. Veterinary perspective and the role of the communityDr Deborah Middleton, Senior Veterinary Pathologist"The virologist thinks the virus causes disease, I think the host causes the disease."We also talked to Dr Middleton about bats, and she filled us in more about the utterly terrifying symbiosis bats have with their viruses. Numerous viruses have been isolated from bats which are violently pathogenic to humans but which are completely asymptomatic in bats. In fact, bats are so riddled with viruses in their natural state that there may be some symbiotic relationship at work. Bats have existed in close to their present form for fifty-plus million years, which is easily long enough for co-dependence to emerge. To test whether bats somehow need these viruses as part of their biological function, AAHL has bred a Specifically Pathogen Free (SPF) colony of virus-free bats for observation. As an aside, among the few viruses which produce symptoms in bats are lyssaviruses, such as rabies, which infect nerves directly and may bypass the bats' innate resistance.Dr Middleton had a great deal of insight into the human element in instances of animal disease, and the importance of communication when companion animals are involved. In the recent Hendra outbreaks, besides the fact that there were a higher than usual number of separate cases, the most unusual element was the infection of a domestic dog. Although dogs appear not to show symptoms of Hendra, it is believed that they could spread the disease to humans they came into contact with, so the normal response in such an instance is euthanasia of the animal. This sparked an unexpected level of public interest - "the dog had its own Facebook page - Save Dusty the Dog. People were saying 'Hide from the Government, Dusty.'"The big pictureDr Martyn Jeggo, AAHL Director"If you come together to tackle the issue you're more likely to get a solution."AAHL director Dr Martyn Jeggo gave us an inspiring introduction to the idea of the One Health approach, in which human medical practitioners, animal health practitioners and environmental scientists come together to work on a holistic response to health crises. The idea is that the health of an organism - whether a human, animal or an entire ecosystem - depends on the interactions between these elements."Viruses don't respect borders."Martyn described an example of this holistic approach to combating disease: the eradication of rinderpest. Rinderpest is a cattle plague, and one of the most virulent and destructive livestock diseases in history. In the 1950s, a vaccine for rinderpest was developed, and an international effort was undertaken to eradicate the disease completely. Dr Jeggo was part of this effort, and received a UN medal for his part in the project. Rinderpest was finally declared extinct in 2011, only the second disease in history (after smallpox) to be intentionally wiped out.Martyn also talked to us about the institution's preparations for an outbreak of FMD. In the UK, there is a facility which contains  FMD vaccine in storage. Australia owns 285,000 doses stored in a liquid nitrogen vat with the Australian flag on it.Going secureThe afternoon of the second day, we went secure, which means nuding up, walking through an airlocked shower cubicle, and collecting sterile clothing and shoes on the other side. Here's a model of the facility:AAHL is a fortress spread over several levels, with a working level in the middle, plantroom levels above and below, and the whole thing encased in an impermeable concrete shell. Whole floors are devoted to waste management and air filtration.Similar facilities designed around the time of AAHLs construction may use ten to twenty world-class HEPA filters throughout the building. AAHL uses more than a thousand, with every individual airspace filtered and controllable individually (down to each shower cubicle).

Nothing comes out of the bunker's secure area without decontamination - waste materials are separated according to their threat level and thoroughly roasted in these drums.

 During our tour a new suite of labs was being prepared to be used for the first time, which entails decontaminating the rooms completely by burning a whole lot of formaldehyde in special woks (on the desk connected to the orange cable at the far end in this image)At the end of the secure area tour, every bit of clothing we were wearing went into laundry baskets. Passing back through the shower cubicles is impossible without showering for a minimum of three minutes. There's a selection of shampoos and a helpful picture which reminds you which door goes to the lab and which goes to the outside world.Then it was goodbyes and back in the cab to Tullamarine, which was expensive.We'd like to extend our thanks to the scientists who each took an hour out of their days to help us understand the intricacies of the work that they do.We'd also like to thank Emma Wilkins at AAHL for coordinating the visit and somehow convincing the staff to be so incredibly generous with their time, and Cris Kennedy from CSIRO Discovery for getting the trip off the ground. You guys are tops.

Choose Your Own Adventure

'Choose Your Own Adventure' is the name we use when referring to the style of performance whereby, as in the legendary book series of that title, the audience is able to navigate through a story by making a series of consecutive decisions that determine which of a pre-determined set of endings takes place. This works through a series of storyline nodes, operating like non-interactive cutscenes, with two or more options branching from each one - the graph below from FlowingData shows a typical structure.

CYOA techniques in theatre work much the same way - actors perform segments of non-interactive script, interspersed with opportunities for the audience to select one from a number of clearly delineated options.

The main benefit of this style of theatre is that the audience is hyper-empowered - what they say goes, they can identify which story elements interest them the most personally, they can explore the morality of their own decisions, and generally tailor their own unique experience. Stories can have huge variations in potential outcomes. Decisions can be made by individuals who are singled out, or (I think more commonly) some kind of voting mechanism can be employed, such as in the case of Emergence by Synarcade, or Trouble on Planet Earth, Escape from Peligro Island and  Half-Real by The Border Project. Finding a decision mechanism which doesn't unnecessarily hold up the flow of the show is obviously important - both of these companies have produced devices which generate colours and are distributed to audience members, which is a neat way of focusing the response through set channels while being nice and tech-y. This focus  is crucial - options have to be clear and limited to the available choices since there may not be any room for improvisation.

A big plus with CYOA is that audience size can be very large and still have every viewer  - this is limited only by the voting mechanism. On the other hand, after a certain point, the actual impact of each individual audience member is essentially zero, and I think this can become obvious and lead to alienation. That said, there's also the fun for a viewer of seeing areas where their instincts conform or differ from those of everyone else.

Choice paths are generally unidirectional so where decisions change the story, this narrative path carries out throughout the remainder of the show. Potential paths for an audience increase exponentially as the show progresses, so even with recycling of sections (as shown in the loops and multiple paths to the same node in the diagram above), there's a huge amount of scripting and rehearsal for sections that the audience will never see.

I must admit I often have issues with using this type of theatre from a scripting standpoint. For my money, an ending must be justified by the story, so a situation whereby the trajectory of a narrative lurches off track due to the intervention of an audience is likely to result in a story that would have been unsatisfying had it been a non-interactive work.  It's a challenge to ascribe a meaningful moral arc to a story whose ending isn't inevitable. So it might be more rewarding to use CYOA techniques to allow an audience to change how they approach a story, rather than the content of the story itself. One of the things about Choose Your Own Adventure novels that I find satisfying is working backwards through the book and contrasting the various possible outcomes, so replicating this on stage presents opportunities.

We've also found that audiences can tend towards a median outcome - an extreme event that is caused by one vote will tend to be cancelled by a conservative or opposite one soon after - people want to see a bit of every possibility rather than commit to one course. And even if there's a good deal of audience cooperation with one another, the fact is that if you write ten endings, odds are that on a given night, an audience is going to wind up seeing one of the middling ones, quality-wise.

It's fun I think to have the option of failure for the audience involved in a CYOA, so that certain options are available only if they succeed in tasks, time-based games - we talk about failure and reward in a separate post.

If there are more than two options on a given choice, there's a chance that more than half of your audience at each point will see a result they didn't vote for - unless you get into some kind of preferential voting system, I guess. Another way to deal with that issue might be segregation of audience based on their decisions (somehow) so that each group has the experience they asked for - this subdivision could be interesting if the segments were then required to competitively or cooperatively complete a task at the conclusion of the performance.

Boho have used CYOA techniques a couple of times, particularly during Food For The Great Hungers, where it formed the show's conclusion and detailed an alternate history of 20th Century Australia. We didn't want to suggest that history was something where conscious choices were made in advance, so we extracted the 'decisions' from the behaviour of the audience during previous scenes, which were then mapped to social factors. A conscious vote on whether conscription could ever be morally acceptable became war willingness, an unconscious vote on tea preference became multiculturalism, a competition between unionists and factory owners became industrial relations, a cooperative challenge based on communication became media adoption, and a series of totally arbitrary moral choices based on emotional bias became political outcomes. These decisions having been made in advance, the 'adventure' through history was presented as a monologue (performed by two actors). A sample generated monologue can be found here. This was fun to do because the voting mechanisms weren't announced in advance, so the generated story was a surprise. Still, there was still a bit of an 'Okay, so that's what happened' feel, and once the history mapped on all factors to a middling path extremely close to what actually happened, which was confusing.

CYOA theatre is a fun format. The audience enjoy a lot of control and the link between their action and the outcome is strong, and it's a good overarching structure which can accommodate a lot of additional styles or kinds of story. The audience have a chance to view a performance like they might a sculpture, coming at it from different angles and seeing it in different lights. The trick is making sure that the format doesn't become the focus of the experience at the expense of the story.