What can game developers learn from a live-action Star Trek simulator?

"The pirates are hiding in a nearby nebula," a fleet officer tells us. "We can either explore them one at a time, but run the risk of abandoning the convoy, or we can send probes into each one – but that will definitely alert the pirates to our presence. Or we could just proceed to the rendez-vous and hope we're not ambushed."

We're standing on the bridge of the USC Havock. More accurately, we're under a railway arch near Vauxhall in London – the home of Bridge Command, an immersive experience run by interactive shows firm Parabolic Theatre that puts groups of visitors in charge of a Star Trek-style starship.

The strategies laid out before us come near the end of our mission. Unlike so many video game story choices that commit players to a specific path, we could pivot at any moment. We could stop sending probes and venture into the nebulas ourselves. We could send out our shuttle crew, with their mini-bridge set, in order to cover more ground. My friend, who had been assigned as chief engineer, yelled in the middle of the inevitable battle: "If you lot don't get your act together, I'll hit the self-destruct button." Almost anything is an option.

It might sound easy to allow this sort of agency in an immersive theatre experience; after all, human actors, like our fleet officer, can improvise and adapt far more creatively than a computer can. But here's a secret: strip away the sets, the flashing lights, the sound of the alarm, and the NASA-style jumpsuits we're all wearing, and Bridge Command is essentially a video game.

All of the touchscreen bridge stations – helm, weapon control, navigation, and so on – are running on a modified version of EmptyEpsilon, a bridge simulator readily available on Steam. That simulation is rendering the nebulas, space pirates, and our allied ships on the main screen in graphics not unlike the original Homeworld or earlier versions of EVE Online.

Bridge Command co-creator and Parabolic Theatre's artistic director Owen Kingston admits that the show is still free from many of the restrictions that game developers face – and pushing past those restrictions is the key to making an experience like this work.

"There are people who make immersive experiences who essentially just sort of clone the decision tree approach that you would take in a role-playing game or choose-your-own-adventure novel," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "The trouble with applying that to a live environment is it's a system that's not designed for that.

"If I've written a choose-your-own-adventure novel, I don't have the option to go to the house of every single person and edit the book on the fly for them. I have to present them with a rational series of choices that I've decided, and they have to choose one of them because there's no other way it's going to work. And when you're playing a computer game, you instinctively know that is what's got to happen because there isn't another way of doing it.

"But when you're in a live experience and you have live actors there who are able to respond dynamically, it's kind of foolish to not take advantage of that. That's the unique selling point at the end of the day."

"We've got people who can react dynamically in the moment. If you can somehow figure out how to do that in a computer game setting, that's potentially gold"

Kingston explains that, instead of taking the decision tree approach typically used in video games, Bridge Command missions are written around a series of emotional beats. The staff/actors can then drop in additional events to help deliver these beats, all the while adapting to how the visitors/players react.

"Our rule is, if you come up with something that seems logical to you, as long as it fits the world of the show, we'll run with it," says Kingston. "We will bend the story around that. A decision you've made might mean that we drop in a completely new, unique plot beat, but it's going to fall all at the same emotional moment as maybe one of the things that we've got up our sleeve in case something doesn't present itself."

Again, this is hard for video game developers to recreate. But Kingston believes that video games will one day be able to move away from the decision tree structure and provide more reactive storylines.

"Decision trees inherently have a really bad customer service problem built into them, which is the 'computer says no' problem," he explains. "If you ask your bank for something and they say 'Sorry, we can't do that, he computer says no', it's the most frustrating thing – yet we build that into games all the time inadvertently by closing off options that seem logical to the player, simply because we can't make every single option available.

"So there is something interesting there, and I don't know whether it's something to pluck out with AI involvement maybe, but being able to adapt to what seems logical to the player and not have to say to them 'You can either do A or B, but you can't do C'... The first computer games that crack how to handle that stand to really benefit.

"Everyone is involved. You need everybody's skillset to make the ship fly"

"If you have a way of dynamically creating option C based on what seems logical to the player, that's a really cool thing. We're able to do it because we've got live actors and we've got people who can react dynamically in the moment. If you can somehow figure out how to do that in a computer game setting, that's potentially gold."

Bridge Command also offers potential inspiration for developers who work on a form of video gaming that is still relatively uncommon: asymmetric multiplayer.

Titles like Dead by Daylight and Secret Neighbor offer players the chance to compete in matches where one of them has a significantly different, often antagonistic, role than the others. However, while the isolated player may have different abilities, the functionality and verbs (run, jump, shoot, and so on) of the gameplay remain largely the same – especially for those on the same team.

Bridge Command is different. Each station offers completely different functionality and even a different interface to the others. Only the helm can steer and accelerate, while only weapon controls can target and fire – it is truly asymmetric, and Kingston says this helps to foster better teamwork and collaboration.

"It makes sure that everyone is involved; you need everybody's skillset to make the ship fly," he says.

"When you move it into a competitive environment, then something shifts. Competitive players want fairness, and it's much more difficult to create a sense of a level playing field when everyone has got unique powers. It's not impossible, but there's always going to be a certain amount of, 'Oh, well, you were playing the sniper, so of course you won.' That kind of thing can be problematic."

Bridge Command currently has two starships available for hire and Parabolic Theatre has been experimenting with bringing them into the same simulation, either for cooperative missions or competitive battles.

"That has got huge potential if we can get it right," Kingston smiles.

The immersive show has one last trick up its sleeve that game developers can also build on: it remembers the players. Each person who experiences Bridge Command is asked to create a profile on their first visit, entering basic information like name and email address. This is recorded in a database on Notion and the staff uses this to record which missions players go on, any significant events that occurred and, where relevant, any particularly notable actions that person took.

The staff then see a summary for returning players in any particular group and plan out the mission accordingly, whether it's bringing back a specific character (if that actor is working that day) or setting up challenges that play to their strengths.

Kingston likens it to the nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor, adding that it can make the player feel like their game experience is truly unique to them.

"When we're able to make callbacks to previous shows, whether it's returning characters or referencing things that the crew have done before, [it] serves to heighten that feeling like you're part of the world," he says.

"For us, the immersive part is that you're not merely sharing the same space as the actors – you're inhabiting the same world as them, you're part of it. So the more things we can do to make that feel real, the better."