Journal

Welcome to the Journal of Interactive Performance


Issue 1: Community

This is a place for curated editorials, interviews, and guest articles that explore the craft and impact of interactive performance through the lens of creators, creation methods, experience types, and applying external ideas to our work.

Each journal features a set of articles prepared by different authors paired together with an underlying theme. Our first is community.

We begin with a look at the direct community created by experiences through the lens of the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser and resulting convention Halcy-Con. We then question what is interactivity and what are the components of interactivity as our community comes together to interact even in virtual spaces. We conclude this issue of the journal with the risks of interactivity and how they impact our community.

This journal is for you, the members of Association of Interactive Performance Professionals, and is intended to feature your voices along with guests. If you have a topic you would like to write about for future issues of the journal, please contact us.

Yours in interactivity,
Erica McCay
Editor-in-Chief
AIPP Journal

  • What is Interactive?

    What is Interactive?

    In the middle of the pandemic circa 2021, alone at home and away from physical spaces and people, I spent a few months with a group of people I’d never met in person, gathering in VR to be together, face each other, perform with one another.

  • Risks in Interactive Performance

    Risks in Interactive Performance

    Let me tell you about how I got into this mess. When I met Jeff Wirth 20 years ago, he was in the middle of producing an experience in conjunction with UCF’s stage production of God’s Country, a play by Steven Dietz about the white supremacist militia movement of the late 1980s. It’s the story…

  • A Spark Ignited

    A Spark Ignited

    Last October, 600 people gathered at a convention created to celebrate the now-closed interactive and immersive experience of Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser. Formerly a 2-day journey aboard a spaceship named the Halcyon, the Starcruiser pulled from many existing interaction types—grand spectacle shout-outs, intimate moments between characters and guests, mobile app choices that influence in-person events,…