Harmeet Chagger-Khan spoke to us about her new project, Elixir of Life - an augmented reality story-game played on the city's streets, where players go on a quest for immortality and inadvertently unlock their own potential. 

Five Things I Learned:

1. Over the last 12 years Harmeet has been using moving image and artistic films to present stories that haven’t been heard or have been forgotten. Knives, Forks and Fingers is a series of films exploring the relationship between mothers and their children through food. To collect and record these stories, Harmeet visited and worked with four groups of south Asian women from different locations across the UK. 

2. Harmeet’s work has always informed by people, but she was ready to move away from her safe space in film and explore what would happen if she took these experiences to real spaces and have people physically play through them. To inform how this experiential game concept would work, Harmeet researched cognitive behavioural therapy as well as working with Saatchi to identify how to implement effective, but easy to maintain behavioural changes.

3. Harmeet is on the board of Birmingham healthy minds committee. She questions why we have such high rates of suicide between 24-34 in the UK. How can we become more mentally resilient through experiential and ethical gameplay? Inspired by the Fighting Fantasy books she read as a child, Harmeet wants to create facilitated play, for vulnerable participants. Harmeet wants to make this game because there’s nothing out there like it currently.

4. Elixir of Life is a cross between immersive theatre and a hero quest where you play in teams of five. The game can be adapted and changed for different cities, however Harmeet will start prototyping the game in her home city of Birmingham before adapting it in other cities. Harmeet considered using augmented reality in her game after trying out the HoloLens, but found that there are still limitations with the headset technology. She is still looking for ways to combine augmented reality into the gameplay through other devices.

5. The game takes place across five different locations in the city. Currently it begins in an art gallery where you meet a character played by an actor who accidently leaves their belongings behind. It becomes your mission to reunite that person with their possessions. On your quest, you meet several characters along the way to interact with and you collect physical totems, each associated with a different personality trait. If you complete a task, such as helping the blind lady for example, you are rewarded a compassion totem.

Harmeet is currently researching and developing her game as part of her residency with the Studio. If you’d like to find out more you can follow her on twitter.