Position: Creator
Additional creators: Ambrus Ivanyos, Bálint Tóth, Mátyás Csiszár
Location: Marseilles, France & Budapest, Hungary
Year: 2016

About the Game: With our city game, Intraverse, we wanted to draw the attention of our audience to a very common problem that concerns quite a lot of people: The majority of people -due to the “programming” and being “set on an orbit” by parents, then school, later employment and society- live according to a routine. It is not easy to “escape” from this system of rules and expectations, yet there are those who succeed. How is this possible? How do they do it?
The answer to the question is that if we want a change in our lives, we need to step out of the comfort zone of our routine and do things differently than we have done so far. We need a new approach and a new solution toolkit! However, it is quite dizzying to look at it from a higher perspective and it is quite scary to do what you have to do from there!
But if we have the courage to do all this, we can deviate from the career-orbit we have been given and finally go our own way…

How to play: The game took place in two consecutive locations, a café and a fourth-floor apartment. Players pre-registered for the program arrived at a café in the 9th district of Budapest. There we told them our fictional story. The story was that there are satellites around the Earth and these satellites do the tasks assigned to them without thinking. Once set on an orbit, their route cannot change in theory, they run the same laps at regular intervals. According to our story, we got the news that a satellite had deviated from its orbit (“escaped”) and it would be up to the players during the performance to decipher how the satellite had managed to do all this.
Then, accompanied by one of the creators, we took the players one by one from the café to the second venue of the game, an apartment on the fourth floor (while further explaining the story to them as if it were actually real news).
Arriving at the apartment, the players -with a projection created by us that mimicked the movement of the planets to William Basinski's music: The Disintegration Loops- symbolically entered the universe, where they got more information.
Then finally a curtain opened, behind which a creator was waiting for the player and who, as a solution to the puzzle, offered them the opportunity to lean out of the fourth floor window and look at the world, life from above, and if the player had even more courage, they could also climb out of it (with climbing equipment) and then they will understand everything.
If the player took this courageous step, then they could understand that the escaped satellite was actually themselves, and by climbing out they symbolically moved out of their usual life, their usual life-circles (from routinely performing the tasks entrusted to them in their life). To change, to leave the well-established circles and habits, they needed only one thing, namely courage. In the game, they began to exercise this courage, climbing out the window from the fourth floor, and whoever does this brave act will have the secrets of the world open up to them in real life (just like before in the game world we created).
The lesson, then, is that just with enough courage, we can get a new perspective, reinterpret our own lives, and get out of the familiar and often meaningless and boring circles.

The Game was supported by IN SITU (a large-scale cooperation project led by Lieux publics, European and national center for artistic creation in public space based in Marseille, France.)