Now Play This Presents – Now Play This

Welcome to Now Play This Presents, a dynamic, evolving space designed to support projects and ideas in development beyond the annual festival. It’s a platform that grows with the community—welcoming new ideas and encouraging big dreams. Together, we’ll reshape the rules of play, making space for everyone to be part of this ongoing adventure.

Now Play This Presents adapts to the needs of each project. Sometimes we’ll nurture ideas; other times we’ll help new voices gain visibility. We might act as matchmakers, offer advice, or even dive in to bring concepts to life.

As the format takes shape, we will announce our plans for new game projects, and also how to submit proposals in the future. For now, watch this space!

As Miguel Sicart writes in Play Matters, “To play is to be in the world and experience the world, but also to act on it, to change it, and to create new meanings” Let’s join forces and make that change happen!

Our inaugural Presents games span the breadth of playful media, expertly showing how games can be used to tackle complex topics. The Strand Avian Society invites players into a secret world of birds through a site-specific street game, and Intrapology blends game and theatre to create an innovative interactive performance.

Intrapology: Episode One

Zoyander Street

Intrapology: Episode One

Zoyander Street

Live, interactive online queer sci-fi series Intrapology is launching this autumn, with performances in September, October, and November. Episode One launches as part of Now Play This Presents, which champions new exciting game projects in the UK and beyond.

Tea (Xander Graves) has discovered that they are not an ordinary human – they are a transdimensional being, assigned to earth to study humans. We influence their behaviour in their first meetings via video call with their otherworldly drag king supervisor, Iris (Caitlin Magnall-Kearns). Understandably, Tea is furious about being assigned to such a horrible project, and demands to be reassigned; but relocation has unanticipated consequences for both characters.

Intrapology shows are interactive, live, online performances. It takes place on a webpage that looks like the main character’s computer desktop. You will be invited to shape the behaviour and views of the main character, through interactions such as voting on dialogue options, or writing in short messages to be read aloud by the actor.

Read more about the show or book tickets to Episode One: Assigned Earth at Birth

Intrapology is created by Dr Zoyander Street (they/them). Zoyander is a neuroqueer and disabled writer, researcher, and digital artist, creating interactive media based on social and historical research. Their work has been shown around the world, including Tokyo, Berlin, Chicago, Vancouver, and London. They are a supported artist at Sheffield Theatres, and a fellow of the Imaginary College at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. More on the project at Intrapology.com

The Strand Avian Society

Arlo Howard, Mel Frances, Chloe Mashiter

The Strand Avian Society

Arlo Howard, Mel Frances, Chloe Mashiter

“A new researcher is needed to finish this map: That’s you.”
Become a investigator looking for clues that reveal the hidden nature of the Strand Avian Society.

Part street-game, part architectural mystery, the Strand Avian Society is a site-specific game that asks players to look closer at the patchwork landscape of The Strand. Initiated during the 2024 festival as a series of workshops for young people in the Borough of Westminster, the Strand Avian Society brings together new games and stories devised over the course of two months and transforms them into a game that leads players through the heart of London.

Read more and play the game

Strand Avian Society Credits

Devised by:

Arlo Howard
Mel Frances
Chloe Mashiter

Design and Illustration:
Viviane Schwarz

Producer:
Nick Murray