Plot, Story, Narrative — and What Sleep No More Taught Me About Immersive Experience

Reposted from my LinkedIn articles, first published February 4, 2026.

I recently read a forthcoming paper by Simon Brind for a special issue of Storyworlds that I’m guest editing, focused on larp. In it, Brind makes a deceptively simple distinction: plot is the design, story is the experience, and narrative is the sense we make of it afterwards.

Almost immediately after reading it, I went to see Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More in Shanghai — and that framework suddenly stopped being theoretical and became lived.

My background is in film and television. In screenwriting, plot, story, and narrative tend to collapse into a single, tightly managed, moment-by-moment experience. Audiences may interpret films differently, but the writer’s job is still to corral meaning, to guide attention and emotional response with some precision. It’s a mature discipline with its own mythologies, gurus, rules, and protocols.

That model begins to fall apart once you move into immersive and experiential work. Fragmentation, non-linearity, partiality — these aren’t problems to be solved, they’re often the point. And that’s where Brind’s distinction becomes genuinely useful.

In Sleep No More, plot is not something you “follow” in a conventional sense. It’s something you learn to recognise. One of the clearest ways I felt plot operating was through time. Early scenes unfold with duration, there were opportunities for extended dwell time; later, everything accelerates. Scenes become shorter, more frantic. That speeding up is not just aesthetic — it’s a signal. It tells you, as an audience member, now is the moment to stop wandering. Follow this performer. Stay with them. Something important is about to happen.

That kind of plotting needs to be at least partially visible. It teaches the audience how to behave. Once you’ve learned that grammar, you feel free to explore — until the work tells you, very clearly, to commit.

But if plot is the design, story is something else entirely. Asked what my story of Sleep No More was, I struggled to answer. What I remember most strongly is deep, powerful affect. Darkness. A lingering sense of instability, even madness. Discovering a hospital hidden inside a hotel produced a cold, unsettling question: why would this be here? I witnessed a murder. I felt the weight of power tipping into corruption and insanity. But these moments arrived as fragments, not as a coherent arc.

And that’s the point. Story, here, is not a sequence of events but an embodied, emotional experience. It’s what happens to you.

Narrative, then, comes later. It’s what I’m doing now: talking with others, comparing experiences, writing, trying to make sense of what I felt. This after-the-fact sense-making isn’t a bonus feature — it’s integral to the work. In immersive experiences, narrative is labour. It’s collective, social, and ongoing.

This is where individuality matters. Everyone’s experience is different, and I don’t see that as a problem. It’s what people come for. There’s a sense of personal authenticity in knowing that only you had that version of the work. Comparison doesn’t diminish the experience; it enriches it. You didn’t find the secret room? Perhaps there never was one — but the myth-making is part of the pleasure.

Experiencing Sleep No More in Shanghai added another layer. Returning to the city after more than a decade and being immersed immediately in a stylised 1930s Shanghai created a powerful resonance between place, history, and performance. I don’t think the work merely aestheticises place — although, of course, all historical staging does. Aestheticisation is part of the work we do. Scenography always involves selection and emphasis, and while that carries risks of simplification, it is also the means by which history and place become spatial, affective, and experiential rather than purely representational. What ultimately mattered was the depth of worlding: Punchdrunk’s cinematic attention to detail, and the creation of spaces that are never “used” in any functional sense, but which nonetheless make the world feel lived-in and real.

It’s also important to say what this work is not. Sleep No More is not larp, and I want to be careful about that distinction, particularly in the context of a special issue of Storyworlds focused on larp practices. I wouldn’t claim authority here — Simon Brind is a larper, a larp designer, and an academic theorist deeply engaged in these debates — and I would defer to those with deeper expertise in the field. My interest is not in collapsing immersive theatre into larp, but in thinking alongside it, using Sleep No More as a neighbouring form that helps illuminate questions of agency, authorship, and post-experience sense-making.

Experientially, however, the distinction is clear to me. In Sleep No More I am cast as a ghost: present, but without agency. Nothing I do alters the plot or the outcome. My choices shape my experience — who I follow, where I stand, what I notice — but never the storyworld itself. That boundary matters.

All of this has changed how I think about documenting immersive work as research. Being there matters. Taking notes matters. Capturing fragments matters. But there is no single, definitive story to record. Every account is personal. That pushes us towards participant-observer and auto-ethnographic approaches — especially when researchers are also makers. Multiplicity isn’t a methodological failure; it’s a condition of the form.

As a designer, one insight stood out sharply: onboarding is everything. In Sleep No More, the experience begins before you enter the building. The box office, the naming, the threshold — you’re already in the storyworld. I’d visited another immersive space days earlier where this was handled casually, almost carelessly, and the difference was stark. The gateway matters. It’s where trust is established.

So why does this distinction between plot, story, and narrative matter now? Because immersive, experiential, XR, and larp practices are still forming their languages, methods, and protocols. Unlike screenwriting, much of the knowledge is tacit and emergent. Having clearer ways to talk about design, experience, and sense-making helps us make better work — and study it more honestly.

It also matters institutionally. Universities and cultural organisations often focus only on “the experience”. What they miss is that people are seeking something social. The conversations afterwards. The decompression. In larp, this is well understood. In immersive theatre, it’s just as necessary. Burning Man calls it decompression — the process of coming back to the world. Without it, something is lost.

Which leaves me with a final question — one Sleep No More doesn’t answer, but productively opens up:

If narrative is something we assemble together afterwards, what responsibilities do designers, producers, and institutions have for what happens once the experience ends?

That feels like a question worth sitting with.