Bliss - an interactive project

Dive into a fun, hands-on experience where creativity meets connection in this one-of-a-kind interactive project. Bliss is a light-hearted, interactive multiplayer game exploring the environmental footprint of our everyday digital habits. Inspired by and framed as a prequel to E.M. Forster’s classic story The Machine Stops. The game explores how our contemporary idea of "the Cloud" obscures a vast, physical reality of server farms, undersea cables, and network masts. As audiences interact, BLISS reveals how everyday hyper-connectivity steadily builds the very Machine that eventually replaces the natural world. Projected directly onto a wall, the game opens with the familiar rolling green hills of the classic Windows desktop background. Audiences connect using their own smartphones by scanning an on-screen QR code. Playing in pairs, they work together to pilot a mobile phone through the scenery, trying to keep their battery full and signal strong. The central tension is straightforward: the better the players do, the more the natural environment degrades. As the score climbs, the green landscape slowly withers, crowded out by masts, wires, and digital infrastructure until the Machine takes over the screen completely. Using cooperative play and cartoony retro graphics, Bliss uses gentle humour to prompt people to reflect on their own screen time and tech consumption.