THE sold-out Blood + Chocolate will not be the only theatre performance taking to the streets of York with electronic equipment this weekend.

Brighton company Root Experience will be equipping each audience member with a mobile phone and earpiece to take part – and I do mean take part – in The Rise And Fall of Geo Goynes, a digital theatre and gaming experience at the TakeOver Festival.

Don’t worry, no wires will be crossed with Blood +Chocolate, because the 300 audience members wearing cordless headsets and 180 actors with earpieces will be passing through York from 7pm tomorrow and Sunday, whereas Root Experience’s adventures will be at 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm each day. What’s more, each gaming experience will be restricted to ten participants.

We joined the beta-test – dress rehearsal to you and me – on a suitably windswept, rain-lashed Thursday, the first evening in ages to suit a detective’s raincoat and a trilby. We gathered for instructions at the De Grey Rooms, meeting artistic director Simon Magnus, who would not be seeing us again all night yet could hear all conversations on the mobile phone network in order to feed us information from his control centre. “It’s a bit like The Hunger Games,” he said.

The year was 2017, he explained; computer algorithms had become so advanced that computers had the power of “Glimpses”: to look into the future of the world and your life. We were to find a blue folder with a map inside attached to the Roman wall opposite the Theatre Royal. A female voice on the mobile instructed us to proceed as quickly as possible to St Helen’s Square without being detected. Apparently agents were on the lookout for us.

We had to locate a figure in an anorak with fur-trimmed hood, hiding in an alleyway. She was nervous, insistent, issuing instructions briskly as to what we needed to do. Our mission was to find the Oracle, a computer programme developed by one Geo Goynes that could access information about anyone at any time.

Without giving too much detail, the game would involve this Oracle, a group called The Brokers who bought and sold future insights, four York locations, such as Filmore & Union and the Macumba cocktail bar, where the Oracle could be hidden and eight more locations where an associate was working. Find the associate, find the Oracle and avoid the “Agents” sent to block your path.

Usually, the game is played out by two teams, each being fed different information to lead them down different routes that will involve encounters with eight figures (all York-recruited actors).

If it sounds like a computer game being played out as a piece of theatre where you are the actors/players, then that is sort of right. “It wasn’t a computer game that attracted me to doing this digital gaming experience,” says Simon. “My interest is in games – card games are my favourite – and the idea came from wanting to explore different ways of having audiences invest in a show to the point where they feel comfortable to do that, which all our shows have done since 2008.

“Playing games is a way in which we all invest in something, and consciously or not, you do become someone else when you play a game, so it felt like a natural progression in our exploration of the relationship with audiences to involve them in a game.

“It’s important that the audience should feel that the story they become involved in has consequences and the world wouldn’t continue as it was if you weren’t there to do something about it, so when they’re in the game, they’re in the story as well.”

Root Experience’s gaming experience is still in development after being premiered in Brighton and road-tested in York this weekend. “It’s a prototype of what we’ll continue to develop with more narrative to it and then hopefully take to other cities,” says Simon.

What makes it a piece of theatre? “That fact that you’re following a narrative, and you’re an actor in your own narrative – and you’re an actor as much as you want to be. It gives you permission to act in any way you want while you play the game.

“One group took it so seriously in Brighton that they ran the entire time they did it and finished in 55 minutes when it should take 90.”