What can game developers learn from a live-action Star Trek simulator?

gamesindustry.biz:

"The pirates are hiding in a nearby nebula," a fleet officer tells us. "We can either explore them one at a time, but run the risk of abandoning the convoy, or we can send probes into each one – but that will definitely alert the pirates to our presence. Or we could just proceed to the rendez-vous and hope we're not ambushed."

We're standing on the bridge of the USC Havock. More accurately, we're under a railway arch near Vauxhall in London – the home of Bridge Command, an immersive experience run by interactive shows firm Parabolic Theatre that puts groups of visitors in charge of a Star Trek-style starship.

The strategies laid out before us come near the end of our mission. Unlike so many video game story choices that commit players to a specific path, we could pivot at any moment pivot. We could stop sending probes and venture into the nebulas ourselves. We could send out our shuttle crew, with their mini-bridge set, in order to cover more ground. My friend, who had been assigned as chief engineer, yelled in the middle of the inevitable battle: "If you lot don't get your act together, I'll hit the self-destruct button." Almost anything is an option.

It might sound easy to allow this sort of agency in an immersive theatre experience; after all, human actors, like our fleet officer, can improvise and adapt far more creatively than a computer can. But here's a secret: strip away the sets, the flashing lights, the sound of the alarm, and the NASA-style jumpsuits we're all wearing, and Bridge Command is essentially a video game.

All of the touchscreen bridge stations – helm, weapon control, navigation, and so on – are running on a modified version of EmptyEpsilon, a bridge simulator readily available on Steam. That simulation is rendering the nebulas, space pirates, and our allied ships on the main screen in graphics not unlike the original Homeworld or earlier versions of EVE Online.

Bridge Command co-creator and Parabolic Theatre's artistic director Owen Kingston admits