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Update: Since publishing the video, I have learned the following additional information.
Bridge command has a dedicated access coordinator.
It is possible to remove the captain’s chair for wheelchair users with advance notice.
BSL can be provided for free with advance notice by Level 1 and 2 BSL staff members.
Ship desk positions other than Comms can be moved to other stations.
Volume on the ship can be altered, and ship advance walk arounds can be arranged in advance.
The captain’s desk cannot be lowered, but the screens can be moved to another location.
The Access Coordinator for Bridge Command can be reached via email at Ewan.bagshaw@bridgecommand.space, and has been super helpful in providing more info.
He’s going to update their website with additional access info, and make sure his contact info is prominently available to reach out to.
Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m kind of obsessed with pretending to captain a fictional space ship, under a railway bridge in London.
A couple of weeks back, myself and a group of friends visited Vaxhaul in London to attend a session of Bridge Command, an experience that’s part video game, part interactive theatre, and part escape room. A group of up to 14 people board one of two fictional starships, get assigned job roles, and complete missions focused on combat, diplomacy, exploration, or intrigue.
Since that first visit I’ve practiced missions at home using the simulator EmptyEpsilon, visited again with my wife to try another mission, and signed up to take part in a pair of larger campaigns later in the year.
The experience sits at the intersection of a bunch of my interests. It combines my love of improv storytelling and character development in D&D, with the chaos of multiplayer co-op games like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, with this practical layer of immersion that really helps to encourage roleplaying in a judgement free space. You get out of this experience what you put into it, and if you’re willing to be fully committed to the reality of this starship, there’s nothing quite like it.
Over my first two visits to Bridge Command, I’ve had a lot of thoughts about the accessibility of both the venue and the overall experience for disabled players of various kinds, and as such this week on Access-Ability I want to talk about some of the positives and negatives that disabled visitors can expect to experience if they decide to attend a session of Bridge Command.
However, before I get much further into this video, I will note that there is very little official video footage of Bridge Command available online. While players are allowed to take photos during their visit they are not permitted to film during gameplay, presumably to limit spoilers spreading online before players tackle the available content. As such, I couldn’t capture my own video footage to illustrate this video with.
There are a couple of trailers for Bridge Command available online, but most of the footage available is from a spoiler heavy video published by People Make Games. I’m going to be using some of their footage with permission during this video to help demonstrate the experience. A big thank you to People Make Games for allowing reuse of their gameplay for this video.
With that out of the way, let’s start with accessibility for wheelchair users.
Bridge Command as a venue is largely step free, with access from street level to gameplay areas featuring ramps that are not overly steep to reach elevated sections. Most job role desks on both the Havok and Takanami skips can accommodate wheelchair users, but there are a handful of positions on the ship which may not be a good fit for wheelchair users who are either non-ambulatory or who would struggle to transfer from their wheelchair to a second seat.
The manual engineer position requires a lot of running quickly back and forth around the ship, and depending on the mission may involve needing to climb a small ladder to reach a self-destruct hatch on the ceiling.
Both ships feature a small shuttle which can, depending on the mission, be manned by a small secondary crew. These shuttles are a little small and cramped, and might be difficult to crew as a wheelchair user.
Lastly, the captain’s desk on both ships is on a raised platform, with a static captain’s chair bolted into place. A wheelchair user would need to be able to climb one step and transfer into a different chair to be able to crew this position.
I do believe that the captain’s position could be made more accessible in future if the venue were willing to remove the raised platform for the captain’s position, and to make the captain’s chair able to be moved.
The bathroom on each ship features a manual door rather than one opened automatically or via a button, but does feature both bars for transfering, and a floor length cord which can be pulled in an emergency. If you experience an emergency while on the ship during gameplay, by raising both hands staff will be alerted to the situation. I suspect alternative signals could be arranged if required.
Additionally, if a full 14 people book your selected time slot, the airlock to enter the ship gets pretty cramped even if all of crew are standing. I suspect that with a wheelchair user playing, the airlock would need to be entered by the crew in batches on a full 14 member mission.
The pre-mission briefing room may also require some slight rearrangement for wheelchair users. The room features two rows of chairs, which may need to be moved aside after the briefing end to make more room for wheelchair users to pass through to the ship corridor.
Moving onto a disability that I have more personal experience with, for autistic players hoping to attend a session at Bridge Command, a couple of similar accessibility considerations may apply. For example, the cramped airlock on a full 14 crew member mission is going to be physically cramped during onboarding. The airlock sequence shouldn’t last more than a couple of minutes, but I imagine this could be accommodated by batching entry if discussed with staff.
Once on board, the bridge of the ship is likely to become a sensory overwhelming experience once your mission begins. Even when things are going correctly during a mission the bridge is likely to be loud, with a lot of chaotic cross talk. Multiple job positions on the bridge require communication with players elsewhere in the room, such as weapons shouting to helm about which ship they need to fly toward during a firefight, or Comms having a conversation with another ship in their headset while the captain attempts to confirm that drones have been recovered before Nav jumps to warp. There will be a degree of expectation that players follow multiple simultaneous threads of conversation, in an environment that may also contain flashing lights to denote alert status, explosion sound effects, smoke pouring out of consoles, and sparks flying from the ceiling.
This is obviously more true for some job roles than others, the captain’s role in particular requiring a lot of communication with different desks at once, but will to varying degrees be unavoidable in bridge crew positions.
When first entering Bridge Command, players are asked by staff if they have any accessibility needs that the staff should be aware of. I suspect that it is possible for sparks and smoke to be disabled on the backend Game Master system for Bridge Command for a specific session, but I would also recommend emailing to make that request in advance, so that there is time available for any necessary changes to be made. Alternatively, non bridge positions would allow for avoiding smoke and spark effects, which seem to be limited to specific bridge desks and spark emitters near the main view screen.
While a full crew of 14 will make the airlock sequence more crowded, it will also increase the likelihood that your crew will include a dedicated shuttle crew, assigned to a small 3-4 person craft that can operate independently in combat. This might be a good position for some autistic players with sensory oversensitivity, as these crew positions avoid a lot of the loud crosstalk of the main bridge, with a smaller crew having less simultaneous discussion during gameplay, and fewer people overall in the space. Shuttle positions tend to be less situated in the middle of the plot, but do get a more relaxed experience of the adventure.
Additionally, the mechanical engineering role on a 14 person crew tends to be its own dedicated job role, whereas it is shared with the power management bridge crew position on smaller size crews. This job requires a lot of physical running around and metaphorical putting out fires which can be stressful, but it balances being near enough to the bridge to understand the plot, but far and separated away enough to have less need to follow multiple conversations to thrive.
Some roles on the ship such as captain, first officer, and comms will naturally require increased amounts of social communication, both with large numbers of new people and with actors who may show up unexpectedly during the mission. If you are not comfortable with social communication, particularly fast paced narrative improv, these positions may not be the right pick for you.
In terms of accessibility for low vision or sightless blind players, there’s not a lot of roles at Bridge Command that are likely to be accessible without sighted assistance. All terminals on the bridge are touch screens, and there’s very little in the way of direct audio or tactile feedback to help identify how you’re doing.
The Comms desk could in theory be made accessible for sightless blind players with the introduction of speech to text or screen reader support, if that player happens to already be comfortable with touch typing on a keyboard. Another alternative path forward to potential accessibility for blind players on comms would be to replace text conversations with audio calls as default as an accommodation for a blind player. To my knowledge neither of these is currently an option, but both are options that I would love to see embraced to open that position on the crew up to other players.
Additionally, the captain role could potentially be a good fit for a sightless blind player if they have a solid memory. While the captain does have a desk with readouts of information from other stations, their actual physical actions are limited to hanging up calls, opening the cargo locker, and setting alert status. Alert status is not mission critical, you can go through a mission without using it. Callers can hang up the call on their end, leaving only cargo bay controls that may need sighted assistance to activate. If that comes up, it’s going to come up at most once in a mission, and you might need someone to press those touch controls for you.
The captain’s role is mainly one of communication – If you’ve got a first officer that’s willing to bring new characters and introduce them to the captain, the captain can largely function as a decision maker and an intermediary for information. It’s the captain’s job to declare destinations, ask how combat is going, approve shield downtime for calibration, check that all drones are returned before warp, and call for authorisation for nuclear weapons for example. The Captain’s role is to listen to all possible information and decide how the ship should proceed, something that doesn’t need the information screens if you’ve got a well trained crew and are willing to delegate certain tasks such as reading through documents and have them summarised to you.
For some Deaf players, the comms role might again be accessible with some accommodation from the organisers. If organisers are happy to make conversations text based by default, and pass audio or video calls straight to the captain, it could be possible to make this an accessible position on the bridge.
However, a LOT of roles on the bridge require a LOT of communicating with other players, which if paired with strangers may be an access barrier for Deaf players. There are exceptions, the dedicated mechanical engineer role on a fully crewed ship for example is largely about fixing problems solo, not needing a lot of input from other players. Similarly the drone pilot role can be fairly autonomous, but you would need to ensure that your crew has a good way to confirm whether all drones have docked back with the ship before going to warp.
For photosensitive players, there’s a few areas of potential inaccessibility. While on the ship sparks can be activated, alongside slow flashing lights being activated when at alert, and lights dimming or brightening based on factors such as ship power levels. Bridge positions also involve upwards of an hour and half looking continuously at screens and monitors.
However, the biggest area of note for photosensitive visitors is the teleporter room, which transports players from the lobby to the mess hall waiting area bar before the start of their mission. To break the illusion a little, this is a rotating room that flashes various colours of strobing lights in a circular patter to counteract and disguise the feeling of the room’s slow rotation. There is a pretty clear doorway to one side of this rotating room that would allow a photosensitive attendee to avoid the teleporter, sacrificing a little of the event’s theming for increased safety.
If you’ve got a condition such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, one accessibility positive is that a rule established during game setup is that your desk is your own, and nobody but you is allowed to touch it during play. This means if you clean your screen and desk at the start of a mission, you know that it’s only you who has touched it still by the end of a session.
For players who need to stand or sit during gameplay, the positions around the outer walls of the bridge which contain a lower and upper monitor can be adapted to a single monitor position. If you need to stand for example, it’s possible to set up tabs on the upper screen, so that you can reach both upper and lower functions from one monitor. The same is true for the lower desk screen at each position.
In terms of general stress, some positions on the bridge are going to inherently be more challenging such as Captain, First Officer and Comms. Navigation tends to be a fairly calm bridge position, and the shuttle crew positions tend to be more laid back than their main bridge counterparts.
As mentioned previously, Bridge Command staff do ask about access accommodations upon arrival at the venue. As a result, I suspect if you make it known that a specific job role would be more accessible for you, or particularly inaccessible, it’s unlikely to be an issue to prioritise your crew placement to accommodate that.
Sometimes, at the end of a mission, some players from the crew will receive a promotion, with their rank carrying forward into future visits. This promotion comes with a “free drink on the captain’s tab”. For anyone who doesn’t or can’t drink alcohol, the venue has a mocktail menu available, as well as alcohol free beer and cider.
There are a couple of aspects of Bridge Command that may not be totally accessible to some disabled attendees. One example, there is a patch for your uniform given out to players who, across multiple visits, have done jobs on the science, engineering, weapons, and command sections of the ship. Each sector has multiple job positions, but if one sector doesn’t contain any accessible job roles for you this may not be an accessible reward. It’s not a hard barrier to interaction with Bridge Command, but an example of a situation where you might want to talk to staff. I suspect if you’d for example done three out of the four roles, but the fourth area of the ship was completely inaccessible to you, this is something you could probably discuss with staff.
Everyone that I’ve spoken with working at Bridge Command has been incredibly welcoming and understanding. There are few events that I would feel as comfortable as this to be open about access accommodations.
Lastly, let’s talk about early departure and late arrival.
While leaving a mission early is mechanically possible, the narrative is such that it may take a moment to organise your departure in a non-emergency scenario. Much like an escape room not technically being locked, but simply walking out would break the narrative illusion, simply walking off a ship that’s meant to be in the void of space isn’t ideal. There are ways to signal to staff if you’re in an emergency scenario, in which case they will break character to come help, but outside of emergency situations you may need to wait a moment to make an exit in a way that avoids major disruption.
While you COULD enter a Bridge Command session if you arrived late, it could again be narratively challenging. If you’re just a little bit late the ship may not yet have left, and integration should be fairly simple. You might miss the mission briefing and early job role allocation for positions such as Captain if you’re five to ten minutes late. If you’re closer to fifteen or twenty minutes you may have missed a larger number of role allocations, giving you a more limited number of choices on the crew. Later than that and you’re liable to miss tutorials being given for various ship positions. Beyond 20 minutes late you should probably expect to have missed the ship departing, and may need to give the game master time to orchestrate a visiting ship docking to drop you off to explain your arrival, and quickly teach you your position.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that Bridge Command runs on a modified version of an open source program called EmptyEpsilon. While the experiences are not 1:1 identical, a lot of the core ship systems run very similarly to their open source software counterparts. If you’re unsure for example whether you’re going to be able to make out visual details such as thin and colour coded lines on a weapons desk, you can get a pretty good sense of that station’s accessibility by loading that portion of the ship up at home. This is a good way to get a sense for example whether perhaps power management might be a more accessible ship role due to its larger interactable UI elements. It is possible to demo various job roles at demo stations in the mess hall once at Bridge Command, but being able to check role accessibility aspects from home is a unique aspect of accessibility not offered by many other interactive experience events.
Overall, I do think Bridge Command is a fairly accessible activity for a decent range of disabled attendees at present, with potential to be made more accessible with some additional access accommodations either being implemented or advertised as options on their website.
I would love to see Bridge Command explore some potential accommodations they could offer sightless blind players and players with limited hearing for example, and advertise those accommodations online as options for players curious about their ability to take part. I would also love to see a redesign of the captain’s desk and chair situation on at least one of the two ships, sacrificing a little of the elevated station status for increased accessibility for wheelchair users.
While there are some job roles that contain access barriers for some groups of disabled players, the thing I think stands out to me ultimately is the way that the variety of positions available give options that can mitigate or avoid interacting with barriers for many disabled players. Sure, if you’re specifically hoping for a shuttle position to avoid sensory overwhelm you might need to keep an eye on the booking site and look for sessions with only 1-2 empty slots available, but knowing that that situation increases the chance of specific dedicated roles becoming available can help when selecting sessions to join to aim for a specifically accessible position.
While not all aspects of Bridge Command are going to be accessible for all disabled players, there’s enough ways to make roles accessible a decent number of players should be able to find a way to take part, even if they might not have the full selection of roles open to them.
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