Threshold is a two-player extended reality game experience interrogating power dynamics in Chinese fandom culture. Through an asymmetric gameplay structure, it illustrates the changing dynamics of idol-fan relationships in attraction, collaboration, defence, antagonism, and termination. This forms the basis of player interaction, one performing the role of ‘idol’, the other of ‘fan’, to explore five different stages of the dynamic relationships: entertainment-social, intense-personal, borderline-pathological, antagonism, and termination stage.

Threshold is based on the mapping of relationships between real and virtual game spaces, where characters and props test the porosity of boundaries between virtual and physical worlds. The virtual world guides players’ movement in space, interactive props and human actuation then build a bridge of physical interaction and emotional connection. Structured as a linear narrative, the game, and its corresponding interaction design, provides ways and means of interrogating the often ambiguous and immaterial nature of para-social relationships through a powerfully direct embodied experience.