Abstract
What happens when an audience is presented with a video game and a single controller? Such is the conceit of the ongoing episodic performance asses.masses, developed by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim. From the crowd, a player must step up to control a donkey tasked with the preservation of its animal workforce as new advancements in farm machinery threaten to displace the entire collective. In this piece of writing, the author discusses how the show cultivates an environment for emergent strategies of play and social negotiation. Situated within the context of returning to live theatre, the author blends influences from performance and game studies theory in an auto-ethnographic analysis of the player experience. In the process, notions of choice, leadership, and positionality are explored as key considerations in audience collaboration.
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