Opening doors to interactive play spaces: fragmenting story structure into games

Abstract

By definition, postmodernism and its fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents provides opportunities for the modular and fragmented story structure of postmodern theatre and cinema to be reinvented as non-linear games and interactive play spaces. This potential is magnified when the theatre art and cinema are hybridized into Integrated Performance Media, (IPM) --- a computer-mediated theatre-art form that effectively enables the transformation of audience members into gameplayers with the power to affect changes in the story narrative. In this paper, we specifically describe how the fragmentary and temporally non-linear story construction of the Spies in the Oilpatch IPM script opens doors of opportunity for audience/players to participate in the spatial exploration of interactive play spaces, notably computer games and virtual reality environments.