The Interactive Theater of Video Games: The Gamer as Playwright, Director, and Actor

Abstract

In storytelling, films, and novels, is traditionally an observer, and by necessity a passive observer. In these media artists can often be seen as telling rather than sharing stories. To be sure, author provides space for a readers imaginative input, but you cannot change words. Both theater and, more recently, video games have been experimenting with, twisting, and turning on its head this traditional view of Unless you're Roger Ebert and believe that video games cannot and will never be art, video game designers, writers, and directors are starting to blur lines between interactive theater and games. (1) In recently released video game Gone Home, for example, is a young college student who returns home from Europe to find her parents missing and a note from her younger sister taped to front door. Reviewing game in The New York Times, Chris Suellentrop comments on work's gripping fiction, its closeness to literary realism. One of designers, Steve Gaynor, influenced by current hit Sleep No More, an interactive theater production to be examined later in this essay, observes that in Gone Home audience ... occupies same three-dimensional space as fictional inhabitants and that inside that space, players, like theatergoers, can choose where to focus their attention. Lucy Pebbles writing in The Observer speaks of game as if it were a video equivalent to audience's experience with Sleep No More: You piece together a sense of who everyone is and what happened through seemingly disconnected items and evidence hidden around house. And those connections are intentionally weak. It allows plot and conclusions to take place in mind of and not in action of game. For her, Gone Home takes gaming element away from screen, and into your head, making room for player/audience directly ... because they are alive to flexibility of choice and narrative. (2) We use video games and interactive theater here as reverse mirrors to raise larger aesthetic questions. Is this increased role for audience, whether offstage or at controls, ultimate goal, reality of both media? What happens to concept of plot or narrative when becomes a collaborator with playwright or with game designer? Is notion of author challenged, reduced, potentially rendered irrelevant with time, as audience's or player's control grows exponentially in these more recent experiments in theater and in video games? And is video game now a legitimate rival of, some would even go so far as to say successor to, legitimate theater which has been described, even dismissed as the fabulous invalid? (3) When filtering play through his or her own life experiences, needs, agenda, interests, preoccupations, spectator in theater has always been a player in loose sense of that word. But idea of spectator's having a direct role in action onstage or even a hand in plot, becoming a player in literal sense as it applies to interactive video games, is of more recent origin. The 1960s saw numerous productions that drew onstage, willingly or not, thereby blurring line between stage and house. As a result, performances were half scripted, half improv, latter coming into play when members joined actors onstage, their role ranging from nonverbal members of a crowd to new characters in ongoing story. Behind such experiments was principle of, even political need for, inclusivity, making spectator more than a passive receptor and challenging what innovators saw as stilted, even undemocratic theater of past. (4) An actor friend tells of a workshop performance in 1980s that offered a variation on such inclusion of audience. Those present were confronted with an actor dressed as Frankenstein's creature, standing motionless before them. …