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How game making is shaping theatre and exhibition spaces | Playable Futures
23.02.2024 - 13:15 / gamesindustry.biz
This series of Playable Futures articles considers how the design, technology, people, and theory of video games are informing and influencing the wider world. You can find previous Playable Futures articles and podcasts here.
For decades, games' digital nature has been defining their very existence. They pull us away from reality into their virtual realms, never existing as physical reality.
Or, at least, that used to be the case. Over the years, phenomena like Pokemon Go have asserted that games that mix the digital and physical worlds can be wildly mainstream and successful. And yet there is another way in which the conventions and rulesets of the video game form are permeating our reality; namely, by increasingly shaping our experiences in public spaces. In particular, spaces such as theatre, galleries and museums are starting to see their output explicitly steered by conventions forged in the games industry.
"To be honest, we didn't explicitly plan that games would become so much of what we do," says Felix Barrett, artistic director at Punchdrunk, which stands as one of the most highly-regarded immersive theatre companies in the world. "After an initial run in the UK, we opened Sleep No More – our version of the Scottish play – in 2009. Towards the end of that year, American newspapers were doing their usual round-ups of the arts, and looking at theatre among other things. And in one of those papers, we saw Sleep No More described as the 'game of the year'. We were like: 'What? But we made a theatre show'.
"And then we started to see that it was just about this difference of vocabulary. The journalist simply used a gaming vocabulary to describe what we were thinking as just a different way of doing theatre. And that was a revelation for us. You could totally view Sleep No More as an open-world adventure game that our audience explores. Over time we've just started to see the theatre we make as having a lot of similarities with video games, and now we're really putting more of what games are into our work.
"It's just deliberate this time," Barrett says with a knowing laugh.
Immersive theatre covers a range of performance approaches, perhaps where the audience might mill about through a large set interacting with cast members, or discover elements of environmental storytelling as they explore. Some shows even let the audience influence or shape the narrative journey. With interaction part of the experience, then, it's not too testing to draw a comparison with how games function as a medium. And yet Punchdrunk's more recent work shows the overlap is about more than just the academic.
"As soon as we got that review,I realised there was a way we can be more methodical about this," Barrett continues, "If we
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