{"id":39,"date":"2016-11-24T02:28:27","date_gmt":"2016-11-24T02:28:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/?p=39"},"modified":"2016-11-24T02:29:16","modified_gmt":"2016-11-24T02:29:16","slug":"on-games-and-theatrec","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/game-3\/on-games-and-theatrec\/","title":{"rendered":"On Games and Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cGames are a kind of theater in which the audience is an actor and takes on a role\u2014and experiences the circumstances and consequences of that role.\u201d (Anthropy 20)<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout the semester, one aspect of videogames has struck me the most and really distinguishes games from any other medium: the power it gives the audience. In other art forms like television, cinema, or painting, the audience never performs any action beyond observation, except for a certain kind of theater known as \u201cinteractive\u201d or \u201cimmersive theatre.\u201d It\u2019s a type of theater that actually makes the audience participate actively in theatrical spaces. The most famous contemporary example of this theater is Sleep No More<\/i>, a production of Macbeth <\/i>by the UK\u2019s Punchdrunk theater collective. This version of Shakespeare\u2019s Scottish play takes place at New York City\u2019s McKittrick Hotel, a six-story where audience members physically inhabit and interact with the same space the actors are in. Journalist Scott Brown writes of the audience\u2019s involvement in Sleep No More<\/i>, “Sleep<\/i>\u00a0allows its\u00a0\u2018guests’ great freedom. Presented with a bone-white Venetian beak mask (the kind favored by plague doctors in the Renaissance), you\u2019re invited to gawk, shame-free, at whatever you see, to rifle through drawers, files, Rolodexes, and even coffins. You and your fellow voyeurs, enskulled in your morbid headgear, quickly become part of the creepy scenery.\u00a0More to the point, you\u2019re a ghost. (N.B.: This doesn\u2019t exempt you from actor contact \u2014 in fact, you\u2019re practically guaranteed to be interfered with at some point in the approximately three hours it takes to survey the space and absorb the long arc of the story.) Fending for yourself in the fictional \u201cMcKittrick Hotel\u201d (a pointed\u00a0Vertigo<\/i>\u00a0reference that dizzy or claustrophobic types should take to heart before booking), you\u2019re given the run of six misty, intricately detailed floors, with more than 100 rooms\u201d (Brown). These rooms include\u00a0\u201c\u2018situations’: a man who may or may not be Duncan, right king of Scotland, being murdered in a sheikh\u2019s tent. A gelid blonde who may or may not be Mrs. Danvers from Hitchcock\u2019s\u00a0Rebecca<\/i>\u00a0\u2014 here in loyal service to Lady Macbeth \u2014 spooning milky poison down the gullet of a soused, super-pregnant woman who very well might be Lady Macduff\u201d (Brown). Sleep No More <\/i>builds a world that immerses people fully in an expansive place, where story unfolds through exploration. The audience is no longer assembled of passive spectators but active, investigative witnesses.\u00a0This type of theater engages audience members to explore and connect with an old story through a completely new environment unlike any other medium, except for videogames. This immersive theater seems (to me) to be a kin to videogames, a medium that also allows for audience members to explore, play, and connect with an environment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Shot of Sleep No More<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That is, videogames could <\/i>be a medium like immersive theater that engages and makes the audience active. I say this because in order for an audience member to become another actor, the audience member must have choice. In Sleep No More<\/i>, the audience can choose to go whatever place they want, try to talk to whomever they want, and do whatever they want. Like the actors who are also making choices to play characters and do certain things on a \u201cstage,\u201d the audience unwittingly does the same thing and is forced to make purposeful choices on what to do and not to do. To relate this to Assassin\u2019s Creed IV: Black Flag<\/i>, interactive theater does not take place in it nor a lot of other videogames. The games inhibit player\u2019s choices to conform to a linear track on which to progress.\u00a0Black Flag <\/i>is more like a movie than a play in a hotel.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, the medium Assassin’s Creed deserves<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To be sure, the player does have freedom and can take action within the world. This is still a digital play space where players can fight anyone they want (except for citizens, which prompts a fail screen), can climb buildings (except for buildings that don\u2019t have any obvious spots you can grab on to), and can spend digital money on whatever (no exceptions). Yet, the game does not offer a lot of freedom to the player, insisting on rigid paths and linear tasks to a linear storyline. After the opening scene of fighting pirate ships that all exploded, my character swam in the water and was essentially presented a path straight to a beach. However, I wanted to swim back to the ship\u2019s wreckage and around the ocean because I could so why not? I swam to these places but nothing really happened until I got to the beach where I was \u201csupposed\u201d to be. So why does the game present options of swimming around pirate ships and climbing buildings but really only rewards players for swimming to the \u201cright\u201d spot where the cutscene kicks in or the \u201cright\u201d buildings that I somehow can climb versus all the other ones? I\u2019m not saying that every choice should be rewarded, but if you have and market a game as being an expansive game world, shouldn\u2019t this game world include more than one set of action for actors? Can\u2019t we choose where we want to be in this world as players instead of being forced down one path of cutscene after cutscene? I might as well watch a movie, instead of being an offered an illusion of theatrical choice. Or I\u2019ll go to a hotel where people are putting on Macbeth<\/i>, where I can do more interesting fictional things.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Works Cited:<\/p>\n

Anthropy, Anna.\u00a0Rise of the Videogame Zinesters<\/em>. Seven Stories, 2012.<\/p>\n

Brown, Scott. “Theater Review: The Freakily Immersive Experience of\u00a0Sleep No More<\/em>.” Vulture, 15 Apr. 2011,\u00a0http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/2011\/04\/theater_review_the_freakily_im.html.<\/a>\u00a0Accessed 23 Nov. 2016.<\/p>\n

Fletcher, Rosie and Hugh Armitage. “Assassin’s Creed movie: Everything you need to know about Michael Fassbender and the cast, spoilers and release date.” Digital Spy, 27 Oct. 2016,\u00a0http:\/\/www.digitalspy.com\/movies\/feature\/a672940\/assassins-creed-movie-everything-you-need-to-know-about-michael-fassbender-and-the-cast-spoilers-and-release-date\/.<\/a>\u00a0Accessed 23 Nov. 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cGames are a kind of theater in which the audience is an actor and takes on a role\u2014and experiences the circumstances and consequences of that role.\u201d (Anthropy 20) Throughout the semester, one aspect of videogames has struck me the most and really distinguishes games from any other medium: the power it gives the audience. In … Continue reading “On Games and Theatre”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,25],"tags":[45,50,54,52,51,53,55],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-3","category-game-log-2","tag-assassins-creed-iv-black-flag","tag-assassins-creed-the-movie","tag-immersive-theatre","tag-macbeth","tag-sleep-no-more","tag-theatre","tag-videogames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41,"href":"https:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fms321.ryrotella.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}