How game making is shaping theatre and exhibition spaces
How game making is shaping theatre and exhibition spaces
How game making is shaping theatre and exhibition spaces
By Will Freeman
February 23, 2024
Summary
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."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." "As soon as we got that review,I realised there was a way we can be more methodical about this," Barrett continues, "If we take rulesets of video games and apply them to live-action theatre, we saw we could create a new form of entertainment. And actually that's the future of Punchdrunk's focus right now. So now I play games to analyse the mechanics. We're taking immersive theatre - which you can already compare to video games - but we're really looking at how we can take immersive theatre to new places by letting it be directly informed by video game design." Away from theatre, gallery and exhibition spaces are equally undergoing a fascinating intersection with games. "For the video games exhibition at the V&A, one of the things that I really loved about the collaboration was working with the project architects Pernilla Ohrstedt, as well as the digital-physical experience team from Squint/Opera, and graphic design studio Julia. We told them we really wanted to resist the cliches of pixels and labels like 'game over,' and further explore how we could go deeper into the medium and how it could be part of how we exhibited games at the V&A. And that's when we started to see what games are [start to] shape the exhibition."
A theatre-focused game engine? It appears the intersection of game design, theatre production and exhibition curation is just getting started.
Reference
Freeman, W. (2024, February 23). How game making is shaping theatre and exhibition spaces | Playable Futures. GamesIndustry.biz. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-game-making-is-shaping-theatre-and-exhibition-spaces-playable-futures