It's called a Play after all.

One of the big and consistent pieces of advice that established screenwriters love to give is that every aspiring writer should take an acting class. I took an acting class during one of the summers before lockdown (I can no longer accurately recall any time before quarantine with any degree of accuracy beyond “Before COVID”). It was a class mostly made up of beginner hobbyist actors and dramatic writers. It was 3-4 weeks long, we’d write scripts for each other and then direct 1-2 person 3 minute stage plays. Working one-on-one with someone else’s writing was negotiation from a weaker position. I could test the limits of the character I was assigned, feeling the bits that were flexible and noting the parts that were rigid. I could give feedback, I could add flair, but it was not my character. I was working within the confines of a role defined by someone else.

It is common in casual conversation and criticism alike to compare video games to film and television. These are the most visible and commercially successful artistic mediums of the past 50 years minimum. They all prominently feature the camera as a key component in their production. As video game fidelity and technology have advanced over the past 30+ years, we see games dabble more and more into explicit cinematography rendering cut scenes as short films. Today we get anything from the moody vignettes of Strange Scaffold’s El Paso, Elsewhere to the 15+ minute photorealistic spectacles in Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding games.

When games are described as cinematic in modern parlance, it is typically through the lens of photorealism. It’s cinematic by way of tricking your parents into thinking you’re watching a movie. I hate this definition as it does not acknowledge that cinematography is a language, that the camera, the perspectives, the lenses, etc., have been studied, practiced, and mastered as to communicate everything from intent to emotion through position and angle alone. If anything, games have become less cinematic as perspectives have shifted from deliberate, fixed camera placements to fully surrendering control to the player with nothing but plot, geometry and their innate curiosity to guide their eyelines.

I posit that video games have more in common with plays and theatre, be it interactive theatre or otherwise. This is hardly an original observation. Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, Gina Bloom notes in Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of the English Commercial Theatre, “The overlap between games and theatrical plays was a foregone conclusion for premodern people. Medieval writers used the term ludus for both games and plays. (Bloom, 2018).” Theatre and video games share a quality that is outside the realm of film, interactivity. Gamers step beyond the role of the audience and into the space of acting.

“Breaking the 4th wall” is a well-known concept with roots in theatre. The fourth wall is an invisible screen between the theatre’s audience and the performers. Breaking down that wall meant the players would momentarily leave the world of the fiction of the play and acknowledge that they were being watched. This is often done for exposition or humour. Sometimes this “breaking” went beyond one way acknowledgement, and the performers would actively blend the line between audience and performer.

The first time I saw a lap dance was when I was 10 years old at a local Jamaican play I have long forgotten the name of. One performer plucked a woman out of the audience, sat her down on stage, and then it was pelvis to pelvis for 30 seconds of hooting and hollering from the audience and mock outrage from the other performers. Later in the play, that character’s partner would refer to the incident as a “deed” done in front of “all of those people.”

What does this moment look like without a willing audience member? You could insure against that possibility by seeding someone in the audience so if too many say no after 5 minutes they would volunteer. Even so, a different woman might react differently. At the show I was at, the volunteer watched it all through a tent of fingers, and while I couldn’t see her face in the dark of the theatre after she returned to her seat in the audience, I cannot imagine she stopped blushing for the rest of the night. On another night, another volunteer might be more into it, meeting gyration with excited gyration. Then that’s a different moment but a similar show, different audience members expressing themselves differently

The 4th wall example shows that within theatre, and under the right circumstances, an audience member can become a performer. In comparing video games to theatre, I assert that the video game player occupies a role akin simultaneously to a performer and an audience member, fluidly oscillating between the two.

Compared to other games (sports, children’s games, etc.) video games have a rigid rule set and narrative. The developer has to anticipate different player’s needs, abilities, and desires and then design around them. While this is less rigid in the patch-friendly post online-storefront reality video games exist in today, a video game will never be as flexible as a Game Master making a decision to bend her narrative to accommodate a player’s preference or completely change the rules on the fly to facilitate a new player or particular circumstances. The developer acts as the writer/director and in their anticipation provides feedback to the player as to the limits of the role they are acting within.

1. Bloom, G. (2018). Gaming the Stage: Playable media and the rise of English Commercial Theater. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/23988/1/1006146.pdf

Chilling, Shilling

HI! I’m very broke and at the end of the month I’m gonna have to find a new place to live and that search is going…slowly. If you enjoy my writing or me [or the idea of me], continue tossing me whatever you’re comfortable tossing my way here. Thank you!