☢️Videogame Platforms as Social Spaces
Wayfinding: Spotlights > Platforms > Videogames: Shakespeare in Fallout 76
VR / metaverse platforms provide a flexible space to build a large virtual world tailored to your production needs. However, you might also consider a more site-specific dramaturgy by using an existing virtual social space in a popular videogame. This can ease audience access and onboarding, provide numerous assets for avatars and settings, and lead to an interesting audience interpretation of your work.
The Wasteland Theatre Company has performed Shakespeare shows including Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, MacBeth, and Romeo and Juliet in the Bethesda-created MMORPG videogame, Fallout 76. The title came out in 2018, the fourth instalment of the popular post-apocalyptic videogame series takes place more than a decade ahead of the other Fallout games, representing an alternative, nuclear war-ravaged 1976 in the Appalachian region of the United States. The prior title in the series, Fallout 3, offered a multiplayer option, but Fallout 76 ‘which means people from around the world can play together, be creative, and hang out’.
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It takes months to put a show together. First, North picks the play and adapts it. Hundreds of pages of script are shared with the crew, so set design and rehearsals can commence. … Between shows, actors scour Fallout’s wasteland for costume parts.
Unlike a traditional theatre production, the creative team had to hire ‘guards’ to patrol around the perimeter of the show and prevent unwanted incidents; this includes NPCs like rad-scorpions who might attach performers and audience, as well as audience members who get the idea to launch a bomb into the middle of the show. One might argue that ushers in traditional theatres serve , but it is rarer to need more aggressive bouncers in the modern day. ‘North is emphatic that his company’s plays are never meant to replace the magic of real-world productions’.
Similar issues are described regarding Grand Theft Hamlet, a live performance of Shakespeare's Danish tragedy performed in the MMO version of Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto V (GTA5). In The Art Desk's review of the documentary on Grand Theft Hamlet's creation, the project's dramaturgy stemming from the pandemic-era isolation, loneliness, and stress of two British actors who, much like Hamlet, found themselves pondering the violence around them both in reality and in their gaming lives. That violence consistently wreaked havoc during auditions, rehearsals, and performances, since the troupe could not stop random players from spawning into their location and blowing up their surroundings - a common practice among GTA5 players. However, within the game-spanning performance, the cartoonish game violence changed audience interpretations of classic soliloquies such as 'To Be or Not To Be' by demonstrating the immediacy of the threats faced by Hamlet's characters.
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