🎮Interactive & Gamified Theatre

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Interactive & Gamified Theatre

I decided to connect interactive theatre and gamified theatre in this section as many of the approaches to interactivity in second wave digital theatre build on game and narrative design techniques. Gamified theatre naturally becomes a subset of interactive theatre. Generally, both Interactive and Gamified Theatre apply techniques to directly integrate the audience into the story, making them participants or, to borrow a term from , . Considering potential combinations of theatre and game design, : ‘Technology and postmodernism have enabled audience participation and intervention again, overcoming the supposed passivity that characterises what is expected from theatre’. echoes this, with more of a positive twist: ‘Multimodal delivery will certainly bring theater to new and expanded audiences … the interactive aspects of Zoom, Twitch, and the YouTube chat have paradoxically made some audience members feel more engaged, more part of a collective, than any night at the theater’. Additionally, as many audience members use their digital devices for more interactive tasks, their association with these devices is to engage – and digital theatre makers can dramaturgically integrate this impulse [See also: Spotlight-Audience Onboarding; Spotlight-Companion Screens].

that the importance of participatory forms is the active experience of togetherness: ‘Interactive and participatory practices have sought to emphasize mutuality by asserting the integrity of the audience as co-authors who shape the performance as it is made’. When the audience makes choices about their experience, they uphold theatrical tradition that they are together simultaneously and can impact each other as well as the narrative; unlike traditional theatre, though, an interactive audience both energetically effects the show, and actively makes changes to it. During the pandemic, when audiences could not gather in the same room, many theatre makers and their audiences both professed the importance of expressing this togetherness more actively, . ‘The choice by many practitioners to foreground audience response—whether by activating the chat function or otherwise inviting the audience to enter a community discussion … further decenters the text, even in the absence of bodies onstage’. The collaborative experience of creating a theatrical performance extends to the audience in this form.

Andrew Hungerford, whose company Know Theatre experimented with a few interactive digital methods during the pandemic, shared with me in our interview: ‘I think about ways things like in Sleep No More, where they intersect with gaming environments …. And what other kinds of storytelling can we do that are at the intersection of theatre and not-quite-gamification but giving audience members more agency when they’re exploring the story’. Traditional theatre may rely on the audience’s dramaturgical interpretation of the performance to be truly complete, but that the formation of the audience as a receptive collective mind required subjugation, forcing them into a lesser position below the artists. , says:

Theatre has prized itself as an interactive artform, especially in opposition to the cinema and television as each technological upstart usurped the stage from which it sprang. However, the most significant characteristic of the ‘digital revolution’ is an explosive new amount of interaction and participation that is profoundly different in volume and character from what has gone before.

Interactive and Gamified Theatre methods solve this problem by promoting audience intervention and including them in shaping the show; digital tools streamline this process with their familiar interactive options. that with ‘its new avenues for audience engagement, the pandemic has effectively accelerated the development of participatory modes’. This seemed to be true for many of the digital theatre makers I spoke with, who grew more interested in offering audiences a sense of liveness of experience and co-presence with each other through technology design choices, rather than telling a linear story to viewers.