💡Audience Understanding of Digital Interaction

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Interactive & Gamified Theatre > Audience Understanding of Digital Interaction

Digital tools are particularly effective for audience interaction, not only because audiences associate their computers and phones with direct engagement, but because computer programming allows for real-time engagements that react directly to the individual user. , queries: ‘Are we not now treading a fine line between a communal audience experience and the experience of an isolated individual at home watching television or a web-cast of some kind, and where does the audience become participants?’ Masura suggests that traditional in-person theatre rarely directly engages the audience, and this experience is similar to TV or online streaming shows; while this is not inherently negative, theatre’s claim to create community and actively, rather than passively, engage spectators goes against more engrained and enforced theatre traditions from the last century and a half, . :

That theatre and live performance are per se characterised by a high level of interactivity, however, is an idealised generalisation. … In fact, the potential for interaction in traditional theatre is usually limited by the separation between the fictional space of the characters and the actual space of the audience.

Even if audiences can applaud, type their approval into a chat section, or use applause emojis, this may not be enough engagement for their emotional catharsis; knowing they are temporally co-present with each other and with the performers may not support their interpretation of the narrative. Because there is a technological 4th wall between audiences and performers in digital theatre, it can be difficult for audiences to know whether they are watching a truly, temporally live show or not. Peter J. Kuo described, for instance, a performance that was fully live over Zoom, which purposefully integrated errors like freezing or dropped audio to ‘prove’ the work occurred live; yet, at the end, the performer insinuated the show was all a recording. The pandemic-era work intentionally played with the audience’s conception of what had occurred to change their interpretation of what they had just seen – whether they craved the frisson of liveness or if they were content with a recorded show.

Early digital performances tested similar desires: in one work described by , audiences who took part in an immersive digital show reported their sense of liveness being ‘as much the product of their imagination and projection than of a given application itself, suggesting that individual readings of circumstance and social and personal interaction are also significant influences on responses to these immersive experiences’. Tender Claws, the producers of virtual reality The Under Presents series, also play with the audience’s liveness expectations by inserting live actors as nonplayer characters in their world, : ‘Within this enigmatic world, characters played by live actors interacted with players in such an open-ended way that it eventually became clear that they were not, in fact, computer generated’. Here, interaction is very important for audiences so they can fully understand that the work is live, and that is part of its dramaturgical frame. It is fun for Tender Claws’ audience to solve the mystery of whether NPCs are live performers or not when they experience the work, since it changes their interpretation of the experience; in contrast, I imagine, with the show Kuo described to me, which might leave the audience with a sense of betrayal.