🐫Gamification as an Interactive Subset

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Interactive & Gamified Theatre > Gamification as an Interactive Subset

Interactive performance comes in a wide range of forms, like improv, Happenings, immersive shows like Sleep No More, and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed which all use different rules of audience engagement. As a theatre maker, you can essentially make up the rules that work best for your show’s interactive dramaturgy, but it might help to draw inspiration from existing processes, too.

Gamified Theatre specifically integrates game-like rules to guide the audience’s interaction with and influence on the narrative; as a contrast, these mechanics are not part of systems like Theatre of the Oppressed or Happenings. The term gamification refers to a postdigital cultural process of adding game elements to many aspects of life: ‘Broadly speaking, gamification is a phenomenon that exports elements and mechanics taken from game theory to other cultural and social spheres for diverse purposes: educational, commercial, technological, experiential or artistic, among others’. I use the term postdigital here because gamification only works now that almost everyone has a digital device like a smartphone to track some type of activity – to-do lists and health changes being two of the more common types of gamified tracking.

While Gamified Theatre does not necessarily award points for completing tasks, the forms of interaction will drive and change the narrative like a player-character’s interactions can change a videogame:

In short, those pieces in which the spectators can alter, with their decisions, the dramaturgical programming of the experience and in which the audience is endowed with a protagonist mission in the etymological sense of the term. In other words, where their intervention is essential to mobilise the experience created.

In all Gamified Theatre forms, but particularly in digital approaches, inspiration comes from videogames, like multi-user dungeons (MUDs), role-playing games (RPGs), massive multiplayer online (MMOs), and similar. Ilinca Todoruţ writes: ‘MUDs [and later, MMOs] may be the main innovation that allowed for a model of theatre not as one player entering a computer-generated interactive world or simulation, but for a community of people experiencing an event together’. Though videogames often have specific paths for the player-character to follow, the end result of the narrative design is a unique experience both in the order of ‘quests’ completed, and potentially for larger narrative points or outcomes:

In fact, playing the same game twice is far less possible than reading the same text twice, as the structures of games inherently enable if not demand variety, plurality of choices, and exploration rather than a carefully designed trajectory. Thus, when we talk about different readings of the same text, we tend to refer to different interpretations in the sense of hermeneutic processes. Different playings of a game, conversely, tend to result in entirely different games, with outcomes as varied as winning or losing, gaining and/or losing lives, credits, and other countable units, radically different navigation options, and, as a result, a large diversity of experiences of the gameworld per se.

Gamified digital theatre does not automatically mean liveness or presence from the performers, while other approaches to Interactive digital theatre benefit from having meatspace humans present with the audience: ‘Videogames are not live in terms of their technological ontology, but they operate responsively in real time and certainly appear live from the perspective of the player-character, arguably far more so than plays or films, since they demand rapt attention and lightning responses’. In the case of this form of digital performance, the interaction or program’s reaction is live, but the human (or animation, avatar, etc.) performer might not be. However, gamified digital theatre does represent a new methodology for telling stories, as Cason Murphy discusses:

For centuries, theatre has been limited to using either diegesis or mimesis as default methods for telling stories . . . Online games have proved able to fulfill the social aspect of attending live performances, while adding collaborative or competitive play, without having to surmount barriers to accessing physically live performance.

Gamified Theatre can use pre-recorded material to create a sense of liveness through spontaneity and interaction, or underlying programming to re-present the story and characters: ‘Besides their interactive parts, games also contain non-interactive segments such as cut-scenes, breaks or intermissions, requiring little or no player input’. These plot segments further the next choices, even if the choice is pressing one of two buttons.