🔔Tips & Tricks

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Interactive & Gamified Theatre > Tips & Tricks

Beta Testing as Rehearsal: With numerous possibilities, it is important to test everything together, which likely means extending tech rehearsals and even having a few invited audience shows. Clemence Debaig noted that she created dance rules for Strings using interaction design:

One thing we had discovered is that, from a pure kind of physical feedback point-of-view, for the performer, having two points of vibration is actually really difficult to identify, but when it is only one part the start-and-stop is very easy to identify. … So, I had to limit to one body part at the time, which meant that I had to create a system where the majority of the people interacting are the ones activating the body parts.

Repeated testing of the haptics attached to her body led Debaig to determine that a website UX design allowing audience members to ‘vote’ by gathering in one area – both in her web app version and in her virtual reality version – would be the most effective. As a side experience, she added that the democratic dance method led the audience to ‘crab-like behaviours’ as they increasingly worked in unison.

Exchange Control: much of this analysis of Interactive and Gamified Theatre has focused on when and how to give the audience control, and how they might understand when they can interact. Related to casting the audience, consider narrative moments when you might offer the audience control, and how you might gently take it back. Brendan Bradley’s Nonplayer Character: The Musical uses this framework:

… you have to design the world, they can't just run completely free. … We have a general sense that they will move through this particular storyline, and they will move generally down this direction, and then there are places along the way that they may stop into. … because it's musical, it has these heavy sections of improvisation where they are really kind of dictating and controlling my journey, and I’m responding to them in in real time, and going with whatever they ask me to do, and then I use the songs to take back control.

Bradley noted that the audience was then able to immerse and enjoy the moments when they had full creative freedom, and when he began singing, they were reminded that the show was a musical and they could just enjoy the ‘cut-scenes’ Bradley created in those beats.

Curate Consequence: playfulness can be a nebulous concept, but it generally holds ideas like openness, willingness, focus, engagement with others, surprise, ludic elements (like games), and, perhaps most importantly, a fantastical and non-consequential element. While some interactive live performances do offer consequences – Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 comes to mind, in which the artist is seated near a spread of props that include a gun, razors, and a pocket knife – these experiences still have a sense of sitting outside mundane reality (as mentioned in Virtual Reality Theatre), which can confuse whether there might be long-term, perhaps permanent, consequences to audience and performer actions. For many interactive and digital theatre shows, the consequence of audience action exists only within the world of the play: using prior examples, En Route had three potential endings, and it was required that we choose one, which was the consequence for our experience; in Meta vs. Life, there might be consequences if the ghosts did not work with the living humans, such as the show taking longer to finish or, perhaps, the ghosts never reaching the Afterlife. The presence of performers in these instances encouraged the audience to work within the limits of these shows. For another type of interactive show like Know Theatre’s Lighthouse at the End of the World, the consequence of choosing certain videos to watch leads to limiting the next suite of video options, but in the current fully online version, participants are allowed to watch all the videos once they have finished going through their initial path. It is also possible to stop making any choices and close the browser window, thus never reaching Andrew Hungerford’s final monologue. Consequence is one element that allows audiences to feel that they actually impact the experience for everyone; however, it is important to ensure they are safe and engaged, with the ludic nature of gamification perhaps skewing the experience toward positive, upbeat, and playful.