In-Person and Virtual Worlds

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Virtual Reality Theatre > Multiple Forms of Digital Hybridity > In-Person and Virtual Worlds

Debaig is experimenting with the overlap of in-person and VR worlds with several access points for many audiences; similarly, Brendan Bradley is experimenting with hybrid in-person and VR shows, though his show Non-Player Character: The Musical requires him to be physically co-present with his audience. Bradley plays a videogame NPC in the show but brings some audience volunteers in as co-performers who don VR headsets and enter the virtual space at specific times to make game-like choices. For Bradley, the show has become more about empowering audiences within a live performance, rather than railroading them down a specific trajectory:

As a VR actor you generally have to also act as kind of a guide for the audience to kind of like help explain like, hey, come over here, and that level of handholding is fun. But I think that it robs the audience of their true agency, of their true, like, letting them actually control story, hold story for a moment. All of Non-Player Character was designed to be about a non-player character, without agency of their own, who relies on the audience to solve this challenge and move through the story.

In some respects, Bradley’s conception for the show is the inverse of a videogame; at points where the audience, as ‘player character’, might have the highest engagement within a videogame, they have the lowest engagement within the performance:

But then the big fight sequence, the moments of high spectacle and high animation – that's the part that I've planned out and written and is being performed beat by beat by beat.

Bradley uses musical numbers to remind the audience that they are watching theatre.

Technologically, Bradley incorporates a virtual world onto the stage by streaming what occurs in it behind him as he and the audience move through VR; the in-person audience becomes more like the audience of a gaming livestream, able to react and comment but not able to change the narrative. as a form of interpassivity: ‘The interpassive actor allows for the cybernetic system to operate without responding to their always-on logic, allowing for critical examination of the system as whole’. Some audience volunteers integrate themselves into the story, but the ‘passive’ audiences are just as important to the interpretation of the stage production as a whole, as in traditional theatre. The group may become more aware of themselves as a unit with some impact on the performance by witnessing a division of attention-labour.