Monday 25 April 2011

From Games to Art: the Evolution of Interactive Stories in the 21st Century

Interactive Theatre was born in the shape of Live Action Roleplaying Games, and it is still mostly limited to the gaming community. Dramatic, Anne Rice-like stories are played as a competition between players for success, and the mechanics of the game still rule most events.

There is nothing wrong with those events. LARPs are great things and satisfy their demographics.

Now, we need to conceive a parallel community for Interactive Theatre. The solution, I believe, is not in getting the LARP demographic to forgo the gaming aspect of their favored activity. They do not want to, and they do not have to either.

The solution is to get new people to try out Interactive Theatre. Some Broadway plays already have the audience interact with the actors or decide an outcome for the play. The Society for Creative Anachronism organizes many events for which participants are expected to dress and act as characters from a given era.

Bring together a crew that would like to act through a plot you'd expect from a Broadway play without scripted lines, dress as they would for the Society of Creative Anachronism, and resist the urge of competition present in the gaming aspect of LARPs, and you obtain a magnificient cultural event, one that would definitely be worthy of the name "Interactive Theatre".

 I hope I will see this one day.

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