theatre / comedy / culture

the prisoner’s dilemma (zombie variant)

July 11th, 2008 • research, social gaming, theatre

A few weeks back, I idly suggested a group game based on an attack of zombies, spreading through twitter - joking that it would be a variant on an old Stanislavski exercise. Today those neurons bashed back together and I went looking for the source: an exercise in An Actor Prepares exploring imagination and improvised action.

Here’s the Director on the potential drama of a closed door:

“But suppose this in this apartment of Maria’s, there used to live a man who became violently insane. They took him away to a psychopathic ward. If he escaped from there, and were behind that door, what would you do?”

Once the question was put in that form our whole inner aim, as the Director described it, was altered. We no longer thought about how to extend our actvitity, or worried about its external form. [...] Our eyes began to measure the distance to the door, and to look for safe approaches to it. They examined the surroundings for directions for escape, in case the madman should break through the door. [...] In the end I found myself under a table, with a heavy bronze ash-receiver in my hand.

The job was not ended. The door was now closed, but not locked. There was no key. Therefore the safest thing we could do was to barricade it with sofas, tables and chairs, and then call up the hospital and arrange to have them take the necessary steps to regain the custody of the madman.¹

It’s a strangely genteel approach to threat beyond the door: relatively few horror stories involve merely arranging that someone “take the necessary steps to regain the custody of the madman.” Manners aside, the point of the exercise - or so the Director informs us - is that all action in the theatre must have an inner justification or motive.

It’s also interesting, though, that the imagined threat of the madman triggers a co-operative group response. Do some kinds of motive always summon communal action? The idea that common threats might trigger common responses isn’t exactly unusual - it’s pretty much the basis for any nation which has an armed forces. You could read World Without Oil’s negative thinking as a communal response to the communal threat of an oil shock.

So I’m thinking about the ways in which game designers can wrangle group behaviour, and produce activity based in the formation of groups. Some examples are rather less emergent and rather more heavily structured than others.

For example, the developers of Left 4 Dead - a new zombie survival video game - have been pretty clear about how the experience has been designed to demand team work: survival is only possible with friends watching your back. Accordingly, players who join a group game and play selfishly soon end up dead; the mechanic of the game acts as a kind of social filter to weed out players who want to ruin everyone else’s fun. So it’s not that the game merely rewards cooperation, but that it actively punishes individuals who fail to work with the group. It’ll be interesting to see how that individual penalty balances against the group penalty - how long can you succeed in four-player game with only three willing players?

Is this kind of social logic another variant of the prisoner’s dilemma?