Archive for social gaming
a few interactive theatre links
November 23rd, 2008 • research, social gaming, teaching
A minor link-dump of companies and performances I’ve been mentioning in lectures and workshops over the last few weeks:
- The Neo-Futurists: Chicago-based company, regularly staging new work but probably best known for Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind - 30 plays in 60 minutes.
- Who Wants to Be? - an audience-led interactive show created by London-based company The People Speak. Applied drama students take note:
- Superstruct - the massively-multiplayer collaborative performance forecasting the world in 2019.
Did you know that in the ‘Ask the Audience’ bit of the TV game show ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire‘, the audience is right 98.9% of the time? ‘Who Wants to Be’ was born when we realised that if the audience could set the questions, as well as giving the answers, and and making up the rules - we’d have a recipe for social change.
wedding disco
July 28th, 2008 • social gaming
I’ve just had email confirming my place in the Festival Scavenger hunt - team name, WEDDING DISCO. From that alone, it’s clear the day is going to be all kinds of stupid awesome.
virtual penance
July 17th, 2008 • social gaming
Reading more about the world of Fable 2: today’s detail is that crimes within the world (violence, murder, theft) can be paid off with a stiff fine or community service, which apparently opens up an entirely new plot-line.
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?
- An Actor Prepares, Konstain Stanislavski, trans. Elizabeth
Reynolds Hapgood. Taylor and Francis 1989. p48. [↩]
Interesting Games Festival
July 11th, 2008 • social gaming
Following the London-based Hide and Seek, there’s the Interesting Games Festival - part of the Bristol Festival and running 19th-21st September 2008. They’re still accepting applications for games up until the 15th of this month.
Hide and Seek ‘08 web coverage
July 11th, 2008 • research, social gaming
My planned visit to Hide and Seek turned into a few hours on Sunday afternoon - missing most of what I had planned to attend because of the magic of theatre - but still enough time to dip into Sleeveface, catch a little of London-as-Tokyo and a too-short taste of the Lost Sport of Olympia.
Congrats to Andy Field - whose new game Checkpoint has been covered in a few different places: Jane McGonigal has a write-up of the whole festival here, as does Kieron Gillen at Rock Paper Shotgun. Hopefully Andy can be persuaded to stage another round during the Edinburgh Fringe..
