Smoked Out’s Game 

The game in Smoked Out was an interactive mobile game. That was about the building process of building a house after the fire. Each step built around gaining the pre-clearances needed to actually start the rebuilding process. This built off what was said during the traditional theatre part. The narrator, Zeus, states before the Act II (the game) “This is all a bunch of self imposed nonsense. If people just payed
attention to the requirements, these people would have finished all of this a long time ago. Here, let me show you.”

The player is responsible for making sure that they get each preclearance done with the budget that they were giving. If you play the game wrong you can go into debt. If you do everything right you might still not pass several of the pre-clearances. Part of the game is in control of the player and another is not.

The point of this game is the continued understanding of how hard this process, of passing pre-clearances to build a home, is. It is simple on paper and in the game however the actuality is very difficult and if you get over the money allotted to you at the beginning of the game, you will just stat to accrue debt. This was the reality of many people, they would be in debt before they even began the rebuilding process.

Games as a Form of Theatre at UCSC

Games have always been very story based. While there are still plenty of games that are more combat or action based, they do contain some sort of plot. At the University of Santa Cruz in the Performance, Play, and Design department, we believe that games are a form of storytelling. When playing a game, the player is performing the role that they choose, they will often refer to their character as “me”, the way an actor does when talking about their character. Utilizing games as a form of storytelling is important because about 3.9 billon people in this world play video games which makes it highly influential. By using the same lens to view  games as a different type of performance we are able to, as theatre makers, reach an untapped market of people to view art. This is made very evident by the seamless transition from game to tv show that the Last of Us’s success. Within the graduate department of Digital Arts and New Media, it was the responsibility of the show to push the boundaries of what we view performance as.

The Builders Association

The integration of games and theater has been the Builders Associations, niche for a long time. This NYC based, Obie award winning group of theater makers have been making groundbreaking theater since 1994. Since its founding by Marianne Weems, it has pushed what it means to make theater by putting futuristic elements of different types of media to create a diverse telling of the stories that they want to tell. One of their most interesting productions was their 2015-2019 production titled the Elements of Oz. This was telling of the classic Wizard Oz movie, but using elements of live music, filming, and AR, the audience is transformed into a different world of both Oz and the filming process of the movie.

Performance and Games 

One of the best parts about adding games into a play, is that one gets to change what a play is. Similarly to the change in dynamics that Forum Theatre gives, games give the same. A play has a structure where a game doesn’t really. In a video game, you sometimes can’t pass a level without defeating the current level, plays are the same way. There is one path that leads to one ending. However, some games don’t have that structure, you can take different routes to get to different endings. When viewing a game as a performance we are able to deconstruct why a play has to go one way with one path and one ending. Through games were are able to play with the structure of a play and make a change to how we see this centuries old structure. The game element also changes the roles of the people within a play, the actors become more than actors they become both the players and the characters. They sit in the drivers seat of the play when utilizing games versus the playwright being the drivers seat. This also means that the director is also a player because they are dictating the actions of the characters while giving them the free will to make their own choices on a set course. Games change the role of the dramaturg as well, the dramaturg also takes hold of the player but also the role of developer as the dramaturg supplies both the director and the actors with information that can change their course destination.  In traditional theater the dramaturg provides information to the actors to change the subtle differences in their performances but with the game lens, the dramaturg provides the context to which they are moving throughout the game/play as a whole.

For more information on dramaturgy and the emergence of games in theatre please check out Systemic Dramaturgy : A Handbook For the Digital Age by Michael Mark Chemers and Mike Sell