Sunday, January 31, 2010
Cultural Olympiad: Audience controls the show in interactive gaming event, Best Before
Vancouver Sun: "The multi-player video game is a fairly recent phenomenon, allowing players to compete anywhere, anytime. If it doesn’t sound like fun to sit in your underwear at home, doing battle on the computer in Call of Duty 4 with thousands of people around the globe in what’s dubbed the “massively multiplayer online role-playing game,” then Best Before is a better bet for testing the concept."
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2 comments:
I hope more people read and comment on this article, because this is the type of theatre that I love to see and hopefully, in the future, will help to create. In several shows I've seen with interactive elements, they exist like choose-your-own-ending books that only produce one of several prefabricated endings. In a show like this, however, when audience members have many degrees of freedom to develop a character and have it interact, it creates a truly unique experience for the audience and every show must be completely different for the non-actors (also a very intriguing move, which is really interesting. It's not really a show anymore, it's more of a social experiment). As I watch plays start to be delivered in very different new ways (if you doubt me, look up twit_play on Twitter), I can't wait to see what comes next.
This seems like a very interesting development in the worlds of interactive games and interactive theatre. I like that players will be able to control everything about their characters' lives and will be able to create their own kind of story, and collectively, two hundred people could create an even larger story just by interacting with other characters. I think it will allow people to think really creatively and explore different situations and decisions with their characters that they wouldn't necessarily be able to in real life. The only thing I would question is the idea that one decision will always have the same result in a person's (in this case character's) life. It seems like the characters may be limited in what happens to them if the players make a certain decision, but perhaps the interaction of two hundred characters will create very unique lives for the characters. It will be interesting to see the development of this technology.
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